11 ms·

Intel to buy smart urban transit startup Moovit for $1B for its car division

141 points by 1cvmask 7y ago

jackyinger 7y ago
This sort of stuff is why I quit Intel and sold all my stock. In my opinion (and I haven’t been following post-Kersanich Intel closely) Intel should be focusing on their process and processors, I don’t think the execs really have the will it would take to diversify. These acquisitions almost always end up being run into the ground because Intel is so used to turning the crank on their mature (read: awesomely ubiquitous software support) CPU architecture that they don’t want to spend much on R&D on things that aren’t proven money makers. But they keep trying to div diversify in a very half-assed way because they have such a high market share in CPUs (not that it is without legitimate threat from AMD) that to continue to grow they want to hit new markets.
- azinman2 7y ago
  I’m just wondering why they have a billion to spend on this. Clearly they can walk and chew gum at the same time, yet being so under fire directionally makes me think they should be more focused on getting their core business right instead of chasing extremely expensive pipe dreams. Those side distractions almost always get cut at Intel...
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    The appearance of generating value in the short term until executive leadership parachutes out leaving shareholders holding the bag.
- Traster 7y ago
  I actually disagree with your analysis, my experience with Intel was from an acquisition. They decided they were going to do 'big bets' which involved massively massively investing in a few areas. What happened, was they acquired the company and told us to grow in certain areas enormously and quickly. So it's not that they acquired and then cut R&D. The opposite happened, they hugely increased R&D (sure they cut lots of other things that caused trouble), but it was like winning the lottery, suddenly everyone could hire for everything. So the message was "Get on and hire, because it won't be like this forever, and if you fail your hiring target, you'll be stuck delivering big projects with no staff". Immediately hiring became a mess, the weight of bringing on all this new staff massively slowed everything down. In most ways we ended up delivering less with twice the staff. Needless to say: this didn't produce the results they wanted. Fortunately for my team, Intel completely shitting the bed on 10nm meant that all these problems were barely noticed - who can blame you if the silicon isn't there. The thing is, that when you pay a premium, overinvest and under-deliver you end up with no choice in the exec team - and you end up 'cutting you losses' and doing a McAfee.
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    > doing a McAfee Do you mean the person or the company? If you mean the person, this is going to pretty weird.
    - PaulHoule 7y ago
      Intel was big into antivirus in the early 2010s and bought the company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McAfee#Acquisition_by_Intel_and_spin-off https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McAfee#Acquisition_by_Intel_an... at first they thought it would sell quad-core processors, but discriminating consumers learned that third-party antivirus makes your machine slow, unstable, hot and runs down the battery. Thus it damaged Intel's brand.
      - minot 7y ago
        > at first they thought it would sell quad-core processors, but discriminating consumers learned that third-party antivirus makes your machine slow, unstable, hot and runs down the battery. Thus it damaged Intel's brand. I don't get the anti-virus market at all. Granted all AV products are probably horrible and I haven't used a third party AV on a personal machine ever since about 2009-ish [0] but back in college I distinctly remember the consumer AV stuff was so much taxing on performance compared to "enterprise" stuff. I don't think there was ever a technical reason for this, was there? So, why? Now I do remember subversion checkouts or anything file intensive was pretty bad (and it still is if you don't have a decent SSD) but my impression is that the enterprise av was better than consumer? Am I misremembering this? [0] I think I switched to Microsoft Security Essentials or some variant of it if I recall correctly.
  - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    It's amazing to me how often this story repeats itself in tech, yet the results are almost always the same: 1. Old, hugely successful company needs to find new growth areas. 2. Company acquires company in high growth area (sometimes innovative, sometimes not) 3. Taking from the MBA playbook that higher investment equals more growth, acquired company is given aggressive targets but also a huge budget to meet them. 4. Company goes on a massive, usually relatively untargeted hiring spree, things become a major shitshow, acquired leadership team is eventually canned. Instead of finding some realistic product targets and then setting a budget around what resources will be needed to attain those goals, the budget is allocated based solely on desired revenue and somehow hiring all these people without a clear plan will make that happen. I'm genuinely curious, has this ever worked?
