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Uber Wants To Buy Nokia's Mapping Services
jfruh writes: When Nokia sold its handset business to Microsoft, one of the services left that it intended to rebuild the company on was Here, its rival to Google Maps. But now a deal is said to be in the works to sell Here to Uber, a company that relies heavily on navigation services and that doesn't want to end up too reliant on Google, a potential rival in the futuristic self-driving car business.
I hear Baidu wants them also.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It was free download; got what I paid for. UBER is out of their league tackling reincarnation of a dead product that doesn't work as a _map_. They should buy RIM Blackberry 'Traffic.app. There's a map that routes, directs, updates and beats GoogleMaps and could be bought.
Is it really Google competing with Uber or is it really Uber competing with Google?
In February this year Uber formed a partnership with Carnegie Mellon University to develop driverless car technology. They're now looking to buy Nokia's map technology for navigation and replace technology provided by Google maps.
Google says they aren't competing with Uber. Their drive sharing app was made internally for certain employees to carpool to work.
Google has at least $258M invested in Uber and has their chief legal officer on the Uber board.
I don't think Google's investment in Uber is anything like ms's partnership with IBM in making OS/2 or ms partnership with opengl. I think the partnership is more akin to Google's relationship with Mozilla back then (which Mozilla later ceased). Google is stronger when there is more than one with their ideas.
I don't know how Uber plans to pay for this, but Stock Options are worthless if Uber tanks.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Well if they do buy it I hope Uber does more with it than Nokia has. It's in terms of the maps it offers Nokia Maps is actually a pretty decent service and has the potential to give Google a hard time if somebody puts some money into it to add features it is missing and improve existing ones like the satelite view feature.
I think that's why Uber is trying to diversify, and fast. Amazing that so much money was thrown at this company whose business model was, as you put it, "basically illegal".
I'm going to start a netsharing company. We're going to put up wifi routers around town and charge people for net service, but we're not going to pay for the outbound connections. Instead we're going to wardrive around cities and wherever we find an poorly secured wifi network, we'll place a repeater there that routes our outbound net traffic through it. We'll be able to offer offer cheaper net access than everyone else, get a bunch of users, and thus a bunch of revenue, and we'll have a huge margin on our balance sheet. Who wants to toss us a few billion dollars?
Or maybe I should start a construction sharing company. We'll let anyone who wants to be a "builder" sign up and offer construction to anyone who wants the job done. No, they won't be licensed or have any sort of "permits", but that's not our issue, that's theirs. The point is, they'll be able to build things really cheap! And so we'll get a bunch of users, and thus a bunch of revenue, and we'll have a huge margin on our balance sheet. Who wants to toss us a few billion dollars?
Or maybe I should start a medicine sharing company... or a sex-for-money sharing company... or a software-license sharing company... or a gunsharing company... you see, if you add the word "sharing" to it, it's not really illegal!
Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
Indeed. Uberpop is already banned in Germany I believe, and my government (in the Netherlands) is thinking about it.
-- Cheers!
OK Uber is today "valued" at what, 3Bn.
$40B and heading to $50B.
You have some interesting comparison. So you're effectively saying that Uber is stealing? Or Uber is using unlicensed drivers? About the only thing I can agree on is the "permits" but interestingly that is something that I applaud Uber for calling bullshit on, the medallion business.
About the only legitimate legal issue I've heard (other than above mentioned medallions) is one of insurance, and that is more of a quirk of an insurance industry that someone who drives too and from work every day can be insured, but someone with identical coverage who happens to take someone else for money (commercial) is magically not. It's also a quirk that doesn't exist in many other countries where vehicles are insured for registration purposes regardless who drives them.
You're making their business model seem far more nefarious than it actually is.
I'm saying that they have a business model entirely based on the mass breaking of laws.
Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
Like Tesla circumventing laws to sell cars directly to people?
I don't really shed a tear over breaking laws that seem to exist for the sole purpose of having someone make money from your business.
Here maps is the app that bundles with the Windows phone I believe. This single application is the main reason I score Nokia's Lumia series -1 out of a possible 0 to 5 score, where a score of 0 indicates the product is so defective that owners should request a refund from the manufacturer.
The phone doesn't do a single thing well, but at least most functionality doesn't involve you reentering the destination while driving every time the screen sleeps. It does other things, like recalculating your route because you just passed under a bridge, meaning your are obviously now driving on the bridge and a number of other equally as amusing quirks.
There are Samsungs, there are Apples, there are Blackberries and $30 asian smart phones, they all do a better job of mapping compared to Here Maps. I really like Uber's service, but I don't expect it to improve with the involvement of a new, extremely defective mapping system, and I don't think users of the service will be very happy if they have to start interacting with this application.
About the only legitimate legal issue I've heard (other than above mentioned medallions) is one of insurance, and that is more of a quirk of an insurance industry that someone who drives too and from work every day can be insured, but someone with identical coverage who happens to take someone else for money (commercial) is magically not. It's also a quirk that doesn't exist in many other countries where vehicles are insured for registration purposes regardless who drives them
There are pretty obvious reasons why an insurance company would charge more for insuring a taxi driver (or 18 year old in a Ferrari, or someone convicted of causing death by dangerous driving, or a racing car driver) than someone commuting to work.
But even putting this aside and assuming that there should or could be some sort of universal flat rate insurance if you nationalised the insurance industry, it is still not up to Uber to ignore or try to circumvent the current legal situation.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Like Tesla circumventing laws to sell cars directly to people?
I don't really shed a tear over breaking laws that seem to exist for the sole purpose of having someone make money from your business.
I'm not from the US, but I find it hard to believe that in the land of enterprise you can't sell something to someone.
However, assuming you're right, it just means that particular law is stupid and should be repealed. It doesn't mean that all laws affecting your business can be ignored.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
However, assuming you're right,
You don't read slashdot much do you? Actually I kid, but really the endless fight between Tesla and the US states have been covered here many times including Telsa offering a service where they will pickup customers from one state and drive them to a showroom in another to offer them a test drive.
One way to get laws changed is to show people how absurd those laws really are. Uber is doing a great job of that right now and I sympathise with them on a number of points. But then I live in a country where insurance isn't allowed to differentiate if someone pays you for a lift or if you're car pooling which basically leaves only stupid laws that Uber are "breaking" here.
Uh, didn't Nokia already sell they Map division to Apple when Apple was having trouble with Apple Maps after they dropped Google Maps? Apple didn't just instantly map the entire world, they had to acquire all that data...
Perhaps they just bought a licence to the data, but I had thought that they had just bought it outright. That sounds more like Apple. It would have cost a couple billion, but then they have/had mad cash on hand anyway.