Today, Nokia announced they sold their mapping business "HERE Maps" to a German automotive consortium consisting of Mercedes, BMW, and Audi
Sale of Maps business completed.
Although it was heavily rumoured for a while that Uber would acquire Nokia's Here Maps, a rival bid from German car manufacturers was accepted instead last August. But the consortium of BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz owner Daimler has just succeeded in buying the mapping service.
Now, with all of the necessary regulatory approvals out of the way, one obvious benefit to this transaction is that future German cars, including Volkswagens and other cars from brands in the group, will more than likely begin to have in-car satellite navigation systems driven by Here Maps.
Currently I know of three companies offering map data on a large scale: Google, HERE and TomTom. Additionally there is of course the open source solution, Open Street Map. The German antitrust-agency ("Bundeskartellamt") agreed on the deal on the base that map data remains accessible on fair terms to other car companies (sorry, only in German).
I would be interested to see some opinions on what this deal means for future technological development. Location based services and map data can be considered crucial for upcoming autonomous cars, where Google tries to get into the automotive business as well. Also for other services (finding nearest gasoline station, restaurant, etc.) and for social networking (alerts when friends are close by, e.g. traveling to Washington DC and receiving a notification that an old classmate/co-worker lives only two blocks away) location based services can be quite important. What do you think?
Full disclosure: I, the submitter, work for HERE Maps. I tried to write neutrally.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by q.kontinuum on Saturday December 05 2015, @01:49PM
I tried to keep the summary brief, as I wasn't sure if any of the details I'd have liked to add might be to biased. In the forum I think I won't restrain myself that much.
So, some more background:
Currently, HERE has a couple of high-profile customers as well in automotive as outside. E.g. Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP [wikipedia.org] and Facebook [theverge.com] Facebook are customers outside automotive, within automotive there are - besides obviously Mercedes, BMW and Audi - deals with Volvo [here.com], Renault-Nissan [here.com] and others.
To my understanding, some automotive companies are concerned that Google might try to take a lot of influence through their mapping services to develop cars to a new advertisement-vehicle. This makes sense to me, as people spent a lot of times in their cars, and with upcoming autonomous driving even the "driver" can be distracted by advertisement without additional risk.
Now, I could imagine car vendors having concerns for HERE maps as well, since the existing consortium (Mercedes, Audi, BMW) is their competitor; but to me it looks to be in every car-makers interest to cooperate. However, I might obviously be biased on that part. But there are examples of delivery companies delivering to all vendors (Bosch, Continental to name two).
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 05 2015, @02:41PM
Yeah, better brush up that CV.
The car manufacturers are going to ruin the whole fucking thing with the same methods they've been using all along. Fucking expenssive GPS system options that never get updated. I'll just use my phone or my outdoors GPS.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Saturday December 05 2015, @02:56PM
Actually I feel much safer due to that deal. For Nokia, we didn't fit to their portfolio anymore. Uber is IMO not yet experienced in this large-scale-operations and is not a company I'd like to work for, anyway. I would have felt really uncertain being bought by them. Automotive seems to see us as a strategic investment, and there are not many alternatives o them. TomTom might be an option; to my knowledge, their data is a bit inferior, but as I said, I might be biased. Google is not seen as an alternative by all automotive brands. Which leaves us. A couple of years from now, when all cars are connected to internet and sensors are developed enough to collect map date, it might be easier to build their own digital map. But delivery of such amounts of data and e.g. traffic-services reliably takes a lot of experience as well. So, as long as Mercedes, BMW and Audi are not going down the sewers entirely, I feel pretty safe right now, and eveb if they should go down I think we are relevant enough to other car companies to survive.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Saturday December 05 2015, @03:03PM
BTW: Regarding using your phone: HERE maps for Android and iOS received a lot of praise by users. Map data can be updated frequently as well. Also I'd expect cars to be connected to the internet in the near future, which would probably solve the update of the map data for inbuilt GPS units. Last but not least, I wouldn't be surprised if GPS units become part of standard equipment. Assisted drive systems become more and more prevalent, and I'd expect them to be far more useful when they know where the driver wants to go (hinting for line-changes etc.)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 05 2015, @03:55PM
But now you have four different companies running the show instead of one, and three of them are in Germany, way off in a distant time zone. The fourth speaks a mixture of German, Finnish, and English. That could lead to paralysis by indecision and communication breakdown.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Saturday December 05 2015, @07:12PM
Hardly. HERE already has long-term relationships to big customers in US and elsewhere, while the biggest office is in Berlin. Neither the English nor the German part of the communication should give us any headaches. BTW: In Berlin, I have colleagues of 40-50 different nations, so nearly all communication takes place in English. In my team I have 7 colleagues. Not two of them with the same origin.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 1) by driverless on Sunday December 06 2015, @12:18AM
I don't think HERE has much to worry about competition from Google, they've been working hard to make Google Maps suckier and suckier every year so all HERE needs to do is let people know they exist in order to get adoption. The web version of Google Maps is pretty much unusable now, and the Android version isn't much better, a few months ago while visiting Paris I had to fall back to a printed paper map because Google Maps was never able to position me beyond "you're this dot somewhere on a 30,000' view of Paris".
