For as long as Uber has been around, the TNC has used Google Maps to guide all from the airport to the party. This could soon change upon a winning bid.
Uber is bidding against a consortium of German automakers — the latter teamed up with Chinese search engine Baidu — and a private equity firm for ownership of Nokia’s Here mapping system, The New York Times reports. An announcement by the tech company is expected to come by the end of May, deal or no deal.
Whereas Google dominates the mobile space with Google Maps at an estimated 1 billion users, Here succeeds in the automotive navigation space. The Berlin-based mapping company holds over 80 percent global market share of all built-in car navigation systems, spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually to maintain and update the maps.
Here would be the latest hedge against Google’s mapping technology should Uber win. The TNC bought deCarta in March of this year, and joined up with Carnegie Mellon University earlier in 2015 to develop mapping and autonomous technologies via the Uber Advanced Technologies Center. The German consortium feels the same way about Google in its own bid for Here, and plans to license the mapping technology to all interested parties should it win.
[Photo credit: Uber/Facebook]
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