SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 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.