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Honestly, I'm surprised that Amazon hasn't done this sooner. Google and to a lesser extent Apple both have a huge lead in this space. Amazon is one of the few c

Honestly, I'm surprised that Amazon hasn't done this sooner. Google and to a lesser extent Apple both have a huge lead in this space. Amazon is one of the few companies that can afford the massive capital cost to create this kind of service. I am curious about the quality though. It seems like they're just reselling from 3rd party data providers. Hopefully, we see this forcing price cuts to Google's Maps API at some point, but I think it will be a while until they reach parity in data quality.

dheera 6y ago
Yeah me too. Google's cloud APIs especially the location related ones have always been a royal pain to use due to limits and really weird policies around how you are allowed to use them (for example, you have to provide attribution, you cannot use them in vehicles, you can't cache, you can't scrape, you can't create content from Maps content, you can't use it near a non-Google map, you can't use it in certain territories, etc.) I'd much rather have a service that I just pay for and I can then use however I want.
swiftcoder 6y ago
Amazon acquired a mapping startup and built out a full 1st party maps product for the FirePhone launch. I'd assumed that was discarded along with the next-gen FirePhone - but it's possible bits and pieces of that effort ended up being integrated into this offering.
- mike_d 6y ago
  If I had to guess, the maps stuff was rolled into the app for delivery drivers. This offering is probably a spin out of the backend for that, since it seems very focused on asset tracking and route optimization.
- cma 6y ago
  They also launched street view before Google (though Google was involved in some related Standford thing from earlier): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com#BlockView https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com#BlockView
vorpalhex 6y ago
> to a lesser extent Apple both have a huge lead in this space When Apple maps first came out, it was terrible. Now it's actually pretty solid - I've heard Apple is very actively contributing to try and really solidify their maps data, but I wonder if the personnel requirements make this an expensive proposition in the first place...
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  Of course it's expensive, but when you get for example 10+ billions USD every year just to allow Google to be your default search engine, it's not like you have any money problems!

dheera 6y ago

Yeah me too. Google's cloud APIs especially the location related ones have always been a royal pain to use due to limits and really weird policies around how you are allowed to use them (for example, you have to provide attribution, you cannot use them in vehicles, you can't cache, you can't scrape, you can't create content from Maps content, you can't use it near a non-Google map, you can't use it in certain territories, etc.) I'd much rather have a service that I just pay for and I can then use however I want.

swiftcoder 6y ago

Amazon acquired a mapping startup and built out a full 1st party maps product for the FirePhone launch. I'd assumed that was discarded along with the next-gen FirePhone - but it's possible bits and pieces of that effort ended up being integrated into this offering.

mike_d 6y ago
If I had to guess, the maps stuff was rolled into the app for delivery drivers. This offering is probably a spin out of the backend for that, since it seems very focused on asset tracking and route optimization.
cma 6y ago
They also launched street view before Google (though Google was involved in some related Standford thing from earlier): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com#BlockView https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com#BlockView

vorpalhex 6y ago

> to a lesser extent Apple both have a huge lead in this space When Apple maps first came out, it was terrible. Now it's actually pretty solid - I've heard Apple is very actively contributing to try and really solidify their maps data, but I wonder if the personnel requirements make this an expensive proposition in the first place...

jmnicolas 6y ago
Of course it's expensive, but when you get for example 10+ billions USD every year just to allow Google to be your default search engine, it's not like you have any money problems!