Nokia’s Here Maps Sold for $3B to Audi, BMW and Mercedes | Hacker News Reader

Nokia’s Here Maps Sold for $3B to Audi, BMW and Mercedes

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46 pointsflying_whale73 comments

Does anyone know what the implications are for the phone application? Its default map application on the Ubuntu phone, and although its missing some features, its quite nice overall.

As someone who is using both HERE maps and Ovi maps on my smartphones, I wondering that as well.

Quite concerning because HERE is so good: it'd be a big pity to lose it.

I wonder what it means for Mazda/Toyota/Nissan/Mistubishi/etc owners with factory installed HERE Maps powered navigation systems, now owned by their manufacturers competitors?

It is default maps application on Windows Phones too (at least that were nokia, now lumia). And for me it is the best maps app working offline.

osmand does a good enough job for me, used it recently on a cross-european motorcycle trip.

edit: i should have been clearer, osmand isn't just "good enough" - it is brilliant.

They failed to release to Windows Phone, though.

I'm also a huge fan of OsmAnd, it has many outstanding/unique features that other map solutions neglect to offer (albeit some features are a bit hidden).

    In no particular order, things that I like:
    - Wikipedia (offline). Discover articles by location
    - Topographic maps (nice for hiking)
    - speed camera warnings
    - completely free & open source
    - you can alter the options, add your own POIs, etc.
    - draw tools, use polylines to measure distances
    - find any POI by name, category or location (they're *all* indexed)
    - copy a position's latitude/longitude to the clipboard
    - start route from a distant starting point (instead of current location)
    - discover opening hours of shops/etc.
    - launch calls from a POI's attached contact number
    - public transport (nice for city trips)
    - GPX logging
    - tools to support OpenStreetMap editing
    - route along saved .gpx/.kml track
    - ...

While it had been available exclusively for Android for a long time, there's now an iOS version as well.

EDIT: Formatting

PS: In the past I've even gone so far as to add phone numbers to my favourite pizza deliveries on OpenStreetMap to be able to call them using OsmAnd.

Or invest $1bn in enhancing the already good openstreetmap dataset?

While I love OSM (both the map and the project), I don't think they have enough data (depth) to provide any navigation/routing.

Or I'm missing something.

FWIW, where I am, the quality of the OSM dataset is way beyond what you need for routing. OSMAnd and Scout are my go to navigation apps. Anywhere which is vaguely rural, you really have to have confidence that all your map data, and your routing capability, are available offline. You can't beat having the map of the entire country on your phone.

I have been using OSM on Android for a while (through OSMAnd) and I disagree with you.

OSM has the most complete and updated maps I have ever seen compared to Google Maps and Nokia HERE. And it has much more POI registered as well.

My only issue is that the UI of the Android app is not that good and efficient when compared to HERE.

The UI got a major overhaul recently (switched to material design) which made some things nicer. I also saw/see the UI as a problematic part of OsmAnd however I recognize it's not easy to pack all the features OsmAnd offers into a GUI and both please beginners and expert users.

Biggest problem with OSM is that quality is varying wildly. Awesome in many cities, but then in rural areas it can be missing half a town. And large differences between countries.

A lot of money could possibly help to get good base maps into it (by paying enough that their producers accept OSM licensing), which could help that situation...

> A lot of money could possibly help to get good base maps into it (by paying enough that their producers accept OSM licensing), which could help that situation...

Possibily. But a mass import is often not a good idea. You need mappers to map (possibly from the base map).

Or, alternatively, getting more people to help with the data. I once did help a bit when I took a bike ride through Albania and for some reason I still get warm fuzzy feelings when I think back to those "mapmaking days". For some reason it feels more meaningful than my wikipedia contributions.

Unfortunately, I live in the center of The Left Wing of the Internet^tm (Berlin) and every anthill is already mapped around here.

Where abouts are you looking at? The OSM community in the USA is a bit weak, so the data there isn't great. In many European countries, the data is great.

(A part of me likes the schaudenfreude, how there's this big tech/open source thing, and for once USA isn't #1 for availablility)

At Europe, heh. There was a number of incomplete spots on the map last I checked.

And coming from the web interface, I honestly thought the map is just that, a map, with no data regarding traffic other than maybe one-way streets. And that it simply doesn't support routing.

"OpenStreetDatabase" is probably a more accurate name, since it's more of a Database than a Map. But there you go. OSM doesn't have much (anything?) about traffic. But it has lots of stuff for routing, and POIs and so forth.

I used to use Navfree (which uses OSM) when I had an Android phone. It was as good as Google maps. Neither were perfect, and made errors every so often, but neither drastically more than the other. I am in Spain, so I don't know if that makes a difference.

$1B + R&D + uncertainty + sometime in the future + handing your competitors all your work for free << a $3B product of known high quality, delivered in full today with minimal uncertainty.

It's not even a contest. Especially when $3B isn't, whatchamacallit, a huge drain on your liquidity.

> handing your competitors all your work for free

Yes and No. The OSM licence is similar to the GPL. If you make a derived work, you have to share your changes back.