- dehrmann 7y ago
  Around 2008, Intel really needed to become a player in mobile computing. Now they're a decade late, and this wasn't what I meant by "mobile."
  - samfisher83 7y ago
    Lets look at least the Highend cellphone space you have Qcom and apple.Even Samsung doesn't really compete with Qcom. Qcom has a moat for their mobile business which is their radio patents. Even apple uses the Qcom radio chips, but they can because they have their insane margins.Lets look at the biggest semiconductor company in the world tsmc they generated about 4bil in Free cash flow. Intel generated about 18, and going after the low cost market is not a good idea. The best option would be for intel is just to return money back to the shareholders.
  - bsder 7y ago
    "Hey, we should start selling ARM CPUs. I know that the profit margin is two orders of magnitude less than x86 processors, but we'll sell an order of magnitude more chips." The only question would be whether they would let that guy leave through the door under his own power. The logical solution is to ride the gravy train until it tanks completely. A dinosaur can take a VERY long time to fall.
    - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
      It's better than that. Intel was an ARM licensee for a brief period after they acquired StrongARM from DEC and developed Xscale. If they had any vision that could have been leveraged into a best in class low power mobile platform.
      - srcmap 7y ago
        Intel can sell x86 with 50-80% margin + 80-90% market share. Or sell arm compete with TW, China ARM licensee at 10-25% margin for 5-15% market share. And you don't have any competitive advantage like Qualcom with IP on CP. If you're Intel CEO, how are you going to choose?
- eldavido 7y ago
  Completely agree. Had a friend start a career at Intel, moved to Apple because he saw it coming. In case anyone isn't totally clear on why Intel is in such trouble: they made a lot of money selling high-end CPUs for desktops, and even higher-margin parts to datacenter operators. On the PC front, when I was in high school (late 90s/early 2000s) it was common to have the computers on a "3 year replacement cycle" where they'd replace 1/3 or 1/4 of the computers every single year. Compare that to today where "2009 era" iMacs (!!) are floating around, ready for purchase at 200-300 dollars. There's no growth here. On the mobile side, Intel had the chance to make chips for Apple but said no. They couldn't make the numbers work volume-wise. It's an interesting story, read it if you haven't. Then comes datacenters. High-performance, high-power has been an Intel stronghold for 10-20 years but the whole industry is consolidating into AWS/Amazon/Azure who will probably make their own CPUs at some point, if not their entire own PCs. Either way this is bad for Intel: they face either someone who doesn't want their product, or a much larger buyer with much more purchasing leverage than a corporate IT department buying in small quantities. Same deal with storage -- the larger operators aren't paying the crazy EMC/NetApp margins those guys could cram down corporate IT's throats. Amazon has already announced plans to make ARM EC2 instances for reasons of both power and not paying Intel's crazy margins. The thing Intel still does have is world-leading fab capabilities. I remember back in the 90s Intel always outperfomred AMD by running at much higher clockspeeds, and they could do it because of their superior process technology. But that allowed AMD to run laps around them in microarchitecture, which is showing with Ryzen. I don't see Intel becoming a contract manufacturer soon but I'm sure they've discussed it internally.
  - gniv 7y ago
    I've been hearing this "Intel is in trouble" story for many years now. Yet their stock doubled in the last 5 years. What gives?
    - justapassenger 7y ago
      Stock price is very often disconnected from reality.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
- Zenst 7y ago
  Agreed, Intel seems to buy companies and then destroy or borg only small bits leaving everything else to rot. But such purchases are good PR for the shareholder perception and almost gets down to churning purches thru the books on the surface, look good at that level of perception. Agreed, They should focus upon what they have and with that, perish the thought they focused upon there FPGA with toolchains and support that could drive it into that and many markets. If Intel added a small FPGA to their CPU's and they could - that could drive a whole new market of development and one in which they are placed to capitlise upon what IP they do have. Certainly an FPGA would make for a good mix with AI, if Intel would make such tools and open up FPGA's more to users and get that adoption going. Then the whole CPU/GPU race may well change into their favour.
- ksec 7y ago
