Uber is acquiring part of Bing Maps' assets

Uber, the rideshare company is acquiring part of Bing Maps’ assets. According to TechCrunch, both of the companies have confirmed the acquisition, however, they declined to reveal the terms of the agreement. Alongside Bing’s mapping assets, Uber is reportedly acquiring 100 employees from the Bing team who are focused on Bing’s image collection activities.

As TC states, there aren’t any details on what the acquired assets. But our guess is that the Microsoft is selling its image collection to Uber. Uber states that the company is “excited about the talent and technology this acquisition brings.” On the other hand, Microsoft stated that in the past year, the company has “taken many actions to focus the company’s efforts around our core business strategy”.

“Over the past year, we have taken many actions to focus the company’s efforts around our core business strategy, In keeping with these efforts, we will no longer collect mapping imagery ourselves, and instead will continue to partner with premium content and imagery providers for underlying data while concentrating our resources on the core user experience. With this decision, we will transfer many of our imagery acquisition operations to Uber.”

It’ll be interesting to see if Microsoft is still planning to bid for HERE Maps’ assets from Nokia (as reported previously) – however, for now, it doesn’t look like it.

Source: TechCrunch