Grab – the Singaporean ride-sharing app that beat Uber on its home turf – decided to develop its own maps because Big Tech's simply weren't up to the job, the company's head of product said at a conference in Singapore.
The decision to do so came after several incidents made it clear that mapping services were not sufficiently localized, explained Samir Kumar, speaking at a panel on the process of product development at the Asia Tech x Singapore conference (ATxSG).
Grab previously integrated Google Maps with its own platform, and has also used HERE Technologies, to determine estimated times of arrival (ETA).
Kumar told the conference that's changed.
"Anytime you see an ETA – all those estimates in the app are powered by our mapping platform," he said.
The company changed direction because off-the-shelf maps had not considered local conditions – most were car-centric in a region where many delivery drivers use two wheels instead of four.
"Large map vendors tend to focus on car base, which works well in North America but not Southeast Asia, so we saw an unarticulated unmet need," said Kumar.
US and European companies also appear not to have considered tropical rains.
"What about rain? When does someone take a bike instead of a car?" pondered Kumar. Southeast Asia undergoes monsoon rains roughly from June through October. Singapore experiences an average of 167 days of rain a year.
Kumar detailed another incident in which an off-the-shelf map offered an incorrect location for an airport drop-off point. Once it was determined that this was the cause of frustration and cancellations for ride-share bookings, the team requested a correction from the map vendor.
That fix took a month to implement.
Grab now uses its own maps in seven out of eight of the countries in which it operates – which brings complications of its own.
"Building maps means solving for eight different addressing systems on different scales of maturity," lamented Kumar. In Singapore, a location can be easily determined using a six-digit code, but this isn't the case in every country.
Grab uses open-source OpenStreetMap (OSM) and Kumar said the company has become the largest contributor to the project in Southeast Asia.
To further localize the maps, Grab has done things like sending engineers on ride-alongs with drivers in Indonesia.
That investment is worth it, given the the huge market on offer. Indonesia is the fourth most populous country after China, India, and the United States, and its capital, Jakarta, is the most populous city in Southeast Asia.
Local relationships have powered Grab's success. When Uber expanded into southeast Asia, Grab was already entrenched and ended up beating the ride-sharing pioneer at its own game. Uber sold its regional operations to Grab and then invested in the Singaporean company.
But not everything has been rosy for Grab. The company recently recorded a net loss of over $1 billion for the fourth quarter of 2021.
And back in 2018, Grab reportedly hired software firm GlobalLogic to help with the mapping on OSM, only to have it "correct" local map details in Thailand using outdated satellite imagery, earning it the hashtag #WhatInGrabsNameIsThis on the platform. Grab eventually suspended GlobalLogic's work in Thailand in response to furious OSM forum posts.
The superapp also had a deeply underwhelming debut on the NASDAQ stock exchange in late 2021.
After that disappointment, Grab CEO Anthony Tan told reporters he was doubling down on building better digital maps of the area in which it operates.
"We invest in mapping because it's a very local technology: Local technology on the drivers' side, merchants' side and consumers' side gives us an edge versus other peers," explained Tan.
Uber's investment in Grab also soured. A net loss of $5.9 billion by Uber in the first quarter of the calendar year was attributed, in part, to $5.6 billion losses on investments.
Despite not operating in Singapore, Uber has its Asia-Pacific headquarters in the city-state. The US giant has said it will stay put until at least the end of 2022, and is even hiring – an interesting strategy for Uber considering Grab's obsession with localization. ®
Right-to-repair advocates are applauding the passage of New York's Digital Fair Repair Act, which state assembly members approved Friday in a 145–1 vote.
The law bill, previously green-lit by the state senate in a 49-14 vote, now awaits the expected signature of New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D).
Assuming the New York bill becomes law as anticipated, it will be the first US state legislation to address the repairability of electronic devices. A week ago, a similar right-to-repair bill died in California due to industry lobbying.
The Russian-based Evil Corp is jumping from one malware strain to another in hopes of evading sanctions placed on it by the US government in 2019.
You might be wondering why cyberextortionists in the Land of Putin give a bit flip about US sanctions: as we understand it, the sanctions mean anyone doing business with or handling transactions for gang will face the wrath of Uncle Sam. Evil Corp is therefore radioactive, few will want to interact with it, and the group has to shift its appearance and operations to keep its income flowing.
As such, Evil Corp – which made its bones targeting the financial sector with the Dridex malware it developed – is now using off-the-shelf ransomware, most recently the LockBit ransomware-as-a-service, to cover its tracks and make it easier to get the ransoms they demand from victims paid, according to a report this week out of Mandiant.
Australia's federal police and Monash University are asking netizens to send in snaps of their younger selves to train a machine-learning algorithm to spot child abuse in photographs.
