SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox | Hacker News Reader

SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox

wsj.com

257 pointsuptown58 comments

Where 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.

I 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.

Same 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.

there 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.

It was never owned by Microsoft.

Owners:

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.

If you don't mind me asking, which country/state are you located in?

Sweden. Some parts are better in Google maps, especially the smaller cities, but I live in one of the larger ones with a university and plenty of tech companies.

I used to contribute to Google map maker, but the process was really painful, and I didn't like working for free so one of the worlds biggest companies could have better proprietary data. Open Streetmap is a joy to edit in comparison.

Mapbox 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.

Can you name a few usecases where you would pay them? Doesn#t have to include your own.

We 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

And why didn't you do it in an open standard data format and just present it on Google Maps?

Google Maps itself isn't exactly open standard... See the woes of OpenLayers, for example.

Yes, that's why I put these as two separate points.

The Google Maps API is also more expensive than Mapbox.

We have exportability as a first class citizen, so you can push out to google maps, tableau, esri, carto, etc. Data viz is not our core competency or something we intend to do very much of.

The downvotes let me assume that people understood this question as a suggestion. But it was really just a question from someone who hasn't looked into that space for 10 years and is curious how it looks like from an expert perspective.

FYI your status page is returning an SSL error. Since you're using HSTS, Chrome is blocking the request altogether.

If you don't want to host your own map tile server?

If you're strapped for cash, there are some lower-priced alternatives in the OSM ecosystem. https://thunderforest.com/ , for example, has map tiles available in vector and raster forms, and https://www.graphhopper.com/ is a full-featured alternative to the Mapbox routing stack. You can always self-host, too, whether for map rendering or routing or whatever.

(Not to detract from Mapbox, whose product line is amazing and who have some of the smartest engineers out there.)

Mapzen is also excellent (although definitely less mature than Mapbox), and a huge chunk of their stack is open source.

At Mapzen, all our code is open source, from front-end UIs to back-end "glue." Have a look at:

- web and mobile SDKs: http://github.com/mapzen/

- map rendering library: http://github.com/tangrams

- map tiles: https://github.com/tilezen/

- routing/navigation: https://github.com/valhalla/

- public transit: https://github.com/transitland/

- search/geocoding: http://github.com/pelias

- gazetteer: https://github.com/whosonfirst

FWIW, we do have a few private repos, to protect some ops internals as well as upcoming blog posts.

(I work at Mapzen -- and am also a happy user of Mapbox's open-source libraries.)

Yup. I've checked out a bunch of those – and have actually contributed to pelias/api (and a dependency, addressit).

Everything I've seen so far has been clean and pretty easy to follow. Really appreciate the work you all do.

I'm a very happy Mapzen customer.

Mapzen is an awesome company. I'm excited to see what comes of OpenTraffic, a Mapzen-sponsored, open-source traffic speed data set: https://github.com/opentraffic/

Mapbox actually just changed their pricing structure to be more friendly to startups and developers - take a look https://blog.mapbox.com/pay-as-you-go-new-flexible-pricing-o...

Vector tiles that you can self-host, cache, download for offline use etc.: https://openmaptiles.org

Having 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".

Zero mentions of OpenStreetMap in that story. Can't be surprised I guess.

There 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.

They 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.

What are the worst examples of money driven tags?

But Mapbox couldn't exist without OSM... They are a mapping company (it's in the name), and where do they get their maps?

I 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.

Supporting Development Seed in developing Mapbox is one of the Knight Foundations biggest successes and is on point with their mission.

Paywall Aversion:

Archive.is: https://archive.fo/IdXZD

FB: https://www.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.c...

Facebook aversion makes the second link yuk

You can also prepend 'outline.com/' to bypass the paywall.

Never knew of outline.com. I now have a new favourite site.

So how will Mapbox fill the $164M dept of required "growth".

No idea what those scare quotes are for

One way is by being bought for $164m + x, where X >= $0.

<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/ . Lastly, for those who are interested, we're using Elixir on our backend!

My 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...

Vector tiles can contain names in multiple languages, and the style sheet can decide how to render: prioritise English, prioritise local, or show both.

Check this out https://www.mapbox.com/mapbox-gl-js/example/language-switch/

The `{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.

Thank 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.

SoftBank, it seems, has and is continuing to make investments in startups with unique/proprietary data... smart team...eg recently uber, nauto, mapbox..

Smart bet.

Paywall.

Congrats 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.

Why not? Some companies don't want to host their own tiles server

Certainly, some companies don't want to host their own tile server. But I'm not sure there's $164 million of profit in it.

FTFY - Mapbox guys + gals + non-binary folks + dogs

No.

Yeah. It's not all guys. https://www.mapbox.com/about/team/

"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.

I believe in American English, "guys" just refers to a group of people.

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