Ola’s co-founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal seems to have been stung by the nationalist bug lately. And the bug encounter could not have happened at a more opportune time than when the ride-hailing firm was looking to buttress its position ahead of its stock market listing. Post listing, Ola Electric Mobility shares soared, performing far better than analysts and investors’ expectations. The share price jump was a result of something more than the underlying electric vehicle business itself.
Mr. Aggarwal began his evangelical mission to proselytise Indian startups to go the ‘swadeshi’ digital way last year. In December, he announced AI startup Krutrim, and two months later, raised a funding round that valued the company at $1 billion.
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A desi chatbot
In February, the firm unveiled a large language model (LLM) that was trained on a set of Indic languages to perform ChatGPT- of Indian languages. Mr. Aggarwal said Krutrim stays true to “Indian cultural ethos and solves real Indian problems.”
Early users of the chatbot pointed out several flaws in its responses. Some alleged that the chatbot was a wrapper on the ubiquitous ChatGPT. One user screen recorded their interaction with the chatbot and posted it on Reddit. In that video, they queried the bot asking whether it was using a ChatGPT API. The bot replied ‘yes’ before auto-correcting to a standard chatbot response that it was built to assist users.
Promotional posts from the company about the AI chatbot on social media platforms received comments from Ola’s electric scooter buyers who complained of poor vehicle quality and lack of customer support, asking the CEO to focus on fix the scooters and provide a decent customer experience in existing business before launching new products.
Such criticisms did not the deter Mr. Aggarwal from launching his next desi salvo against foreign firms. This time, his target was cloud service players like Microsoft, AWS, and Google.
A desi cloud
Complaining that Microsoft-owned LinkedIn removed his post as it was centred on wokeness, the ride-hailing company co-founder said he was quitting Microsoft’s Azure cloud and moving Ola’s services to Krutrim cloud. He urged Indian businesses to move to Ola-owned desi cloud platform.
In a clarion call, in May, Mr. Aggarwal offered Krutrim cloud service to startups for free for an year. While some developers saw his stance against hyperscalers ambitious, others sought more details on the specifics, as cost was just one of the many other factors startups consider before picking their cloud vendor.
Hyperscalers like Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon Web Service and Google Clould provide a whole host of features to customers that Krutrim’s cloud will find difficult to build in such a short period. On the cost factor, some developers point out that the cost of electricity in India is quite high. This, in essence, will translate to higher price, making Krutrim charge more once the free period ends.
A desi map
As Ola mooched its ways through the cloud ecosystem, the ride-hailing company launched its third desi salvo before getting listed. This time, the company’s target was Google Maps.
Nudging Indian startups to go the desi way once again, Mr. Aggarwal posted on X platform that “After ExitAzure, it’s time for Indian developers to ExitGoogleMaps! 1 YEAR FREE access to all developers to Ola Maps on Krutrim cloud, more than Rs. 100 crore in free credit!” He further noted that the company’s maps service outperformed competitors on location accuracy and several other key metrics.
A desi backlash
With the maps boast, Ola wasn’t anymore fighting a swadeshi battle. It was entering a civil war zone against another homegrown company, CE Info Systems. The parent of MapmyIndia filed a lawsuit against Ola for allegedly copying the company’s data and breaching licensing agreement while building its own maps service. The complaint accused Ola of copying data to reverse engineer a licensed product.
While Ola has called MapmyIndia’s complaint false and baseless, it is important to understand how the digital maps tapestry was woven over the past several decades.
Digital maps-based navigation systems are result of painstaking tasks of computerising the physical world with help of an army of cars, equipped with cameras and sensors, roaming every street like digital explorers. They captured images, measured distances, and noted every turn and landmark.
Complementing the work of this vast ground force, an array of satellites high above beamed down precise coordinates as local knowledge was crowd-sourced from users who act as modern-day cartographers, updating and refining the map in real-time, solving an important optimisation problem.
The Travelling Salesman Problem
At the heart of the mapping systems lies a complex web of algorithms that aim to solve the “Travelling Salesman Problem” millions of times a day. The problem is one where the algorithm must help find the optimal route through a labyrinth of possibilities by factoring in real-time traffic data, roadblocks, and even personal preferences to chart the optimal route to get from one point to another.
While we are used to thinking that navigation apps are limited to smartphones, these systems have spread their use cases far and wide. They are used in a range of tasks from guiding self-driving cars to charting courses through the skies.
As their use cases grew, the business models surrounding maps-based services boomed. Enterprises and marketers saw a goldmine in the data this platform created, which could be used for location-based advertising as well as integration into other services.
Ride-hailing and delivery platforms capitalise
Platforms like Ola, Uber, Zomato and Swiggy found a strong use case in connecting their delivery persons or a cab drivers to end customers through the in-built maps feature in their apps.
In India, there are largely three major vendors who sell licensed maps product. The biggest and most up-to-date product is Google Maps. With over a billion users, the Alphabet-owned company’s product stands out for providing real-time granular data on traffic and roadways.
MapMyIndia, established in 1995, comes next. The platform provides geospatial landscape information in India, offering mapping data along with APIs, SDKs and various other analytical geospatial products. Their maps are updated every six months.
OpenStreetMaps, which was established in 2004 as a community project that relies on users for updates on location, takes the third position. While both Google Maps and MapmyIndia are paid services (based on the number of users), OpenStreetMaps is a free and open-source product.
Global navigation systems
These platforms use global navigation systems to provide geospatial services to their cusomters. Currently, there are four major global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) - - the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS); Russia’s Global Navigation Satellite System (GLOSNASS); China’s BeiDou Navigation System (BDS); and EU’s Galileo.
These navigation systems provide autonomous satellite-based geopositioning, and they cover the entire globe. These systems provide global coverage through a constellation of satellites orbiting the earth. These satellite-based systems are complemented by a data-based system to provide granular-level details.
The geospatial information system (GIS) captures, stores and analyses data that is associated with a specific location. A GIS application can generate detailed contour maps based on the data in a digital format. So, in a sense, Google Maps is a GIS that uses Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS).
Back to the civil war
Given the amount of time and effort it takes to build this kind of mapping system, it is arduous for any company, let alone Ola, to build a navigation system that is on par with the state-of-the-art maps services.
Also, MapmyIndia has another issue against Ola. The ride-hailing company signed a licence agreement with MapmyIndia in 2015 to use the latter’s map data. So, the homegrown maps company has accused Ola of plagiarising the company’s data to build Ola Maps service.
While Ola, according to a August 23 PTI report, said the company has sent a legal notice to MapmyIndia and is awaiting their response, the ride-hailing company’s CEO is, for the first time, sailing in uncharted territory, battling against another swadeshi company that has a time-tested product. And now that the IPO business is done and dusted, it will be good idea for Ola to focus on building a quality product.
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