9 ms·
SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
- uptown 9y agoPaywall Aversion: Archive.is: https://archive.fo/IdXZD https://archive.fo/IdXZD FB: https://www.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fsoftbank-leads-164-million-bet-on-digital-mapping-startup-mapbox-1507640404&h=ATO15fivQaJd4hCklK0rTI4otGpSuNecQByMxBAb2rkYkXGr67An1yh9cJdyDtuAuR3jOqcLMv3VRCMDyA7LQSkcs4AelUGKqC7jqOs&_rdr https://www.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.c...
- singularity2001 9y agoFacebook aversion makes the second link yuk
- laktek 9y agoYou can also prepend 'outline.com/' to bypass the paywall.
- Hbthegreat 9y agoNever knew of outline.com. I now have a new favourite site.
- ris 9y agoZero mentions of OpenStreetMap in that story. Can't be surprised I guess.
- outside1234 9y agoThere are zero mentions of any other open source project too. The good news is that having a commercial platform on OpenStreetMaps is a good thing (tm) - they are driving a lot of improvements to the dataset and the licensing on it means that they have to as they improve it. That's a good thing in my book, but yes, all of this investment would be impossible without OSM.
- anc84 9y agoThey are also driving a lot of crappy contributions. They have huge power to push their own vision in terms of data and tags based on their money. There are many other commercial providers based on OSM's many possibilities. Mapbox have great marketing.
- maxerickson 9y agoWhat are the worst examples of money driven tags?
- rmc 9y agoBut Mapbox couldn't exist without OSM... They are a mapping company (it's in the name), and where do they get their maps?
- zappo2938 9y agoSupporting Development Seed in developing Mapbox is one of the Knight Foundations biggest successes and is on point with their mission.
- zacharyozer 9y agoHaving used Google Maps in a professional context for quite some time, I certainly welcome the competition. Their data is the gold standard, but their Enterprise licensing team is difficult to deal with. One example: We were sold a license that we were subsequently told was inadequate. We were then forced to use a 3rd party broker to negotiate a new deal, and even then the terms were unclear. Also strange because you get 75% discounts at each pricing tier, so we ended up in a tier that gave us "lots of room to grow".
- neom 9y agoMapbox is an amazing product, it's super expensive and pretty hard to swallow the bill every month as a small startup, but the product is just so good, their APIs are fantastic. For sure a company to watch, their COO Roy was the COO of Twilio and he knows what he is doing.
- erikb 9y agoCan you name a few usecases where you would pay them? Doesn#t have to include your own.
- neom 9y agoWe build a data store for municipal governments, we have a very light weight data viz tool that allows municipal workers to view the data on a map: http://john.je/mzHm http://john.je/mzHm
- erikb 9y agoAnd why didn't you do it in an open standard data format and just present it on Google Maps?
- erikb 9y agoCongrats to the Mapbox guys. Always looked like a cool team. However personally I'm not sure it's a business case that will survive the time. But doesn't matter, with that kind of investment and their current track record they probably live 10+ years, which is well enough in times like these.
- Un1corn 9y agoWhy not? Some companies don't want to host their own tiles server
- michaelt 9y agoCertainly, some companies don't want to host their own tile server. But I'm not sure there's $164 million of profit in it.
- sloanesabbith 9y agoFTFY - Mapbox guys + gals + non-binary folks + dogs
- erikb 9y agoNo.
- NegativeLatency 9y agoYeah. It's not all guys. https://www.mapbox.com/about/team/ https://www.mapbox.com/about/team/
- erikb 9y ago"No." means: I don't care if you identify as Apache Helicopter and feel disrespected for being called "guy". This planet has some real issues we need to solve. But that is not one of them. You can be called "guy" AND be awesome.
- 9y ago
- olegkikin 9y agoPaywall.
- sorenjan 9y agoWhere I live OpenStreetMap data is superior to Google maps. There are streets that are several years old that aren't in Google maps yet, and their satellite photos really needs updating too. Strava uses Mapbox instead of Google, and it's much better because of it. I'm happy for the competition in the maps space, and the promotion of open data.
- grepthisab 9y agoI didn't know about Strava, that explains a lot when I'm making a route fine in Strava but can't get it on Google Maps.
- kuschku 9y agoSame here, Google maps last updated imagery in 2004, streets in 2009. 3D data, funnily, is from 2016 – but with 3D disabled, you only get 2004 satellite images. Entire streets and districts are missing, and no transit data. Every competitor has all that. OSM does, Here WeGo does, even Bing does.
- gcb0 9y agothere is also HERE map app. it started in nokia, microsoft, and now under new management. Don't know if it is going to get better or worse because of that.
- monksy 9y agoIt was never owned by Microsoft.
- zamber 9y agoOwners: 1985–2007: Navteq 2007–15: Nokia 2015–present: Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Navinfo 2016–present: Tencent, GIC Private, Intel On 3 August 2015, Here was sold to a consortium of German car makers Audi, BMW, and Mercedes. On 4 December 2015, the consortium completed the acquisition for 2.8 billion euros (2.9 billion US dollars).[33][34] As of December 2015 the company had 6500 employees.[35] In December 2016, Navinfo, Tencent and GIC Private Limited (the Singapore sovereign wealth fund) agreed to buy a 10% stake in HERE.[34] In January 2017 it was reported that Intel was taking a 15% stake in the firm.[34] Captain Wikipedia flies away.
- ingenieroariel 9y agoI trust the MapBox team to execute and innovate on complex technical challenges. Personally, I hope this investment translates into MapBox sending a lot of the high resolution LIDAR derived data back to OSM or similar.
- anc84 9y agoSo how will Mapbox fill the $164M dept of required "growth".
- whipoodle 9y agoNo idea what those scare quotes are for
- robotresearcher 9y agoOne way is by being bought for $164m + x, where X >= $0.
- adamsea 9y ago<shameless but relevant self-promotion> I work on a similar product, one more focused on analytics for location data. We also use OSM as our datasource, and it's cool to see other companies in this space. So far most of our customers are less technical (we have an Excel Plugin which interacts with our API). We also have a python client which can do geocoding, driving distance/time, and US census data lookup. We're a small team and offer competitive pricing. If you're interested, or just want to check it out, please shoot me an email or go to https://cairngeographics.com/ https://cairngeographics.com/ . Lastly, for those who are interested, we're using Elixir on our backend!
- dageshi 9y agoMy main gripe with Mapbox and perhaps it's something that's been fixed recently? Is that you could never force place names to English whe available. So if you're making a map of Tourist map of thailand then the default for all places will obviously be in Thai, if you want to use the English translations which is in the underlying OSM data you can't. But you can if you roll your own...
- tuukkah 9y agoVector tiles can contain names in multiple languages, and the style sheet can decide how to render: prioritise English, prioritise local, or show both.
- bsudekum 9y agoCheck this out https://www.mapbox.com/mapbox-gl-js/example/language-switch/ https://www.mapbox.com/mapbox-gl-js/example/language-switch/
- danpat 9y agoThe `{name}` field that's the default for most place labels in styles is the "local name", in the local symbol system. Change it to `{name_en}` in your style for place labels, and you'll get English-script names where available.
- dageshi 9y agoThank you, I will look into it again, admittedly I think it's been at least a year since I last checked into see if it's possible.
- innovate 9y agoSoftBank, it seems, has and is continuing to make investments in startups with unique/proprietary data... smart team...eg recently uber, nauto, mapbox..
- sjg007 9y agoSmart bet.
- lsjdfkljdfwkwdf 9y agoWhy did Google discontinue mapmaker?