  Those acquisition that are in terms of actual silicon production are at least still running, because that is part of Intel's expertise. Those that has absolutely nothing to do with Silicon production are all being run to the ground. They should have diversify into either into more silicon products or Custom Fabs, instead their Custom Foundry was a complete mess. What Intel dont realise was their competitor isn't actually AMD or Nvidia, but TSMC and Samsung. The market has no problem paying premium for leading edge node, leading edge processor design and software support. The problem is Intel lost on the first two and lost the third with respect to CUDA. At least the new CEO seems to understand the problem better.
jSully24 7y ago
This appears to be a very desperate move by a company just realizing the desperate situation they find themselves in. I agree with others sentiment that they need to find a way to get back to doing well what it is they know, or used to know.
- jeffbee 7y ago
  Yeah Intel really has their back against that wall, after all they are one of the most highly capitalized businesses in human history, just recorded their largest annual revenue in the history of the firm, and earn a profit of only about $80000 per minute. Pure desperation down there in Santa Clara.
  - eldavido 7y ago
    Financial results are always a lagging indicator in tech. That doesn't mean they aren't important, just that you can coast on an existing product line for a really long time (decade+) and then everyone's "surprised" when unit sales decline, and there's nothing else in the pipeline. An example of this: Sears. Dominant retailer, completely missed the boat on ecommerce, now bankrupt. Literally.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      Sears missed the boat on ecomerce, but that isn't why they are gone. Walmart missed the boat too at first, but they are still big because their manageme was good. They also have adjusted overtime such that now my family does most of our shopping there (once this pandemic is done I'm looking forward to going back to the local stores I used to go to.)
    - jeffbee 7y ago
      Microsoft missed the boat on mobile and now they are the biggest firm in the universe.
      - uHuge 7y ago
        I do not see them, Nokia is minor, Win discontinued..?
bfrog 7y ago
What a terrible purchase. Moovit is worth exactly $0.
- Gys 7y ago
  Clearly that depends who you are asking
  - bfrog 7y ago
    If your asking the former vp from Intel that transferred to moovit I think he'd disagree strongly, your right. I'm sure he got nothing from the deal.
chx 7y ago
Let me grab this occassion to draw attention to a lesser known feature of Citymapper (not everywhere alas): it can make a public transit plan augmented by a cab. This is something I have been doing without an app myself at my home city in a very clear demonstration of the "time is money" principle. This is one of the true differentiating capabilities between Citymapper, Moovit and Google Maps, otherwise they would be quite similar.
- petra 7y ago
  Moovit has audio alerts, which Google Maps doesn't have. It's a valuable feature when riding a bus.
  - fastball 7y ago
    Citymapper has "get off the bus" alerts too.
- kungato 7y ago
  Google Maps has this
- cwhiz 7y ago
  I actually hate that feature and can’t figure out how to turn it off. It thinks getting me within 1-2 miles of my destination and hailing a car is better than being on a train for 20% longer but being much closer to where I actually want to go. I outright stopped using the app because it’s too annoying to make sure the suggested route doesn’t involving getting off a train and catching a car.
  - skrtskrt 7y ago
    Use the Transit app, it is almost completely focused on city transit only + walking. It suggests ubers and bike shares, but they’re pushed down to the bottom of the options list.
- mFixman 7y ago
  It also interfaces with bike shares in some cities. Bike share + train multimodal commutes being the norm is the dream of every modern urbanist.
saipraneeth 7y ago
can someone explain the differences between Moovit, Transit and Google Maps.. seems to me that they solve the same problem..
- skrtskrt 7y ago
  I’ve used Transit and Google Maps and to me Transit’s suggestions are closer to how a human considers transit options. Google Maps seem strangely over optimized for things like minimum walking at the beginning of the route. Plus the Google Maps “how far away the bus is” doesn’t update based on new data (from the city bus trackers or crowdsourced data) unless you close the app and re open
- aeyes 7y ago
  They do solve the same problem but Google Maps public transportation data is not crowdsourced, if there is no GTFS feed then it has nothing. Living in a 3rd world country where we have many buses but little data I can tell you that Moovit works much much better here.
  - pier25 7y ago
    Doesn’t google use waze for data?
en4bz 7y ago
Can someone create an equivalent of the Google Graveyard but for dumb Intel acquisitions?
- Zigurd 7y ago
