SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
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Re: SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
#2Paywall Aversion:
Archive.is: https://archive.fo/IdXZD
FB: https://www.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.c...
Re: SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
#3Zero mentions of OpenStreetMap in that story. Can't be surprised I guess.
Re: SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
#4Zero mentions of OpenStreetMap in that story. Can't be surprised I guess.
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.
Re: SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
#5Supporting Development Seed in developing Mapbox is one of the Knight Foundations biggest successes and is on point with their mission.
Re: SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
#6Having 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".
Re: SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
#7Mapbox 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.
Re: SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
#8Congrats 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.
Re: SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
#9Mapbox 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.
Can you name a few usecases where you would pay them? Doesn#t have to include your own.
Re: SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
#10Mapbox 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.)