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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.
They should just support and contribute to OpenStreetMap. The world does not need yet another proprietary map system, and Uber needs to focus on their core business rather than getting side tracked into a lot of silly vertical integration.
Their core business is moving out of the taxi service and into financial markets. 3 Billion dollars, how long have these people been around to get that kind of money?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
They got some dumbasses to take on all the risk while they get the profit - perfect Wall St material.
Right, because there is no such thing as a competitive advantage when it comes to technology.
Unless your tech is better, there is no advantage. How is Uber's proprietary map system going to be better than what Google, Apple, etc. have already done? They should either sign a long term license agreement with an established incumbent, or they should contribute to an open platform. Either will be far cheaper than building and maintaining their own system.
You should read "The Halo Effect" http://www.amazon.com/The-Halo-Effect-Business-Delusions/dp/1476784035
"Focus on their core business" is only seen as wise with the benefit of hindsight when it works well. When they lose market-share because of "The Innovator's Dilemma" then they are suddenly buffoons for being complacent and not innovating.
If these "maps" investments(Autonomous Cars BTW) pay off should we expect a retraction/public back pedaling to match the "I told you so's" that we can expect if this doesn't go well for them?
I love 'Here', downloaded Paris when I moved there, no need for data connection, unless I want public transport times. I find it clearer than google maps to orientate myself thanks to landmarks (Eiffel tower, odd shaped tower blocks etc) being 3Dish and having different textures. Haven't tried voice navigation. Google maps was really unintuitive about downloading maps, and seemed (they didn't make it clear) to make it difficult to keep maps for long or to download large areas - this might have improved.
I prefer it to Google maps on my laptop screen even.
(I have never used the Blackberry one so that might as you say also be better than Google - I just wanted to point out that Here works for me.)
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.
One of the reasons that Nokia took pretty much the whole market for Windows Phone was the Here suite of apps; turn by turn navigation, public transport routing, live traffic, downloadable maps and local discovery and all of it integrated into the OS. Very slick. The other reason was the cameras, of course.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"