  I nominate Spectron. It died twice I think: the corpse was sold to Dialogic, then Dialogic was bought by Intel later on, and then there was more spinoff/merger pinball. The original idea was for Intel to wrest control of multimedia from Microsoft and create an Intel controlled multimedia subsystem. They didn't actually acquire Dragon for the speech recognition part, but Dragon's fate was even worse.
crazygringo 7y ago
Wait... let's rewind. Why does Intel have an "Israeli automotive hub" from acquiring "Mobileye, the autonomous driving company" in 2017? It makes sense when a large company acquires a smaller one, or founds a division from scratch, because it can provide that smaller company/company with uniquely valuable resources. E.g. Google/Alphabet founding Waymo because of Google's existing expertise in ML. But how does expertise in processors translate to any kind of advantage for autonomous driving? Presumably the microprocessors in a self-driving car are one of the most commoditized parts... who cares if it's Intel, AMD or ARM? Does anyone "in the know" have a clue around Intel's strategy here? I can only guess they want to repeat the "Intel Inside" marketing campaign of the 1990's -- i.e. if they lost mobile, they don't want to lose cars too. But then wouldn't they want to form strong subsidized partnerships, the way they did with Intel Inside? Developing their own technology seems like it would make the autonomous car industry view them as competitors, not partners, and thus less likely to use their chips. What am I missing?
- my123 7y ago
  Their competitor here is Nvidia, which has quite good hardware. Also, yes the ISA doesn't matter that much in the field, because no 3rd-party user-installed apps on automotive by design...
- detaro 7y ago
  NVidia has product lines specifically for this field. Tesla proudly announced to the world that they made their own chip for autonomous driving. "Autonomous driving" research/development right now means lots of Machine Learning, image processing, ... High-performance stuff that benefits from GPU-like designs, all the while the systems for that need to be reasonably energy-efficient and build in a way that they'll survive in an automotive setting. They're not a competitor to car companies because car companies typically don't want to design chips themselves, they'll happily buy them if they can (Tesla is a really odd one out in that regard, and even they'll use superior hardware made by someone else if it makes sense). If it takes off across manufacturers, Intel very much would like a slice of that pie instead of leaving it all to NVidia&Co.
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gallego2007 7y ago
Interesting acquisition by Intel, but also equally surprising valuation at $1B. I thought Moovit was entirely crowdsourced and made up primarily of volunteers[1]... maybe that changed recently? [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/crowdsourcing-just-ticket-exponentially-grow-your-business-nir-erez https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/crowdsourcing-just-ticket-exp...
- 303space 7y ago
  Also the article claims “800 million riders” which is astounding for an app that is currently #36 in the navigation category (iOS App Store). Unless this app is more popular than TikTok everywhere outside of the US they’ve gotta be playing fast and loose with those usage statistics.
  - bhouston 7y ago
    From what I can tell they are providing a lot of data via partnerships to other apps and clients. At least that is what Wikipedia states.
  - aeyes 7y ago
    Moovit is for public transportation and that is pretty much why it isn't big in the US. Here it is #3 in navigation after Google Maps and Waze. I couldn't live without it anymore, the city has probably around 500 bus lines. Making 3 combinations isn't unusual and it works to the point where I don't worry about researching a new route. Whenever you aren't commuting it is your best option to finding a route. Sometimes I spend a weekend in smaller cities I don't know well. They have bus lines which you can't find online anywhere. But everything is on Moovit. This has saved me so many hours, I feel like I should be paying for it.
lawrenceyan 7y ago
This in my opinion is just a bailout acquisition from Intel to Moovit, made to make Intel look more innovative in the face of a stagnating processor division while bailing out Moovit from bankruptcy.
- fred_is_fred 7y ago
  If that's true why not wait a few months and buy it for say $100M? Maybe it's not as splashy for Intel if they do that.
  - ksec 7y ago
    Intel Capital ( VC arm of Intel Crop ) is one of the early investor of Moovit.
toasterlovin 7y ago
The other day I was defending buybacks and dividends on HN as policies that protect owners from managers. These kinds of acquisitions are exactly what I had in mind.
blackrock 7y ago
Intel screwed up and missed the mobile phone revolution. They’re probably trying to make sure they don’t miss out on the autonomous car revolution. Which will likely require more chips, in both vehicles and infrastructure. But this is a huge gamble, as an infrastructure upgrade like this will cost billions or trillions. And it may likely never happen. But if and when it does, then Intel may be standing on the next wave of huge spending for its technology.

