Stevie Ooi and the value of knowing where

A concrete mixer can be standing perfectly still and still have work to do. The drum needs to rotate. The material inside cannot simply be left to wait while everyone else sorts out the schedule. For Stevie Ooi, co-founder and CEO of W-Locate, this is the sort of detail that makes location technology interesting. A truck’s position is useful information. The activity of the truck gives that position meaning.

It is an unglamorous place to begin a technology story, which is part of its appeal. Concrete does not read a pitch deck. It has requirements of its own. Ooi’s working life has taken him through air cargo, directories, mapping and mobile services into a business concerned with where things are and what happens around them. The recurring subject is information that someone can actually put to work.

His title, Chief Locationist, gives the business a little personality. The questions underneath it are plain enough: where is the device, where is the vehicle, and what can its owner do with that knowledge? Following those questions takes us from a small component inside a phone to the considerable machinery of a construction fleet.

A business inside the SIM card

Before W-Locate, Ooi founded MarketingWorx in 2008. The company provided SIM-based value-added services. During that work, he recognised an opening for SIM-based location services and founded W-Locate in 2010. The progression matters. He approached the opportunity through an existing relationship with mobile services and the operators that delivered them.

A SIM card is an easy object to underestimate. It spends its working life out of sight, a small piece of a larger device. Ooi’s commercial interest lay in giving that familiar component another job. A platform already involved in mobile service could also help establish location. The idea brought a different question to infrastructure that operators already possessed.

Earlier chapters give this move some context. He spent more than 15 years in air-cargo sales before starting EinfoAsia in 2002. The directory business helped companies assemble targeted contact lists. In 2006, he joined mapping and navigation company AGIS as Director of Special Projects, working on business development and sales. These were businesses in which information had to reach a customer and make itself useful.

Seen together, the career has a recurring commercial concern: turning available information into a service people have a reason to buy. A directory, a map and a location system do different jobs. Each depends on a relationship between what can be known and what a customer needs to do next. That is the thread through Ooi’s changes of industry.

W-Locate’s XimLoc used a SIM-resident applet to gather cellular-network information. A server then calculated the device’s most probable position. Early development involved Morpho Cards. The proposed advantage was the ability to work indoors, where satellite positioning could be troublesome, and to serve cellular devices without depending on a particular phone operating system.

The distinction gives the founding idea some substance. Customers did not merely need another picture of a map. They needed a way of getting a position in circumstances where their existing approach had limitations. W-Locate co-founder Sam Tan shared the venture with Ooi; its early offerings included both XimLoc and the fleet-management service FIND.

In 2014, Thailand’s AIS launched its enterprise Mobile Track and Trace service using XimLoc. Ooi’s argument at the time was that mobile operators could use SIM-based positioning to develop enterprise services. That brought the idea into a distribution channel with its own business customers. A technical possibility had become something an operator could offer.

The truck has arrived. Now what?

The fleet side of W-Locate’s work pushes beyond locating a device. FIND brings tracking together with telematics and business information. The difference becomes easy to understand around a mixer truck. Its arrival is one event in a sequence that also includes departure, waiting and discharge. Knowing the vehicle is present leaves several practical questions open.

W-Locate’s relationship with Holcim Malaysia began in 2012. Sensors in mixer drums recorded whether they were mixing or discharging and their rotational speed. The system combined that information with vehicle positioning and workflow data. Staff could examine operations remotely through cloud-based services, rather than needing to be physically beside every vehicle.

Think of the distinction between an address and an appointment. An address gives a place. An appointment adds a time, an activity and an expectation. Fleet operations need that fuller account. The map pin is useful, but it cannot on its own explain whether the work associated with a delivery has begun or finished.

That is why the drum is such a good detail. It adds a verb to the map. Mixing and discharging are different activities, even when a vehicle occupies the same patch of ground. When a business can distinguish them, it has a more useful account of a working day than a trail of coordinates.

There is a human consequence to this kind of design, too. Information has to fit the work of the people using it. A fleet owner’s concerns and a ground crew’s experience both belong in the discussion. W-Locate’s described implementation process begins with conversations about business processes before deciding which information to collect and which sensors to deploy.

The order deserves attention. Begin with the job, then decide what must be measured. Installing equipment is the visible part of the exercise. Agreeing on the question comes earlier. Otherwise a business risks acquiring a remarkably detailed answer to something nobody needed to ask. Even a handsome dashboard should be expected to earn its keep.

The border on the map is also a contract

Ooi has also had to deal with the infrastructure beneath the service. A location business operating across countries needs connectivity as well as customers. In 2018, he put one frustration directly: “In new territories, MNOs didn’t give us the attention we deserved.” MNOs are mobile network operators. Their agreements, costs and willingness to engage formed part of the expansion problem.

“It took a lot of time and effort.”

Stevie Ooi · 2018

That same year, W-Locate selected Tata Communications for its MOVE connectivity platform and IZO Private Cloud. The arrangement was intended to reduce the need for separate local connectivity negotiations. At the time, W-Locate served enterprises in Singapore, Hong Kong, Jakarta and Malaysia, with plans to reach additional Asian markets.

The choice reveals a less picturesque side of entrepreneurship. A service can cross a border on a presentation slide in an instant. In practice, someone must arrange the network access and account for the cost. Those arrangements belong in the story of the product because the product depends on them.

There is a useful symmetry here. W-Locate sells visibility into operations; its own operation needed a clearer path through connectivity and storage. Ooi’s problem was partly a problem of coordination. The business had to connect the location service, its customers and the infrastructure providers without making every new territory an entirely separate undertaking.

His public writing shows the wider ambition behind these arrangements. In a 2015 essay, he discussed hybrid location technologies and their potential use in connected cities, including transport and planning. These were arguments about future applications, rather than a catalogue of completed projects. They place his industrial work inside a broader interest in what location information might help people organise.

Keep the drum turning

The construction work offers a particularly concrete version of that ambition. In November 2024, Nanyang Polytechnic described its collaboration with W-Locate on fleet efficiency. Tracking and scheduling could reduce idling and improve routes. It reported fuel reductions of up to 10 per cent. A separate electric system could keep a mixer drum rotating while the truck’s engine was switched off.

Ooi shared preliminary estimates of up to 30 per cent fuel savings for that electric system. The two figures describe different interventions and different kinds of evidence. One is a reported reduction associated with fleet operations. The other is a preliminary estimate. Neither should become a promise for every truck or every business.

The mechanical question is wonderfully specific: can the drum keep doing its job without requiring the truck’s engine to do another one? It asks where an operation’s demands can be separated. A vehicle may be waiting, yet part of its equipment must remain active. Understanding that distinction opens a different route to efficiency.

For Ooi, sustainability also has a commercial urgency. His phrase is brief: “At the end of the day, sustainability is survivability.” The wording brings the subject back to the continued life of a business. Fuel and operating decisions belong to the same working world as customers, delivery schedules and the cost of keeping equipment busy.

There is a temptation to describe technology through its largest possible ambition. Ooi has made room for those wider possibilities in his writing. His fleet work supplies a smaller, more testable unit of interest: a particular truck, an observable activity, a decision that can change. The scale of the question does not diminish its value to the person who has to answer it.

The SIM card and the rotating drum make an unlikely pair of bookends. One is nearly invisible inside a device; the other is conspicuous enough to announce itself on the road. Between them sits Ooi’s business of making location information useful. The story comes into focus when the map connects with the task. Somewhere, a truck has arrived. There is still work to do.