
SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox - uptown
https://www.wsj.com/articles/softbank-leads-164-million-bet-on-digital-mapping-startup-mapbox-1507640404
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sorenjan
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.

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gcb0
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.

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zamber
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.

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neom
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.

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

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neom
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](http://john.je/mzHm)

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

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

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

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zacharyozer
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".

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

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outside1234
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.

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anc84
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.

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maxerickson
What are the worst examples of money driven tags?

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ingenieroariel
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.

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zappo2938
Supporting Development Seed in developing Mapbox is one of the Knight
Foundations biggest successes and is on point with their mission.

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uptown
Paywall Aversion:

Archive.is: [https://archive.fo/IdXZD](https://archive.fo/IdXZD)

FB:
[https://www.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.c...](https://www.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fsoftbank-
leads-164-million-bet-on-digital-mapping-startup-
mapbox-1507640404&h=ATO15fivQaJd4hCklK0rTI4otGpSuNecQByMxBAb2rkYkXGr67An1yh9cJdyDtuAuR3jOqcLMv3VRCMDyA7LQSkcs4AelUGKqC7jqOs&_rdr)

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

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

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anc84
So how will Mapbox fill the $164M dept of required "growth".

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

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adamsea
<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/](https://cairngeographics.com/) . Lastly,
for those who are interested, we're using Elixir on our backend!

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dageshi
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...

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danpat
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.

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dageshi
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.

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

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sjg007
Smart bet.

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olegkikin
Paywall.

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erikb
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.

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

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erikb
No.

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NegativeLatency
Yeah. It's not all guys.
[https://www.mapbox.com/about/team/](https://www.mapbox.com/about/team/)

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erikb
"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.