141 points by 1cvmask 7y ago

This sort of stuff is why I quit Intel and sold all my stock. In my opinion (and I haven’t been following post-Kersanich Intel closely) Intel should be focusing on their process and processors, I don’t think the execs really have the will it would take to diversify. These acquisitions almost always end up being run into the ground because Intel is so used to turning the crank on their mature (read: awesomely ubiquitous software support) CPU architecture that they don’t want to spend much on R&D on things that aren’t proven money makers. But they keep trying to div diversify in a very half-assed way because they have such a high market share in CPUs (not that it is without legitimate threat from AMD) that to continue to grow they want to hit new markets.

azinman2 7y ago
I’m just wondering why they have a billion to spend on this. Clearly they can walk and chew gum at the same time, yet being so under fire directionally makes me think they should be more focused on getting their core business right instead of chasing extremely expensive pipe dreams. Those side distractions almost always get cut at Intel...
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  The appearance of generating value in the short term until executive leadership parachutes out leaving shareholders holding the bag.
Traster 7y ago
I actually disagree with your analysis, my experience with Intel was from an acquisition. They decided they were going to do 'big bets' which involved massively massively investing in a few areas. What happened, was they acquired the company and told us to grow in certain areas enormously and quickly. So it's not that they acquired and then cut R&D. The opposite happened, they hugely increased R&D (sure they cut lots of other things that caused trouble), but it was like winning the lottery, suddenly everyone could hire for everything. So the message was "Get on and hire, because it won't be like this forever, and if you fail your hiring target, you'll be stuck delivering big projects with no staff". Immediately hiring became a mess, the weight of bringing on all this new staff massively slowed everything down. In most ways we ended up delivering less with twice the staff. Needless to say: this didn't produce the results they wanted. Fortunately for my team, Intel completely shitting the bed on 10nm meant that all these problems were barely noticed - who can blame you if the silicon isn't there. The thing is, that when you pay a premium, overinvest and under-deliver you end up with no choice in the exec team - and you end up 'cutting you losses' and doing a McAfee.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  > doing a McAfee Do you mean the person or the company? If you mean the person, this is going to pretty weird.
  - PaulHoule 7y ago
    Intel was big into antivirus in the early 2010s and bought the company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McAfee#Acquisition_by_Intel_and_spin-off https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McAfee#Acquisition_by_Intel_an... at first they thought it would sell quad-core processors, but discriminating consumers learned that third-party antivirus makes your machine slow, unstable, hot and runs down the battery. Thus it damaged Intel's brand.
    - minot 7y ago
      > at first they thought it would sell quad-core processors, but discriminating consumers learned that third-party antivirus makes your machine slow, unstable, hot and runs down the battery. Thus it damaged Intel's brand. I don't get the anti-virus market at all. Granted all AV products are probably horrible and I haven't used a third party AV on a personal machine ever since about 2009-ish [0] but back in college I distinctly remember the consumer AV stuff was so much taxing on performance compared to "enterprise" stuff. I don't think there was ever a technical reason for this, was there? So, why? Now I do remember subversion checkouts or anything file intensive was pretty bad (and it still is if you don't have a decent SSD) but my impression is that the enterprise av was better than consumer? Am I misremembering this? [0] I think I switched to Microsoft Security Essentials or some variant of it if I recall correctly.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  It's amazing to me how often this story repeats itself in tech, yet the results are almost always the same: 1. Old, hugely successful company needs to find new growth areas. 2. Company acquires company in high growth area (sometimes innovative, sometimes not) 3. Taking from the MBA playbook that higher investment equals more growth, acquired company is given aggressive targets but also a huge budget to meet them. 4. Company goes on a massive, usually relatively untargeted hiring spree, things become a major shitshow, acquired leadership team is eventually canned. Instead of finding some realistic product targets and then setting a budget around what resources will be needed to attain those goals, the budget is allocated based solely on desired revenue and somehow hiring all these people without a clear plan will make that happen. I'm genuinely curious, has this ever worked?
dehrmann 7y ago
Around 2008, Intel really needed to become a player in mobile computing. Now they're a decade late, and this wasn't what I meant by "mobile."
- samfisher83 7y ago
