The cab booking company Uber has purchased mapping tools from Microsoft Bing, in a bid to reduce its reliance on the Google Maps service. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, warned employees last week that the company would be making some tough decisions in the future, and it appears that mapping was one of the technologies due to get re-evaluated. On Monday, Uber confirmed that it had purchased the Bing mapping assets, but it did not disclose how much it had paid for it. As a part of the purchase, about 100 employees will be moving over to Uber from Microsoft, and the taxi company will also be gaining a data centre, some image analysis software, and cameras. Uber will be using the mapping software to improve the experience they offer to both drivers and riders. Meanwhile, Microsoft noted that over the last year they had taken a lot of action to focus the company’s efforts on their core business strategy, and said that they would be continuing down that path, and instead of trying to collect mapping information themselves, they would partner with premium providers for their data. They still want to provide maps services for their users, but are no longer interested in being a tech company in that respect. While Bing is moving away from tech and towards service provision, Uber is looking to massively improve its tech across the board. The company is looking at Nokia’s Here service to improve its mapping, and has also decided to partner with FourSquare to add location-based recommendations and place search to its service. This move will make it even more important for business owners to have a strong online presence, as Uber users who are searching for somewhere to go will clearly have the strongest searcher intent out of any kind of user. Having a presence in the services that Uber takes data feeds from will greatly increase searcher visibility and allow business owners to reach those users at the best possible time. Google maps is still arguably the most important of the mapping services, but it is just one of many, and it is well worth making the effort to build up a presence on the others, and to make sure that your FourSquare, TripAdvisor and other profiles are always correct and kept up to date with your business information.
03rd July 2015
