

Maps Navigation : Google vs a Startup   - nishantmodak
http://silicontryst.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/what-google-did-makes-me-sad/

======
illumen
This reminded me of google advertising about 'Chrome by google' on big
billboards in London. My first thought was 'they are not giving credit to
everyone else who did the work on chrome'. Maybe it should have been 'Chrome -
an open source project by google'.

There is no advertising clause, but claiming that it is by google is still a
big lie considering big parts were not written or designed by them. Including
the main part - webkit/khtml, the html renderer.

Especially with open source projects, getting credit for your work may be the
only thing you get. Giving credit is a gentle(wo)mans thing to do.

In academia this would be plagiarism... but in business, it seems to be
business as usual. Business can get in trouble for giving credit, but academia
gets in trouble for not giving credit.

~~~
simonw
Do you feel the same way about "Mac OS X by Apple", considering how much of
that operating system (FreeBSD, Darwin, GNU, KHTML, llvm etc) started life in
the open source community?

I'm as big an open source booster as anyone, but I can't say it upsets me in
the slightest to see Google taking credit for Chrome in adverts. If anything,
it makes me feel like the open source model has won - it's so widespread now
it isn't even noteworthy.

~~~
illumen
Yeah, I do feel the same way about Apple. Apple claims credit a lot more than
Google. Google is definitely way more free software friendly than Apple in my
experience - like a whole different magnitude of more friendly :)

I see your point, but without giving proper credit, the developers of open
source projects will not get credit outside of the project. They won't get the
credit from the press or from The People.

Even in other open source projects it would be nice to give credit more
evenly. As an example, many interviews or articles mention 'Guido the creator
of python'. Whereas the reality is that thousands of people have contributed
to python to make it what it is today.

It's hard to give credit even when you try your hardest to. Also, where do we
draw the line? Do we start with crediting Persian, Egyptian, and Greek
mathematicians and artists? Do we need to give a whole raft of references each
time a trumpet is blown? Do we list individual contributors? Or just major
contributors, or founders? Or perhaps not mentioning anyone at all - which
many hackers do. An 'open source community project' is a nice compromise as it
gives credit to everyone.

Perhaps 'Made by the people of the world, for the people of the world' would
have been a better advertisement.

\-- merry xmas

------
apinstein
While I don't normally like to kick people while they're down, I am going to
make an exception in this case.

I am sick of people thinking their tiny little feature tweak is a _startup_.

I am also sick of people thinking that computerizing things that people have
been doing for tens/hundreds/thousands of years is innovation. It isn't.

If you have an idea for a startup, but your startup could be killed by huge
company XYZ if they add one feature, you don't have a startup. If you try to
pursue it anyway and finally XYZ Co adds it to their product and crushes you,
this should be no surprise. Building a startup in face of such a scenario is
an enormous risk, one that'd I'd bet almost never pays off. You should've
known better than to waste your time and money.

I have no pity for you.

I am being harsh only in the hopes that more people will learn to respect this
hard truth and actually invest their time and brainpower into something more
productive and likely to yield returns.

~~~
endtime
While I don't disagree with you, and felt the blog post came across kind of
whiny (cultural difference, perhaps), you aren't really responding to his
point. He's not sad that he has to compete with Google. He's sad that Google's
taking credit for thinking of implementing landmark-based navigation, and is
claiming that he or his team met with Google reps a while and that at the time
they praised his idea as innovative.

~~~
apinstein
Fair enough, and I didn't talk about the "idea stealing" too much.

But again I have to say that it's pretty obvious thing to do. Even if the
GMaps guys were heads-down and no one at Google had thought of it (which I
doubt), clearly tens of thousands of people have thought "why can't map
directions say turn at gas station X instead of turn at street X".

As someone who lives in an area with lots of missing street signs, I know I
thought about that years ago, and I imagine tens of thousands of others have
as well.

~~~
1010011010
I've joked about maps and GPSes giving "country directions" for years now.
"Turn left where the old store used to be and drive on until you get to where
the tornado hit" kind of stuff. It's landmark-based navigation, albeit a jokey
one.

In other words, not really a new idea.

------
xcombinator
Well, I don't know what this startup is calling his innovation because I
didn't tested its system, but what I understand for landmark based is
something like:

+Go straight until you see a school at your right.

+Then turn right(left on India).

+Continue until you see a big fountain.

Is that innovation? I don't know in USA but in Spain and a big part of the
world that is the normal way of telling someone how to go to a place, is not
so strange that another human being has the same idea than you about doing
with a computer what you do without it.

That is the main problem about software patents, people want to have a
monopoly over ideas a lot of people spontaneously have.

~~~
patio11
_Is that innovation?_

The notion of landmark-based direction is not innovative. Using publicly
available data sources to cover India in algorithmically discoverable
landmarks so that you can give them from two arbitrary points in the nation,
_that_ is innovative. (And hard.)

I couldn't even begin to describe a cost-effective way for an Internet startup
to discover that my apartment is the second one on the right after you take
the left at the statue of Buddah.

------
johnSebstian
This is really eye opening.

1\. To learn that some really smart young guys have outsmarted Google so many
years ago.

