Grab built its own map in Southeast Asia, and is now going after Google
restofworld.org
restofworld.org
It's worth noting the existence of the open source street image platform https://panoramax.fr.
Disclaimer : I'm building a local open source "clone" of Google Maps, on the Web, for France. https://cartes.app. Code : https://github.com/cartesapp/cartes
No shared instance for uploading images for Norway as I see it, and feels weird having to set up my own federated instance if all I want to do is offload all my pictures for others to use? I know the one on the page you linked says "OSM World wide", but reading at the wiki https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Panoramax it says not to use it for things outside france, and I also can't understand how I contribute to MapComplete.
(here's the tooling I've built for myself btw https://github.com/Matsemann/matsemanns-streetview-tools/ )
Edit: this is in the US
Organic Maps (OSM client) on the other hand is much more accurate and supports offline routing.
(I reported this mistake, and it seems to be corrected now)
And here in Belgium, your 100 km trip could take anywhere between 50 minutes and 2 hours depending on whether there's traffic in the Kennedytunnel or an accident in Nazareth. It's crucial for me to check traffic before I leave, so if there's a one-hour traffic jam I can just do whatever else for an hour before leaving.
And I haven't found a way to check that without Google Maps yet. But I use OsmAnd if I'm not taking the highway.
An ongoing PITA in Thailand was Thais being absolutely baffled by Google Maps. You couldn’t hand your phone with an pin to a driver and expect it to make sense. All the taxi drivers and motorsai guys have smart phones — hell I even saw one at the _win_ using a VR helmet — but were totally perplexed by Google Maps. Weirder still was the insistence at places like Ikea that you drew a map to your property, but the map they wanted needed to be entirely landmark based.
I feel like there was some underlying sociological issue there where Thais thought of maps in terms only really of landmarks, and not as birdseye views of territory. Would be fascinated to know what Grab’s experience of it is, and also if Grab and friends are slowly converting professional drivers to real maps.
Instead it's so damn slow as to be hard to get anything done while on the go, even with maps downloaded, modern Android phone, etc.
It really, really needs a simplification refresh.
Your reads to me like you expect that if someone comes to you and gives you GPS coordinates, you should be able to know where that is because you have a GPS in your pocket. No, you'd need to put the GPS coordinates into something and have it translated to something that made sense for you, like into Google Maps. Same goes for Thais, even if it's a PITA for you.
Unique problems require unique solutions, and I think your definition of a map is probably too closed-minded. Imagine trying to take a real map and deliver something here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQyVMy6_n1k
I will say that it is changing, though. For younger rideshare drivers, there is a greater reliance on and ability to use Google Maps. In my experience, it is older drivers that have an interesting time adapting. This makes me think that there is certainly some ostensibly unrelated cultural norms at play: for example, Thailand exhibits a high degree of social hierarchy dependent on age, and a priority on saving face. Totally ignoring Google Maps, if I know the best way to get somewhere in Bangkok, and I know that most taxi drivers don't, me communicating it in Thai as respectful as is culturally appropriate can and does get shut down or ignored. In these instances, we invariably get lost and/or stuck in traffic.
Is a dislike for Google Maps in navigation completely a function of cultural values? Probably not, but this kind of technology isn't thought to be by default an amazing convenience in many parts of the world.
Because Grab have been around a long time and their custom maps are pretty new
This is such an interesting comment, I'm curious of your age. I grew up and learned to drive before smart phones existed and landmark based directions were extremely common. Directions like this were expected, moreso than street name based directions. "Take a left at the 3rd light after the freeway, then a right after 7-11, and it is the 5th house on the left with the blue door and red Truck in the driveway".
What is interesting is that these drivers are still using this older method.
We are making the shovels for the AI gold miners now. You all need data. We can make that visual training data.
Let's build a large spatial model together? Hit me up!
(Quite literally - Uber sold off their SEA operations to Grab in exchange for a stake in Grab, when Uber exited the SEA market)
Use Grab a lot and I don't consider it a super-app. It truly is the Ride Hailing/Food delivery service app to use in certain parts of SE Asia. WeChat has a massive ecosystem in that its chat, payments, and a million company built "apps".
In many bank apps they will do travel, stay, cars, vacations, shopping and other dozen things like that .
It is not just banks , airlines do it too, they are so good at it, they are sometimes called finance companies with incidental air transport business.
Somewhere there's a Dr. Strangelove kind of comedy where a wrongly addressed tweet sends the nukes flying, because the competent engineers on X will make an API over tweets, you see...
Uber also owns a significant share of Grab.
Cash is not only accepted but in specific Indian cities expected , I.e. the driver will call you and if you don’t offer cash they will cancel the booking or won’t show up at all .
Uber and others pay out on a weekly basis. Cabbies would rather have the cash now. And by cash, they mean a direct payment outside the app. Typically this would mean a direct transfer via UPI.
Each country has and always has a lot autonomy on features and services offered . Just their booking methods in different airports can have lot of variation , OTP workflows in geos with high no show rates , transportation options like motorcycles or Tuk tuk or public transit integration all are unique to many locations
Consolidation and exits happened for variety of reasons i strongly doubt it was ever because of product features or lack thereof
# At indexing time - The search engine use LLM to convert all the page content into a "common language" (English?!) before indexing.
- Use LLM to rank the page (detect page spammy/informational level)
# At query time - My query is translated to the "common language" - Result list most appropriate results unbiased by page language, but only by spammy/informational value.