Qatar Mobility Innovations Center (Qmic) has released the next generation of its Wain Mobile Platform, featuring major updates with an enhanced positioning to better serve residents and visitors. 
The new Wain platform offers a completely new and richer user experience including a new user interface, enhanced map services, customisation capabilities, and introduces the concept of a Super-Wain framework with embedded micro-apps to deliver value added services and content which can benefit from Wain’s core capabilities. These significant changes will enable “Super” Wain to keep evolving to meet the emerging needs of road users in Qatar.
As Wain utilises 100% home-grown technologies, map, data and intelligence, Qmic has the full ability to customise Wain capabilities and services to meet the changing needs of national stakeholders. The Wain platform is powered by a data infrastructure that utilises multi-source data gathered by Qmic, combined with years of technical and field experience in data intelligence and analytics to deliver an end product – both informative and value rich. 
The new Wain framework is centred around three major themes which are easily identifiable and inter-linked to provide a seamless user experience and to give more control and choice to users. The first one is on enhancing the in-map services and content. 
These include significantly enhanced navigation and trip planning services, traffic info services, general and category search capabilities, in-map road info, map filtering and customisation, quick shortcuts to display relevant info such as next prayer time, national address search, ability for users to contribute content, and much more. This will be later enhanced by adding multimedia capabilities related to points of interest and relevant events, in addition to enhancing personalisation capabilities. The second major theme is on providing specific core services which include a dedicated National Address search and navigation section, an Events section which enables users to publish and browse different kinds of events, a Places section for providing a comprehensive list of different categories of Points of Interest, and a Parking section where real time info about availability of Parking is provided from key connected parking locations such as Msheireb, Al Bidda Park, Souq Waqif, and other major locations in Doha.
The third theme is on delivering micro-apps in different domains and to complement the core Wain services. This important and evolving section will enable Qmic, strategic parties and approved third parties to deliver ad-on services that can benefit from the Core Wain capabilities. At this stage, two micro-apps are included in this Wain release. The first one enables users to access info from Ashghal about road announcements.
 The second micro app is the recently launched “Drive Safe” application that will enable users to seamlessly monitor their driving behaviour and eventually benefit from what will be offered in the future to reward good driving behaviour. Qmic plans to introduce many more micro-apps within Super-Wain in the coming few months with a focus on mobility, sports, and road services. In addition, Qmic will reach out to relevant entities and companies to identify micro-apps that can be offered within Wain.
Dr Adnan Abu-Dayya, executive director and CEO of Qmic said: “This version of Wain has been the most challenging to develop and is the most promising in terms of value and impact. Transforming Wain to a Super-App is a key step towards positioning it as an enabling platform for delivering local location-based and rich road info. This is just the beginning of a roadmap to significantly enhance the capabilities of Wain and to offer micro-apps and transactional services to serve the needs of residents and visitors of Qatar as we are less than two years away from hosting the football World Cup and other key events.” 
Finally, this Wain release has rich location-intelligence capabilities that enable the delivery of location-based alerts and notifications to users within a certain geographical area or to users entering or leaving a zone, in addition to emerging rich media alerts. All of which can be used to inform users about important and relevant messages whether about road incidents or impending traffic diversions.