  Lets look at least the Highend cellphone space you have Qcom and apple.Even Samsung doesn't really compete with Qcom. Qcom has a moat for their mobile business which is their radio patents. Even apple uses the Qcom radio chips, but they can because they have their insane margins.Lets look at the biggest semiconductor company in the world tsmc they generated about 4bil in Free cash flow. Intel generated about 18, and going after the low cost market is not a good idea. The best option would be for intel is just to return money back to the shareholders.
- bsder 7y ago
  "Hey, we should start selling ARM CPUs. I know that the profit margin is two orders of magnitude less than x86 processors, but we'll sell an order of magnitude more chips." The only question would be whether they would let that guy leave through the door under his own power. The logical solution is to ride the gravy train until it tanks completely. A dinosaur can take a VERY long time to fall.
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    It's better than that. Intel was an ARM licensee for a brief period after they acquired StrongARM from DEC and developed Xscale. If they had any vision that could have been leveraged into a best in class low power mobile platform.
    - srcmap 7y ago
      Intel can sell x86 with 50-80% margin + 80-90% market share. Or sell arm compete with TW, China ARM licensee at 10-25% margin for 5-15% market share. And you don't have any competitive advantage like Qualcom with IP on CP. If you're Intel CEO, how are you going to choose?
eldavido 7y ago
Completely agree. Had a friend start a career at Intel, moved to Apple because he saw it coming. In case anyone isn't totally clear on why Intel is in such trouble: they made a lot of money selling high-end CPUs for desktops, and even higher-margin parts to datacenter operators. On the PC front, when I was in high school (late 90s/early 2000s) it was common to have the computers on a "3 year replacement cycle" where they'd replace 1/3 or 1/4 of the computers every single year. Compare that to today where "2009 era" iMacs (!!) are floating around, ready for purchase at 200-300 dollars. There's no growth here. On the mobile side, Intel had the chance to make chips for Apple but said no. They couldn't make the numbers work volume-wise. It's an interesting story, read it if you haven't. Then comes datacenters. High-performance, high-power has been an Intel stronghold for 10-20 years but the whole industry is consolidating into AWS/Amazon/Azure who will probably make their own CPUs at some point, if not their entire own PCs. Either way this is bad for Intel: they face either someone who doesn't want their product, or a much larger buyer with much more purchasing leverage than a corporate IT department buying in small quantities. Same deal with storage -- the larger operators aren't paying the crazy EMC/NetApp margins those guys could cram down corporate IT's throats. Amazon has already announced plans to make ARM EC2 instances for reasons of both power and not paying Intel's crazy margins. The thing Intel still does have is world-leading fab capabilities. I remember back in the 90s Intel always outperfomred AMD by running at much higher clockspeeds, and they could do it because of their superior process technology. But that allowed AMD to run laps around them in microarchitecture, which is showing with Ryzen. I don't see Intel becoming a contract manufacturer soon but I'm sure they've discussed it internally.
- gniv 7y ago
  I've been hearing this "Intel is in trouble" story for many years now. Yet their stock doubled in the last 5 years. What gives?
  - justapassenger 7y ago
    Stock price is very often disconnected from reality.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
Zenst 7y ago
Agreed, Intel seems to buy companies and then destroy or borg only small bits leaving everything else to rot. But such purchases are good PR for the shareholder perception and almost gets down to churning purches thru the books on the surface, look good at that level of perception. Agreed, They should focus upon what they have and with that, perish the thought they focused upon there FPGA with toolchains and support that could drive it into that and many markets. If Intel added a small FPGA to their CPU's and they could - that could drive a whole new market of development and one in which they are placed to capitlise upon what IP they do have. Certainly an FPGA would make for a good mix with AI, if Intel would make such tools and open up FPGA's more to users and get that adoption going. Then the whole CPU/GPU race may well change into their favour.
ksec 7y ago
Those acquisition that are in terms of actual silicon production are at least still running, because that is part of Intel's expertise. Those that has absolutely nothing to do with Silicon production are all being run to the ground. They should have diversify into either into more silicon products or Custom Fabs, instead their Custom Foundry was a complete mess. What Intel dont realise was their competitor isn't actually AMD or Nvidia, but TSMC and Samsung. The market has no problem paying premium for leading edge node, leading edge processor design and software support. The problem is Intel lost on the first two and lost the third with respect to CUDA. At least the new CEO seems to understand the problem better.