(Score: 1) by PocketSizeSUn on Sunday December 06 2015, @03:25AM
How does a bad AGPS / signal have anything to do with the map data? If you had bought a sim (5 euro) in Paris your AGPS would have worked fine.
If you must have better / faster GPS signal (too remote for signal, dense city of tall builds ... like the middle of Hong Kong for example) you can get a real a real GPS have Android use that for location data. (I used the Holux M-1000 although the price has gone up) You can also use a usb dongle like the GlobalSat BU-353S4 -- it presents as a USB Serial device. You will need an OTG cable and an app [You Are Here GPS works].
Personally I prefer the Holux. YMMV.
(Score: 1) by driverless on Sunday December 06 2015, @04:42AM
I doubt it was that, since I never had any problems with HERE maps in another city, it was only Google maps that had the issue.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by nitehawk214 on Saturday December 05 2015, @05:08PM
HERE has a bunch of features that make it superior, such as the ability to navigate when there is no data connection. You know, when you are in the middle of nowhere and need navigation the most. Google seems to actively fight against this, as there used to be a way to download maps but removed it or made it more difficult to use.
OpenStreetMap... well... it just sucks. No other way around it, it makes dumb routing decisions, does not give easy ways to select alternative routes, and will tell you "turn left here" when the road is simply bending left with no intersection. Also you have to pay to get more than a little bit of map coverage. (It has been a couple years since I have used OSM, so perhaps it has improved)
That being said, I end up using Google Maps more often when I know I will have a network connection for my entire trip. It lets you go into overview to see the entire route all at once easier, handles rerouting well, and has quite good traffic displays. (at least where I live) Street view is handy for identifying exactly which house on a crowded street is the one you want to find.
I think anyone can agree that having less competitors in mapping and navigation is a recipe for stagnation. Google can afford to give away maps to try to starve out the competition.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Saturday December 05 2015, @05:10PM
As an aside, while Google Maps is freely given away to users, it is quite expensive for companies to license. My small company has the regular google maps integrated into our website and we are looking to move away due to the exorbitant license fees when compared with competitors. I can't imagine how much it would cost for a multi-billion dollar company to use.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2, Interesting) by driverless on Sunday December 06 2015, @12:36AM
+1 on Google in offline mode, it just doesn't work if you have no coverage, while HERE handles it perfectly.
Same thoughts for OSM, it's actually so bad that I hadn't even considered it in the comparison. When you start up HERE or Google, they quickly show you a map of the surrounding area. OSM, at least when I ditched it about a year ago, shows you some buttons with mostly irrelevant options. Eventually you figure out how to get to a map, whereupon it shows you where you were last week (I was trying to find my way around Crete, and it showed me a map of Malta). You can manually enter where you want to see a map for, but it only accepts input in Greek (since I was in Crete). Eventually I found an option to choose the location from a dropdown list (also in Greek, but I could figure out most names). For that it shows *every single fscking village and town in Greece* in the list, hundreds of pages of scrolling to get to where you want. The place I wanted was Nikolaos, a very common place name in Greece. So OSM gave me the option of choosing Nikolaos, Nikolaos, Nikolaos, Nikolaos, Nikolaos, [five pages later] Nikolaos, Nikolaos, or Nikolaos. Totally, utterly useless.
(Score: 1) by PocketSizeSUn on Sunday December 06 2015, @03:33AM
Not accurate (to an extent). I though that it was even covered recently:
http://bgr.com/2015/11/10/google-maps-android-iphone-offline-navigation/ [bgr.com]
Saving map data was added a looong time ago, then hidden (but still available) and now restored and improved.
I have no doubt that HERE maps is far and away sill a better choice for offline. And I agree that OSM Android UI is ugly as bleep, but you *can* very nearly store the entire OSM data [vector tiles] set on an SD Card which is really cool.
(Score: 1) by driverless on Sunday December 06 2015, @04:45AM
I was using (or trying to) Google maps in offline mode. I got suckered into it by reading about how they finally supported offline mode, downloaded the maps for Paris, and ended up having to use a paper map. When I used HERE maps (later, after I'd given up on Google maps) in another city, it all went fine, and I didn't even need to manually download the maps (I assume HERE does some sort of location-assisted cacheing, since when I got out of hotel WiFi range it still gave map info). Apart from that, what really impressed me was when I walked into a mall to get some food for dinner and it showed me the interior floor plan of the mall I was in complete with all the shops.
(Score: 2) by quixote on Saturday December 05 2015, @09:09PM
Samsung's Tizen Z3 phone (which I just bought W00T! but not arrived yet so only a small woot) has (had?) HERE included. Will it continue to be included? Or are the new owners likely to pull it? Or what? What does this actually mean for users?
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Saturday December 05 2015, @11:02PM
I don't have insight into any contract details there, but as I wrote above, we do have ongoing contracts with other companies. I would expect the contracts will continue. Hopefully there will be some official clarification on this soon.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 1) by PocketSizeSUn on Sunday December 06 2015, @03:50AM
I have not been keeping with Tizen but I am glad to see the are shipping, even if they are in the budget line of smartphones. It gives me some comfort to know that Enlightenment continues to be funded, in part, because it is used for Tizen UI. Knowing that HERE maps is bundled is also a really cool plus IMO.
It would be really nice to have an open source competitor to Android which seems to be getting more closed by the day.