If OSM got a big cash bump, and was improved, then if (say) Google wants to put that improvement in Google Maps, they would be forced to release all the data that's in Google Maps. Unlikely to happen.

No, but if OSM becomes good, then, say, Ford, can just grab it and use it in their cars for free. They're just going to use it, not improve it, so there's nothing to contribute back.

Then Audi, BMW and Mercedes spent $1b, and at the end of the day, their maps are the exact same as Ford's (who spend $0).

Already happening. BMW et al. sponsor OSM conferences ( http://sotm-eu.org/ )

Well, the HERE data also contains 3D-scans of every single street in Europe. Very useful for self-driving cars.

I generally find the quality of built-in GPS maps in cars to be quite inferior to the quality of google maps. Is this company really worth 3B? who knows, but the car manufactures could probably just licensed google maps for free and focus on building great cars instead.

Google Maps is free to consumers, but that doesn't mean corporations can license the data for free. Google would expect something in return -- user data, Android Auto installations...

HERE [1] is the same way. You can access their maps for free on the web or through the apps:

https://www.here.com

But if you're building a product that needs to incorporate maps, HERE will certainly charge you for it.

[1] I hate this all-caps spelling, but it looks confusing without it.

It might be surprising to some people in Silicon Valley but there are folks who find it a bit disconcerting that Google knows every place they drive to, when they do it and how long they stay. I personally am glad that there is still some competition in the maps market and since HERE is a European company, you can expect them to be much more privacy conscious than Google (or Bing Maps, ftm).

What nefarious use of the data will be beneficial to Google?

Google can be hacked or forced by public authorities to enable or to do nefarious things. I know, godwin’s law, bla bla, but look what happened during the second world war to german companies. There are more examples.

I’m not okay with being tracked, and I don’t care whether the tracker swears to be or not to be evil. And no, this is not negotiable.

I'm especially not OK with being tracked when it has absolutely zero benefit for me, long or short term. UI is getting worse (for all these megacorps that harvest all the "automated feedback" they can) and I don't consume advertising and even if I did, the "targeted ads" are irrelevant pretty much all the time.

Tracking is the only way for Google to get traffic data; you could still not find that reason enough to get tracked, but it's not "zero benefit" for users.

I'm quite sure they, and other map providers who have live traffic info (including HERE), get the data primarily from infrastructure managers.

I don't know if anything changed recently, but I'm sure that at least until a couple years ago they got the traffic info from their own app.

Apart from NSA et.al., there is huge commercial value in movement profiles:

- Visiting a physician a lot? You future health insurance might wanna know.

- Spend a lot of time in the red light district? That must be worth a couple of bucks to your employer who wants to get rid of you.

You might think that this is far fetched and right now, it still is. But 20 years ago, most people would have considered it very implausible and offensive that their private conversations (emails) or library searches (web searches) are sold to advertisers. Well, lets see what (some) people find acceptable 20 years from now.

Google is a US company, bound by US constition & law. Which doesn't extend a right to privacy to non-USAians outside the USA.

What's even more bothersome is that there is absolutely no reason for any of this. GPS based navigation does not need a server connection to function at all, the one thing you might need a network for is periodic map updates.

google maps will (seems to?) consider current traffic when suggesting a route, which is a big plus for having a server connection.

Might be not enough to prefer online navigation to offline, but it is a reason.

Yes, I think that's a big part of why they bought Waze

I'm not quite sure that's accurate. Aside from updating the Almanac, a typical navigation system also updates traffic data.

Sending live navigation data to servers is useful to update traffic information in real time. Estimates of arrival time are much more accurate if you know how long it took to somebody who used the same route 10 minutes ago.

That should be 'opt-in'.

These are German car manufacturers,though.

1st, Germans really like their privacy, 2nd, We have inductive loops at EVERY single lane of every single intersection. Meaning, you can get live traffic data without needing to know where everyone is.

> We have inductive loops at EVERY single lane of every single intersection.

What? I'm German and I have never heard about this. I also can't find anything to support this.

I am aware of induction used for traffic light switching, but certainly not at every intersection, let alone in every lane.

Well, I’ve seen them at every intersection I’ve been to in Kiel, Berlin, etc.

At least in the bigger cities for traffic shaping they measure the traffic at every lane of every intersection.

I think the absolute ubiquitous tracking of cars is inevitable in the short to medium term future anyway. Self driving cars will almost certainly have permanent network connections and your cars location will be uploaded to some server somewhere for traffic management officially, but of course for policing too. I can't imagine a scenario where this doesn't happen.

You seem to make the assumption that everyone gets their map info from Google. I don't understand why. They only provide the maps with their value-added info (user annotations) and routing.

The vast majority of GPS systems source their map data just as Google does and then add their own value-added information.

Google only knows where I'm driving if I plan my trip with Google's tools. Otherwise, there's no connection between my GPS/maps and google.

Privacy by the way,

Is there an alternative to Bing and google translate?

How European a company is it? Some significant part of it is made out of Navteq, which was headquartered in Chicago.

