Connecting people, places and information around you.

Apontador is the local search leader in Brazil. Apontador properties and services enable users and businesses with the power of search and location to simplify everyday life. They help people identify what they want, where it is, and how good it is in the view of the public in general and of the people they know.

Through its mission to connect people, places and information around you, the company is putting cutting edge web and mobile technologies to work where life really happens near you.

Values

People - we develop, keep and attract excellent people: stars without an attitude, who are horny about technology, showing commitment and passion for what they do, always with sparkling eyes. We work always in teams, encourage decision making, keep transparent relationships among us.

Our way - we work hard to build a cool company, in a open environment free of barriers, with trust and simplicity, where professional development depends fundamentally on each one’s dedication and will. We all are responsible for sharing knowledge and experience.

Meritocracy - we reward and offer opportunities so that people grow in line with their results, with clear and objective evaluation metrics, without restrictions or privileges of any kind.

Innovation - creativity and agility are essential to our success. We continuously launch products and services to positively surprise the market, without fear of failing.

Heavy user - we are proud of what we do, and because of that we talk about and teach our products for everyone, all the time. We are the heaviest users and biggest critics of our own products.

Our History told by Apontador founder and our CTO Rafael Siqueira:

“On 2000, one of my college friends told me about a person who were doing a project with digital maps and wanted to meet me. I went to meet him when I run into a Korean businessman who was investing on a mobile assembling line, but I wanted to develop for the web.

He was already opening his eyes for the technology world, watching what was happening, and saying that what was really going to take off in Brazil was location. I was able to show him a project in that area, because I was working with AOL, he invited me to be a part of his business as a partner I accepted the challenge. We created Apontador in just 2 months and it was the first maps routes website in Brazil.

From then on we started to show to the Brazilian market about online services based on location.

I took over the technology department and started to build up a team and help develop a business model. We launched on 2003 a vehicle-tracking product that until today is used in 80 companies. The Apontador brand caught the attention of a lot of investors and companies that wanted to buy that service, but it was only in 2007 that we had an approach with Google Maps, that worked with the corporate market. It was Google that put us face to face to talk to Maplink for us to reach an agreement, because to them it would great if the two big players in maps in Brazil work together for them. After 4 months of the merge of Apontador and Maplink we raise 70% of our billing because they knew how to explore what we had to offer. As we didn’t want to extinguish neither brands that were pretty well known, we’ve kept the names and we saw that we didn’t have the same user base.

My task at the company is to show the trends and where I want to be with what I’m planning. It’s like I’m my team’s client. Our great engineering is into understanding how do people move in time-space to offer each time an even more qualified service with great value to companies of all sizes. The concept that we work with it’s called behavior target, we analyze the behavior of our users to offer relevant information. Besides offering everything they need in terms of location with all the content that we have, and we put a lot of technology in all that."