2\. How Google articulates stories to make innovation their own.

Had these guys not talked about their disaapointment, how would the world have
come to know about the real truth.

~~~
nickpleis
Of course it's entirely possible that Google did independently arrive at the
same innovation. I have no idea how long Google has been working on this, but
it was likely quite some time (which is probably why the solicited help from
that company in the first place...)

I'd really be curious to know what the truth is here. Landmark nagivation is
an unbelievably big project, and Google is doing it at pretty large scale. It
may have very well taken a couple of years to build the thing (not so much the
programming, but rather building the data-set itself).

~~~
paraschopra
They license the dataset. It is usually the algorithm which determines what is
a landmark and what is not (it is my guess).

------
paraschopra
A detailed comparison of the services by the Routeguru founders themselves

[http://www.pluggd.in/routeguru-founders-on-google-
landmark-b...](http://www.pluggd.in/routeguru-founders-on-google-landmark-
based-driving-direction-service-297)

------
Tichy
Why did RouteGuru never submit to Hacker News? Did they submit to Reddit, or
Digg? How was I supposed to have heard of them?

However, I can feel the pain in a way: a lot of possible projects I can think
of are in danger of being made redundant by some Google project or other.
Sometimes I worry about my own future - will there even be things to do in the
future, without the backing of a huge corporation with ginormous data centers
behind it? Should I do everything I can to become part of a giant corporation
now, to be on the save side?

But as Yoda says, fear leads to suffering, so probably it is best not to worry
about it too much.

Also, I suppose there will always be customers who don't want to use Google
out of principle. But Google will probably have the lions share.

And, Google seems to be strange in a way: they do a lot of things, but only a
few things properly. Many cool projects they have just end up being incomplete
and poorly tended to.

~~~
endtime
>Why did RouteGuru never submit to Hacker News? Did they submit to Reddit, or
Digg? How was I supposed to have heard of them?

Presumably, their target audience is in India, so expecting them to post to
sites mostly frequented by Europeans and Americans doesn't make too much
sense.

~~~
nishantmodak
> mostly frequented by Europeans and Americans doesn't make too much sense.

[http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/news.ycombinator.com?p=tgraph&...](http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/news.ycombinator.com?p=tgraph&r=home_home)

Alexa - About 9 % Traffic from India. 2nd to United States.

~~~
endtime
Collectively, users of those three sites are mostly European and American. And
if only 9% of HN users are American, then yes, it does make sense that they
didn't target this site.

~~~
endtime
Correction: "And if only 9% of HN users are _Indian_..."

------
SingAlong
I think this idea has been worked on by a lot of people too.

Way back in Hackday India 2007 a group of guys worked on an app called
Socialrouting which was hosted at socialrouting.com (it's currently down). It
allowed users to mark and view routes with respect to landmarks and also allow
people to update traffic in a particular area via an SMS to the SocialRouting
twitter account, which was then transferred to the map on the site. I was
impressed by the way Pradeep (one of the dev) gave a talk at a Barcamp about
their mashup.

And now, I guess that was the idea that morphed into Mapunity
<http://www.mapunity.in> which they are currently working on. It provides live
traffic data for a few cities in India. These guys provide services to govt
organisations.

P.S: I used their Traffic API in Hackday India 2009 :D thats how I know about
them :)

------
sree_nair
"chase a dream of changing the way directions are consumed in India and
globally" - Isn't it a hollow claim ?. Directions were always given in india
by landmarks and it's not your firm which has invented it. So trying to take
credit for it doesn't sound too good.

In what way did google steal your idea?. It's an idea even kids in devoloping
countries know of. and google need not even see your site to realise that the
lanamark system is the one that works in this part of the world.

Sory, to sound diffrent. But I don't see this point standing.

~~~
gpiyush
No! it's not a hollow claim.

1\. We're talking about the technology invention not the concept and RouteGuru
pioneered this technology. Also there's a process in which the landmark
intelligence is generated which is legible for a patent as well and RouteGuru
has filed one.

2\. Why Globally? In many countries, landmark intelligence can fundamentally
change the way solutions extend directions today i.e. "Street name based
directions", which is a very traditional style.

3\. I'll encourage you to read the post again. All we felt sad about was that
Google did talk to us, learnt whole lot about Landmark intelligent directions
from us and eventually it comes up with a lofty story on how did they figure
out the problem, terming it as their own invention and without patronizing
RouteGuru at all.

We wouldn't have raised our voice if at all RouteGuru could get a single
mention anywhere.

~~~
alain94040
_All we felt sad about was that Google did talk to us, learnt whole lot about
Landmark intelligent directions from us and eventually it comes up with a
lofty story on how did they figure out the problem, terming it as their own
invention and without patronizing RouteGuru at all_

Can you prove that? How do you know that they didn't truly come up with the
idea on their own?

There are thousands of possible ways this thing played out. Maybe the
discussions you had were _after_ some people at Google started having that
idea. Maybe the people you met had never had that idea, but another employee
in the next cubicle was already working on it for months.

You don't know how it all worked out. Parallel inventions are common place,
especially in this case, since it seems that the idea was fairly obvious and
in widespread use in India.

