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SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
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Re: SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
#12Mapbox 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 a…
Mapzen is also excellent (although definitely less mature than Mapbox), and a huge chunk of their stack is open source.
Re: SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
#13Mapbox 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.
Mapbox actually just changed their pricing structure to be more friendly to startups and developers - take a look https://blog.mapbox.com/pay-as-you-go-new-flexible-pricing-o...
Re: SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
#14Mapbox 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.
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
Re: SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
#15Where 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.
Re: SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
Mapzen is also excellent (although definitely less mature than Mapbox), and a huge chunk of their stack is open source.
At Mapzen, all our code is open source, from front-end UIs to back-end "glue." Have a look at:
- web and mobile SDKs: http://github.com/mapzen/
- map rendering library: http://github.com/tangrams
- map tiles: https://github.com/tilezen/
- routing/navigation: https://github.com/valhalla/
- public transit: https://github.com/transitland/
- search/geocoding: http://github.com/pelias
- gazetteer: https://github.com/whosonfirst
FWIW, we do have a few private repos, to protect some ops internals as well as upcoming blog posts.
(I work at Mapzen -- and am also a happy user of Mapbox's open-source libraries.)
Re: SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mapzen is also excellent (although definitely less mature than Mapbox), and a huge chunk of their stack is open source.
At Mapzen, all our code is open source, from front-end UIs to back-end "glue." Have a look at: - web and mobile SDKs: http://github.com/mapzen/ - map rendering library: http://github.com/tangrams - map tiles: https://github.com/tilezen/ - routing/navigation: https://github.com/valhalla/ - public transit: https://github.com/transitland/ - search/geocoding: http://github.com/pelias - gazetteer: https://github.com/whoso…
Yup. I've checked out a bunch of those – and have actually contributed to pelias/api (and a dependency, addressit).
Everything I've seen so far has been clean and pretty easy to follow. Really appreciate the work you all do.
I'm a very happy Mapzen customer.
Re: SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
#18I 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.
Re: SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
#19Where 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.
I didn't know about Strava, that explains a lot when I'm making a route fine in Strava but can't get it on Google Maps.
Re: SoftBank Leads $164M Bet on Mapbox
#20Where 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.