Having previously rumored to be selling the HERE Maps
division and was targeting Apple as potential buyer, Nokia finally announces
that now the HERE Maps has a new home. This means that the journey of HERE Maps
with Nokia has ended; now this navigation service has been officially purchased
by a consortium of three car manufacturers from Germany.
Nokia's confirmation said that this company has agreed to
sell HERE Maps to the three German car manufacturers: Audi, BMW and Daimler
worth of 2.8 billion Euros, or about $ 3.1 billion. The interest of these three
car manufactures is certainly with strong reason, by having HERE Maps, now they
have an alternative navigation service provider other than Google Maps and
Apple Maps that have been used at this moment.
HERE Maps itself is now available as navigation application
service on Android, iOS and Windows Phone. With the presence of HERE Maps to
the automotive industry would facilitate the provision of navigation system in
the produced vehicles. IHS estimates that there are at least 17 million
vehicles in 2014 which were made with the support of navigation system. Thus
certainly the automotive industry needs an accurate and updated map data for
the future vehicles.
In addition to support navigation system, the presence of
HERE Maps is also considered important for the development of future vehicles.
HERE Maps itself is developing a technology that can collect data from a car
and distribute them to other vehicles that have similar features, and then
presents predictions about the roads condition, which of course will be beneficial
to the development of self-driving cars in the future. Moreover, according to
IHS analyst team, the HERE Maps could become the de-facto standard of navigation
system in vehicles when the three manufacturers begin to implement it into
their vehicles.