Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO of the Ola group, Monday asked all developers in India to exit Google Maps, while offering a one-year 'free access' to Ola Maps, the ride-hailing company's latest in-house mapping programme that has created a lot of buzz in technology space.
Aggarwal, in a post on X, said people in India have been using "western apps to map for too long", even as he claimed that such applications "don’t get our unique challenges: street names, urban changes, complex traffic, non-standard roads etc".
"After #ExitAzure, it’s time for Indian developers to ExitGoogleMaps! 1 YEAR FREE access to all developers to Ola Maps on @Krutrim, more than ₹100Cr in free credits!" the OLA founder posted.
He said that Ola Maps tackles these challenges with AI-powered India-specific algorithms, real-time data from millions of vehicles, leveraging and contributing massively to open source “with more than 5 million edits just last year” to the Open Street Maps.
Aggarwal claimed that Ola Maps was outperforming its competitors on search latency, location, search and ETA accuracy. Last week, the ride-hailing company exited Google Maps and shifted to Ola Maps for cab operations, with Aggarwal claiming the shift saved the company nearly Rs 100 crore a year.
“We're outperforming competitors on location accuracy, search accuracy, search latency and ETA accuracy,” said the Ola founder. Last month, Aggarwal cut all his ties with Microsoft Azure and shifted his company's entire workload to in-house AI platform Krutrim.
Aggarwal also shared a detailed blog posted by Suvonil Chatterjee, Ola's Chief Technology Officer, that explained what parts the company built in Ola maps in house and what it leveraged from the open source community.
Explaining the same in one excerpt, the blog read: "For data sources, Ola Maps is built to utilize the most diverse set of data and send updates in near real time to ensure the most accurate mapping data as possible. Our AI first data systems utilize real time data from millions of vehicles using Ola Maps, fleet of Ola S1’s equipped with 360 cameras, open-source government data repositories, OpenStreetMap, partnerships and proprietary sources to build essential map features such as roads, points of interest, street furniture, building geometry and traffic signals. This highly comprehensive data system helps us with a robust mechanism for map expansion and map maintenance while allowing us to contribute to the open source community. In the past one-year alone, we have contributed a total of 5.43 million edits to Open Street Maps."
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'Car'Tographic Shift: Ola Maps Will Save Rs 100 Crore A Year Paid For Google Maps, Says CEO Bhavish Aggarwal
