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.
Same here, Google maps last updated imagery in 2004, streets in 2009. 3D data, funnily, is from 2016 – but with 3D disabled, you only get 2004 satellite images.
Entire streets and districts are missing, and no transit data.
Every competitor has all that. OSM does, Here WeGo does, even Bing does.
Sweden. Some parts are better in Google maps, especially the smaller cities, but I live in one of the larger ones with a university and plenty of tech companies.
I used to contribute to Google map maker, but the process was really painful, and I didn't like working for free so one of the worlds biggest companies could have better proprietary data. Open Streetmap is a joy to edit in comparison.
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.
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]
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.
If you're strapped for cash, there are some lower-priced alternatives in the OSM ecosystem. https://thunderforest.com/ , for example, has map tiles available in vector and raster forms, and https://www.graphhopper.com/ is a full-featured alternative to the Mapbox routing stack. You can always self-host, too, whether for map rendering or routing or whatever.
(Not to detract from Mapbox, whose product line is amazing and who have some of the smartest engineers out there.)
Mapzen is an awesome company. I'm excited to see what comes of OpenTraffic, a Mapzen-sponsored, open-source traffic speed data set: https://github.com/opentraffic/
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
The downvotes let me assume that people understood this question as a suggestion. But it was really just a question from someone who hasn't looked into that space for 10 years and is curious how it looks like from an expert perspective.
We have exportability as a first class citizen, so you can push out to google maps, tableau, esri, carto, etc. Data viz is not our core competency or something we intend to do very much of.
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".
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.
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.
<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/ . Lastly, for those who are interested, we're using Elixir on our backend!
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...
Vector tiles can contain names in multiple languages, and the style sheet can decide how to render: prioritise English, prioritise local, or show both.
SoftBank, it seems, has and is continuing to make investments in startups with unique/proprietary data... smart team...eg recently uber, nauto, mapbox..
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.
"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.
