This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Type | Private (acquired by Google) |
---|---|
Industry | Data Analytics |
Defunct | September 2016 |
Fate | Acquired by Google |
Headquarters | Los Altos, California, United States |
Key people | Shiva Shivakumar (Co-Founder and CEO) Balaji Prabhakar (Co-Founder & Chief Scientist) |
Website | www.urbanengines.com |
Urban Engines was a data analytics startup based in Silicon Valley. It was acquired by Google in September 2016. It used data to give insight into cities and how people move around in them. [1] Founder and CEO Shiva Shivakumar says the company is mapping the "Internet of Moving Things," as quoted by the New York Times, which is a new way of mapping objects in motion. [2] The company's goal is to improve mobility in cities. [3]
Urban Engines has developed a new type of database, which maps objects in motion, called a "Space/Time Engine", [2] and currently has deals with cities like, Washington D.C., São Paulo and Singapore [4] as well as delivery and logistics companies. [1]
The company also released a commuter app with "mixed-mode routing," [5] which evaluates different modes of transportation – walking, driving, public transit, and Uber – to give users the quickest routes. [5] The app is built on Urban Engines own proprietary mapping system. [3]
The company was founded by Shiva Shivakumar and Balaji Prabhakar. Shiva was previously VP of Engineering and a Distinguished Entrepreneur at Google (2001-2010), who helped build AdSense, Search Appliances and Cloud Apps, and Balaji is a Stanford professor and director of the Stanford Center for Societal Networks, a prominent research initiative to make societal networks smarter, more scalable and more efficient. [6]
Urban Engines has raised an undisclosed amount of money led by Google Ventures. Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Greylock, Samsung Ventures, early Google investor Ram Shriram and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt also participated. [4]
Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets, real-time traffic conditions, and route planning for traveling by foot, car, bike, air and public transportation. As of 2020, Google Maps was being used by over 1 billion people every month around the world.
Google Street View is a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides interactive panoramas from positions along many streets in the world. It was launched in 2007 in several cities in the United States, and has since expanded to include cities and rural areas worldwide. Streets with Street View imagery available are shown as blue lines on Google Maps.
Splunk Inc. is an American software company based in San Francisco, California, that produces software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated data via a Web-style interface.
Tableau Software is an American interactive data visualization software company focused on business intelligence. It was founded in 2003 in Mountain View, California, and is currently headquartered in Seattle, Washington. In 2019 the company was acquired by Salesforce for $15.7 billion. At the time, this was the largest acquisition by Salesforce since its foundation. It was later surpassed by Salesforce's acquisition of Slack.
Yummly is an American website and mobile app that provides users recipes via recommendations and a search engine. Yummly uses a knowledge graph to offer a semantic web search engine for food, cooking and recipes.
Qwiki was a New York City based startup automated video production company acquired by Yahoo! on July 2, 2013 for a reported $50 million. Qwiki released an iPhone app that automatically turns the pictures and videos from a user's camera roll into movies to share. The company's initial product, an iPad application that created video summaries of over 3 million search terms, was downloaded more than 3 million times and named by Apple as the best "Search and Reference" application of 2011.
SimilarWeb Ltd. is an Israeli web analytics company specializing in web traffic and performance. Headquartered in Tel Aviv, the company has 12 offices worldwide. Similarweb went public on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2021.
Leap Motion, Inc. was an American company that manufactured and marketed a computer hardware sensor device that supports hand and finger motions as input, analogous to a mouse, but requires no hand contact or touching. In 2016, the company released new software designed for hand tracking in virtual reality. The company was sold to the British company Ultrahaptics in 2019, which sells the product under the brand name Ultraleap.
Apple Maps is a web mapping service developed by Apple Inc. The default map system of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS, it provides directions and estimated times of arrival for driving, walking, cycling, and public transportation navigation. A "Flyover" mode shows certain densely populated urban centers and other places of interest in a 3D landscape composed of models of buildings and structures.
Sketchfab is a 3D modeling platform website to publish, share, discover, buy and sell 3D, VR and AR content. It provides a viewer based on the WebGL and WebXR technologies that allows users to display 3D models on the web, to be viewed on any mobile browser, desktop browser or Virtual Reality headset.
Mapbox is an American provider of custom online maps for websites and applications such as Foursquare, Lonely Planet, the Financial Times, The Weather Channel, Instacart Inc. and Snapchat. Since 2010, it has rapidly expanded the niche of custom maps, as a response to the limited choice offered by map providers such as Google Maps.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Drive, and YouTube. Alongside a set of management tools, it provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, data storage, data analytics and machine learning. Registration requires a credit card or bank account details.
Mapillary is a service for sharing crowdsourced geotagged photos, developed by remote company Mapillary AB, based in Malmö, Sweden. Mapillary was launched in 2013 and acquired by Facebook, Inc. in 2020. This is one of the few alternative platforms that has street level imagery like Google Street View.
Crashlytics was a Boston, Massachusetts-based software company founded in May 2011 by entrepreneurs Wayne Chang and Jeff Seibert. Crashlytics helps collecting, analyzing and organizing app crash reports.
Snap Inc. is an American camera and social media company, founded on September 16, 2011, by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown based in Santa Monica, California. The company developed and maintains technological products and services, namely Snapchat, Spectacles, and Bitmoji. The company was named Snapchat Inc. at its inception, but it was rebranded Snap Inc. on September 24, 2016, in order to include the Spectacles product under the company name.