Researchers are looking to collect images of people aged 17 and under in safe scenarios; they don't want any nudity, even if it's a relatively innocuous picture like a child taking a bath. The crowdsourcing campaign, dubbed My Pictures Matter, is open to those aged 18 and above, who can consent to having their photographs be used for research purposes.
All the images will be amassed into a dataset in an attempt to train an AI model to tell the difference between a minor in a normal environment and an exploitative, unsafe situation. The software could, in theory, help law enforcement better automatically and rapidly pinpoint child sex abuse material (aka CSAM) in among thousands upon thousands of photographs under investigation, avoiding having human analysts inspect every single snap.
Rick Smith, founder and CEO of body camera and Taser maker Axon, believes he has a way to reduce the risk of school children being shot by people with guns.
No, it doesn't involve reducing access to guns, which Smith dismisses as politically unworkable in the US. Nor does it involve relocating to any of the many countries where school shootings seldom, if ever, occur and – coincidentally – where there are laws that limit access to guns.
Here's a hint – his answer involves Axon.
A critical flaw in the LTE firmware of the fourth-largest smartphone chip biz in the world could be exploited over the air to block people's communications and deny services.
The vulnerability in the baseband – or radio modem – of UNISOC's chipset was found by folks at Check Point Research who were looking for ways the silicon could be used to remotely attack devices. It turns out the flaw doesn't just apply to lower-end smartphones but some smart TVs, too.
Check Point found attackers could transmit a specially designed radio packet to a nearby device to crash the firmware, ending that equipment's cellular connectivity, at least, presumably until it's rebooted. This would be achieved by broadcasting non-access stratum (NAS) messages over the air that when picked up and processed by UNISOC's firmware would end in a heap memory overwrite.
A crew using malware that performs cryptomining and clipboard-hacking operations have made off with at least $1.7 million in stolen cryptocurrency.
The malware, dubbed Trojan.Clipminer, leverages the compute power of compromised systems to mine for cryptocurrency as well as identify crypto-wallet addresses in clipboard text and replace it to redirect transactions, according to researchers with Symantec's Threat Intelligence Team.
The first samples of the Windows malware appeared in January 2021 and began to accelerate in their spread the following month, the Symantec researchers wrote in a blog post this week. They also observed that there are several design similarities between Clipminer and KryptoCibule – another cryptomining trojan that, a few months before Clipminer hit the scene, was detected and written about by ESET analysts.
Healthcare organizations, already an attractive target for ransomware given the highly sensitive data they hold, saw such attacks almost double between 2020 and 2021, according to a survey released this week by Sophos.
The outfit's team also found that while polled healthcare orgs are quite likely to pay ransoms, they rarely get all of their data returned if they do so. In addition, 78 percent of organizations are signing up for cyber insurance in hopes of reducing their financial risks, and 97 percent of the time the insurance company paid some or all of the ransomware-related costs.
However, while insurance companies pay out in almost every case and are fueling an improvement in cyber defenses, healthcare organizations – as with other industries – are finding it increasingly difficult to get insured in the first place.
Something for the Weekend We're standing still. The suspense is unbearable. One of us is going to crack.
On the large projector screen is a message: "The application is not responding." Facing the large projector screen is a roomful of startup dudes. Staring back at them, and situated just underneath the projector screen, is the flailing, forlorn presenter himself: me.
"It's never done that before," I lie as I eventually give up frantically tapping the keyboard and jabbing the trackpad as if I was playing whack-a-mole.
On Call Welcome back to On Call wherein a Register reader accidentally improved an airline's productivity by the simple virtue of knowing their stuff.
"Eric" (for that is not his name) spent much of his career working on systems in the airline industry. "Since airlines were the first commercial organisations to use large-scale transaction processing systems, many of their features date back to the late 1950s," he said.
"Some of them were surprisingly sophisticated for the period. In the IBM mainframe world, each user terminal could support up to five simultaneous sessions which were designated by the letters A through E."
Disgraced tech giant Toshiba has revealed it has received ten buyout proposals, and devised a plan to grow its digital businesses.
"As of today, the Company has received eight initial proposals for privatization, as well as two initial proposals for a strategic capital and business alliance with the Company remaining listed from Potential Partners," the Japanese conglomerate stated in a canned statement [PDF] dated June 2.
Toshiba didn't say who submitted the buyout proposals, but Bain Capital is known to have expressed an interest. Reports have indicated CVC Capital Partners and KKR might be in the running too. It's worth noting that CVC has sought this opportunity before.
Amazon.com has decided to end its Kindle digital book business in China.
A statement posted to the Kindle China WeChat account states that Amazon has already stopped sending new Kindle devices to resellers and will cease operations of the Kindle China e-bookstore on June 30, 2023. The Kindle app will last another year, allowing users to download previously purchased e-books. But after June 30, 2024, Kindle devices in China won’t be able to access content.
An accompanying FAQ doesn’t offer a reason for the decision, but an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters “We periodically evaluate our offerings and make adjustments, wherever we operate.”
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