jSully24 7y ago

This appears to be a very desperate move by a company just realizing the desperate situation they find themselves in. I agree with others sentiment that they need to find a way to get back to doing well what it is they know, or used to know.

jeffbee 7y ago
Yeah Intel really has their back against that wall, after all they are one of the most highly capitalized businesses in human history, just recorded their largest annual revenue in the history of the firm, and earn a profit of only about $80000 per minute. Pure desperation down there in Santa Clara.
- eldavido 7y ago
  Financial results are always a lagging indicator in tech. That doesn't mean they aren't important, just that you can coast on an existing product line for a really long time (decade+) and then everyone's "surprised" when unit sales decline, and there's nothing else in the pipeline. An example of this: Sears. Dominant retailer, completely missed the boat on ecommerce, now bankrupt. Literally.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Sears missed the boat on ecomerce, but that isn't why they are gone. Walmart missed the boat too at first, but they are still big because their manageme was good. They also have adjusted overtime such that now my family does most of our shopping there (once this pandemic is done I'm looking forward to going back to the local stores I used to go to.)
  - jeffbee 7y ago
    Microsoft missed the boat on mobile and now they are the biggest firm in the universe.
    - uHuge 7y ago
      I do not see them, Nokia is minor, Win discontinued..?

bfrog 7y ago

What a terrible purchase. Moovit is worth exactly $0.

Gys 7y ago
Clearly that depends who you are asking
- bfrog 7y ago
  If your asking the former vp from Intel that transferred to moovit I think he'd disagree strongly, your right. I'm sure he got nothing from the deal.

chx 7y ago

Let me grab this occassion to draw attention to a lesser known feature of Citymapper (not everywhere alas): it can make a public transit plan augmented by a cab. This is something I have been doing without an app myself at my home city in a very clear demonstration of the "time is money" principle. This is one of the true differentiating capabilities between Citymapper, Moovit and Google Maps, otherwise they would be quite similar.

petra 7y ago
Moovit has audio alerts, which Google Maps doesn't have. It's a valuable feature when riding a bus.
- fastball 7y ago
  Citymapper has "get off the bus" alerts too.
kungato 7y ago
Google Maps has this
cwhiz 7y ago
I actually hate that feature and can’t figure out how to turn it off. It thinks getting me within 1-2 miles of my destination and hailing a car is better than being on a train for 20% longer but being much closer to where I actually want to go. I outright stopped using the app because it’s too annoying to make sure the suggested route doesn’t involving getting off a train and catching a car.
- skrtskrt 7y ago
  Use the Transit app, it is almost completely focused on city transit only + walking. It suggests ubers and bike shares, but they’re pushed down to the bottom of the options list.
mFixman 7y ago
It also interfaces with bike shares in some cities. Bike share + train multimodal commutes being the norm is the dream of every modern urbanist.

saipraneeth 7y ago

can someone explain the differences between Moovit, Transit and Google Maps.. seems to me that they solve the same problem..

skrtskrt 7y ago
I’ve used Transit and Google Maps and to me Transit’s suggestions are closer to how a human considers transit options. Google Maps seem strangely over optimized for things like minimum walking at the beginning of the route. Plus the Google Maps “how far away the bus is” doesn’t update based on new data (from the city bus trackers or crowdsourced data) unless you close the app and re open
aeyes 7y ago
They do solve the same problem but Google Maps public transportation data is not crowdsourced, if there is no GTFS feed then it has nothing. Living in a 3rd world country where we have many buses but little data I can tell you that Moovit works much much better here.
- pier25 7y ago
  Doesn’t google use waze for data?

en4bz 7y ago

Can someone create an equivalent of the Google Graveyard but for dumb Intel acquisitions?

