*Justin* schreef op 13 mei 2015 10:09:
Nieuw New York Times artikel
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Deal Talks for Here Mapping Service Expose Reliance on Location Datapicture: An engineer for Nokia's Here unit makes adjustments in a mapping vehicle in Warwick, England.
ROB STOTHARD FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
By MARK SCOTT and MIKE ISAAC
MAY 12, 2015
When people look up a company’s Facebook page on their smartphones, the address is overlaid on a digital map provided by Here, Nokia’s mapping unit, which is for sale.
The same goes for the mapping services offered by Amazon and Yahoo. The tech giants are just three of the many companies, including SAP, Verizon Wireless and Baidu, the Chinese search engine,? that rely heavily on Nokia’s geospatial data.
Companies are grappling to stay relevant in a world where smartphones — and people’s geographical information — are at the heart of nearly every tech leader’s plans. That is why companies like Uber, the ride-booking service, and an alliance of German automakers have submitted rival bids of up to $3 billion to acquire the Nokia division.
A deal is widely expected by the end of the month. If one happens, there is likely to be a lot of angst to go around in the tech industry.
Nokia’s mapping service is the main global competitor to Google Maps. But if a new owner decides to restrict access to Here’s vast, 30-year-old trove of mapping data, some of the largest tech companies could find themselves relying on Google’s mapping services once more.
That could put companies like Amazon and Yahoo in a difficult position, potentially requiring them to share valuable location and routing data with one of their most powerful rivals in Silicon Valley.
“There are too many businesses out there that want an independent service,” ?said Harold ?Goddijn, chief executive of TomTom, the Dutch digital mapping company that licenses data to Apple for its mapping service. ?“They don?’?t want to share customer data with ?Googl?e. ?They want users to stay within their domain.”
As part of the German automakers’ bid, the companies, which include BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz, want to give access to Nokia’s mapping service, under licensing agreements, so others can still use its global geospatial data, according to a person who spoke on the condition of anonymity. It remains unclear whether Uber would follow suit if it acquired the unit.
Representatives for Uber, the German automakers and Nokia declined to comment on the deal talks.
“Mapping is an extremely hard thing to do and takes years to replicate,” said Shyam Kumar, a senior analyst whose firm, TT Focus Fund, is an investor in both TomTom and Nokia. “If you cannot get access to another independent map, you might end up having to license from one of your major competitors. There’s obviously an inherent tension here.”
The sudden interest in Here belies its often overlooked position in the technology world. While Google Maps is used in more than one billion smartphones worldwide, the Nokia unit, which until recently was somewhat hampered by the Finnish company’s close relationship with Microsoft, has instead focused primarily on offering mapping services to other companies, instead of directly to consumers.
FedEx, for example, has used Here’s mapping data to manage its fleet of delivery trucks worldwide. Deutsche Telekom, the German carrier that owns T-Mobile, has built smartphone apps with Nokia’s services that allows people to share their locations with friends and family through their cellphones.
But it’s the automotive industry, where Here holds up to an 80 percent global market share for built-in car navigation systems, that has become a main focus.
The mapping service has becoming a crucial component for the automakers pursuing driverless car projects. In 2013, for instance, Mercedes-Benz teamed up with Here to test an autonomous car around 60 miles of German roads. The trial included instant 3-D modeling of nearby cars and constant corrections from the car’s computer.
So far, many automakers have preferred to use Nokia’s services over those provided by Google because of the search giant’s own ambitions in the nascent driverless car industry. Yet Nokia’s mapping technology may become unavailable if a new owner of the mapping unit decides to limit what other companies can do with the data.
“There are really only a handful of comprehensive mapping data sets for navigation and local search,” said Marc Prioleau, managing director of Prioleau Advisors and a former executive at deCarta, the mapping start-up acquired by Uber this year. “The real question is, what do these companies lose out on if someone else buys Here?”
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