Skift Take
Nokia dispenses car crawlers and collects data points from the 3.3 billion miles that UPS drives a year, creating a massive database that might not stand up to Google on its own, but could be acquired by Apple to improve its product quickly.
There are more than two horses in the race to create an index of the physical world. There’s a third company that’s invested billions of dollars, employs thousands of mapmakers, and even drives around its own version of Google’s mythic “Street View” cars.
That company is Nokia, the still-giant but oft-maligned Finnish mobile phone maker, which acquired the geographic information systems company Navteq back in 2007 for $8 billion.
“We get over 12 billion probe data points per month coming into the organization,” Fox said from his office in Chicago. “We get probe data not only from commercial vehicles like FedEx and UPS trucks, but we also get it from consumers through navigation applications.”
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