Zigurd 7y ago
I nominate Spectron. It died twice I think: the corpse was sold to Dialogic, then Dialogic was bought by Intel later on, and then there was more spinoff/merger pinball. The original idea was for Intel to wrest control of multimedia from Microsoft and create an Intel controlled multimedia subsystem. They didn't actually acquire Dragon for the speech recognition part, but Dragon's fate was even worse.

crazygringo 7y ago

Wait... let's rewind. Why does Intel have an "Israeli automotive hub" from acquiring "Mobileye, the autonomous driving company" in 2017? It makes sense when a large company acquires a smaller one, or founds a division from scratch, because it can provide that smaller company/company with uniquely valuable resources. E.g. Google/Alphabet founding Waymo because of Google's existing expertise in ML. But how does expertise in processors translate to any kind of advantage for autonomous driving? Presumably the microprocessors in a self-driving car are one of the most commoditized parts... who cares if it's Intel, AMD or ARM? Does anyone "in the know" have a clue around Intel's strategy here? I can only guess they want to repeat the "Intel Inside" marketing campaign of the 1990's -- i.e. if they lost mobile, they don't want to lose cars too. But then wouldn't they want to form strong subsidized partnerships, the way they did with Intel Inside? Developing their own technology seems like it would make the autonomous car industry view them as competitors, not partners, and thus less likely to use their chips. What am I missing?

my123 7y ago
Their competitor here is Nvidia, which has quite good hardware. Also, yes the ISA doesn't matter that much in the field, because no 3rd-party user-installed apps on automotive by design...
detaro 7y ago
NVidia has product lines specifically for this field. Tesla proudly announced to the world that they made their own chip for autonomous driving. "Autonomous driving" research/development right now means lots of Machine Learning, image processing, ... High-performance stuff that benefits from GPU-like designs, all the while the systems for that need to be reasonably energy-efficient and build in a way that they'll survive in an automotive setting. They're not a competitor to car companies because car companies typically don't want to design chips themselves, they'll happily buy them if they can (Tesla is a really odd one out in that regard, and even they'll use superior hardware made by someone else if it makes sense). If it takes off across manufacturers, Intel very much would like a slice of that pie instead of leaving it all to NVidia&Co.
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gallego2007 7y ago

Interesting acquisition by Intel, but also equally surprising valuation at $1B. I thought Moovit was entirely crowdsourced and made up primarily of volunteers[1]... maybe that changed recently? [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/crowdsourcing-just-ticket-exponentially-grow-your-business-nir-erez https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/crowdsourcing-just-ticket-exp...

303space 7y ago
Also the article claims “800 million riders” which is astounding for an app that is currently #36 in the navigation category (iOS App Store). Unless this app is more popular than TikTok everywhere outside of the US they’ve gotta be playing fast and loose with those usage statistics.
- bhouston 7y ago
  From what I can tell they are providing a lot of data via partnerships to other apps and clients. At least that is what Wikipedia states.
- aeyes 7y ago
  Moovit is for public transportation and that is pretty much why it isn't big in the US. Here it is #3 in navigation after Google Maps and Waze. I couldn't live without it anymore, the city has probably around 500 bus lines. Making 3 combinations isn't unusual and it works to the point where I don't worry about researching a new route. Whenever you aren't commuting it is your best option to finding a route. Sometimes I spend a weekend in smaller cities I don't know well. They have bus lines which you can't find online anywhere. But everything is on Moovit. This has saved me so many hours, I feel like I should be paying for it.

lawrenceyan 7y ago

This in my opinion is just a bailout acquisition from Intel to Moovit, made to make Intel look more innovative in the face of a stagnating processor division while bailing out Moovit from bankruptcy.

fred_is_fred 7y ago
If that's true why not wait a few months and buy it for say $100M? Maybe it's not as splashy for Intel if they do that.
- ksec 7y ago
  Intel Capital ( VC arm of Intel Crop ) is one of the early investor of Moovit.

toasterlovin 7y ago

The other day I was defending buybacks and dividends on HN as policies that protect owners from managers. These kinds of acquisitions are exactly what I had in mind.

blackrock 7y ago

Intel screwed up and missed the mobile phone revolution. They’re probably trying to make sure they don’t miss out on the autonomous car revolution. Which will likely require more chips, in both vehicles and infrastructure. But this is a huge gamble, as an infrastructure upgrade like this will cost billions or trillions. And it may likely never happen. But if and when it does, then Intel may be standing on the next wave of huge spending for its technology.