AFAIK it's probably the best offline maps you can get (disregarding Google Maps and co's offline availability feature which isn't really geared for having a full dataset stored on a device). Haven't compared it myself but that's what I heard. All I know is, built-in navis for Mercedes are very lackluster currently, so they're probably getting something out of this deal. If it's worth their 1B (or whatever it is) share, who knows.

Most you can do with Google Maps is cache some layer pictures. All search, routes etc. takes a round trip to Google's servers. Which makes it useless abroad, for instance. With HERE, you download an entire country, and use it (search, route planning etc.) without using data. Works fantastically.

Hardly an impossible feature to add to a mapping product tho? We are basically talking downloading the map tiles to the device you want to browse from.

HERE maps are not pre-rendered tiles, they are heavily compressed geometries and features. That's why it can do searches and navigation offline.

That is interesting, as OVI maps was tiles IIRC, thanks!

Another issue is that Google maps is mostly shit in Germany: Satellite data is from 2005, maps data doesn't even contain my whole district except for one road, so all the time people using Google Maps to navigate end up here, etc.

Here maps is the best maps here (at least inmy city), and I can understand why German car manufacturers might want it.

HERE has proprietary data whic Google doesn't have, not sure on the specifics.

Other than lack of Streetview, how the HERE suite inferior?

It makes sense to own your own system, rather than rely on a third party whose interests may not remain aligned with yours. Remember the Google/Apple maps split.

Autonomous vehicles rely on extremely good mapping, and if the car companies don't own their own stack they are in danger of becoming mere OEMs, producing commodity hardware for someone else who extracts the value from the system. (It's debatable how well they will be able to execute, considering the quality of most in-car software.)

Also, in the short term I doubt that Google would licence maps for free.

Well, this is a step to making them better. TBH, I'm not so fascinated with Google Maps for commuting by car. I'm pretty impressed, for example, with using the latest BMW navigation system, in Europe. Not saying it is better than the rest, but I've seen it work in combination with internet and RDS and liked it. If I really have to choose, Waze would probably be a much, much better choice than Google Maps. First, GMaps really are not that precise (or their routing algorithm is not). I miss the the car-oriented features of the built in cars. And I do like when systems are integrated with the car, and the manufacturers see it as a selling point. On the other hand, I am pretty sure they will not want to be shackled to Google or any other similar company, and I would not like it either. You can see how far does this go since these three huge competitors actually chose to cooperate tightly on this one.

The point is that they don't want to be dependent on Google (and rightly so I think). Because they know google is here to destroy them in the long run (think about the whole "in-car" experience + maps (with advertising of course) + autonomous cars).

Personally I prefer my users to get to use the best providers of the services they want to use... unless I can actually provide a better service, especially with a luxury brand.

I think this is a mistake Nokia made (several times over), they didn't want to use other companies services and wanted control over (practically) everything - unfortunately it is near impossible to be great at everything, and unfortunately their products suffered as they provided sub-par services to their users, so consumed with ownership and making as much money as possible.

  Personally I prefer my users to get 
  to use the best providers of the 
  services they want to use

If the car manufacturers don't have a BATNA [1] Google could ask for loads of money per car - or only offer their famously shitty customer service.

The car manufacturers need an alternative, so they can walk away from Google if this happens.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...

I see your point however I think the other map providers offer competition (BATNA), and would probably want to feature in vehicles.

Especially before having to create and provide your own relatively complex solution (mapping is not easy imvho).

> I think the other map providers offer competition (BATNA), and would probably want to feature in vehicles

Yes, today. But what if Google Maps wins? What if all the other options go bust? Here the car companies are ensuring that Google Maps has a compeditor.

> Because they know google is here to destroy them in the long run (think about the whole "in-car" experience + maps (with advertising of course) + autonomous cars).

I don't see Google destroying anyone in GERMANY with those privacy concerning features.

Well, yeah, but I don't see the German brands wanting to compete for the German market only either.

Indeed, they might be making the same mistake Nokia did.

I have Nokia HERE maps in my car (Volkswagen), and so far I can't complain about the quality. Map updates are free as well, simply download a 6 GB archive and decompress it to an SD card.

What I don't like compared to Google Maps is the general slowness of the system. After turning on the ignition, I have to wait about a minute until I can enter an address. Entering a new address (vs. loading a recent one) again takes a minute. That's why for shorter distances I still use Google Maps.

Edit: the strongest point of Google Maps, and the weakest of OSM and my in-car navigation is the geocoder.

What you have in your car (Columbus?) is just map data from Navteq (Nokia), but not the navigation app. So the slowness is on the VW and it's supplier.

Imagine you're a car maker. You're realising that you need to have maps in your car. A car without maps could be like a car without a radio/music system.

Do you want to be in a sitution where Google can have you over a barrel?

Trucking and logistics companies (at least here in .au) all seem to use HERE Maps - I'm told because their elevation/grade information is so much better than all the alternatives and that turns into real fuel-saving dollars for them.

Last time two cars GPS got us nowhere, we relied on some friends old Motorola Razr I with Google Maps. I couldn't stop smiling.

What happens to the employees with a joint ownership like this? In other words, who runs the technical side of the house and determines the future course of the product.

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