The two-year old startup Urban Engines has been acquired by Google in order to incorporate its location analytics technology into the Google Maps application.
Google Acquires Urban Engines
According to ZDNet, As Uber, Apple and others develop their own mapping capabilities, Google continues to improve its Google Maps. The acquisition of location-based analytics startup Urban Engines comes to support the enhancing of Google Maps app.
Urban Engines said in a blog post that location analytics technology is important for both companies and the two will combine their forces to provide maps that help other organizations. The company explained in its blog post that we are now in the age of Internet of Moving Things, based on the rapid growth in sensors on cars and smartphones. By learning from commuting behavior patterns, creating new consumer services and reshaping congestion, this new technology has the potential to improve the lives of millions of commuters.
In this context, Google's Maps app has lately been improving and expanding its features and functionality in order to compete with mapping capabilities developed by companies such as Uber and Apple. Business Insider reports that the head of the Google Maps team, Jen Fitzpatrick, declared that they are working to develop the most detailed, deepest and understanding of the real world.
Their team's efforts will be supported by incorporating the rich traffic data collected and analyzed by Urban Engines. The startup had already customers in Europe, Asia, Africa, across the Americas and the Middle East.
According to Venture Beat, the startup Urban Engines has been founded in the year 2014. Since then, the company leverages spatial analytics and big data to help local businesses and governments improve transportation offerings and assess urban mobility in the surrounding area.
The co-founders of the Urban Engines startup were Balaji Prabhakar, Shiva Shivakumar, Deepak Merugu and Giao Nguyen. For Nguyen and Shivakumar the move to Google is just a homecoming, since they previously served as the company's principal engineer and vice president of engineering, respectively.
