Big Tech Companies Join Linux in Effort to Kill Google Maps

Some of Google’s greatest rivals are coming collectively in a type of rogues gallery with the hopes of making new open supply companies to knock Google Maps from its mapping throne.

On Thursday, the nonprofit Linux Foundation introduced its personal open challenge that’s meant to collate new map initiatives via out there datasets. And a number of different main corporations have come out of the woodwork to assist it in what looks like a bid to lastly finish Google’s domineering geolocation reign. Those corporations embrace Meta, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and none apart from Dutch geolocation firm TomTom.

This Overture Maps Foundation is basically an open supply program for curating and collating map knowledge throughout the globe from a number of totally different knowledge sources. So in essence, the challenge guarantees it would use the huge quantity of worldwide knowledge housed by these varied corporations and from exterior to construct up-to-date maps that builders can then use. Linux additionally promised this new challenge will primarily degree the taking part in discipline for anyone seeking to develop up-to-date geolocation companies or maps with out breaking the financial institution on costly business knowledge that won’t even be correct.

In the discharge, Linux Foundation’s Executive Director Jim Zemlin mentioned “Mapping the physical environment and every community in the world, even as they grow and change, is a massively complex challenge that no one organization can manage.”

Of course, all the businesses concerned may have a serious stake in such open companies. AWS’ basic supervisor Michael Kopenec mentioned within the launch that map knowledge is “cost prohibitive and complex,” although it’s unclear if Amazon desires to interrupt into the world of geolocation as effectively. Overture is also a boon to its flagging “metaverse” ambitions, with applications in both VR and AR. The firm has its personal avenue view firm known as Mapillary, and it’s already labored alongside Microsoft on street mapping data.

While Google and its father or mother firm Alphabet had been combining its Maps and Waze groups, its avenue view and AR capabilities hold getting extra refined, leaving its potential opponents within the mud, even after it was cited for promoting customers’ location knowledge. That domination is so nice that Google Maps has mapped greater than 220 international locations and territories, in line with the corporate. Maps is the most-downloaded GPS app by far, and it’s not even shut.

Though TomTom’s market share has seriously depleted since highs in 2008, the corporate has survived in opposition to Google Maps with offers in international locations the place the highest performing app wasn’t out there. Last month, the corporate introduced a brand new maps platform. TomTom’s Chief Technology Officer Eric Bowman mentioned in an inner Q&A “The world of maps today is pretty siloed. Everyone who is making a commercial map—whether they admit it or not—is starting to see that there are limits to what any one company can do, no matter how big or powerful or well funded they are.”

TomTom’s CEO Harold Goddijn, mentioned in a release “Overture’s standardization and interoperable base map is fundamental to bringing geospatial information from the world together.”