United Maps

The "Lost Remote" has a snip that is quoted in full here:

The mad dash toward location awareness continues with Google’s “Gears Geolocation API.” Developers can use Google’s toolkit to develop location-based services for both mobile devices and on your PC. At its core, the API can “determine your location using nearby cell phone towers or GPS for your mobile device or your computer’s IP address for your laptop.” In other words, this will make it easier for developers to launch location-based applications on the fly. Google explains in this video.

The sidestep: Cory Bergman is Director of Business Development at msnbc.com

Needless to mention Google's Chrome, the latest dragster in the location race.

... without falling into strict chinese export restriction problems?

The product announcement was reported by Telematics Update: Garmin starts offering it's "City Navigator® China NT 2008" to olympic tourists heading for Bejing.

We briefly thought about offering pedestrian navigation (hence: better maps) for the same (and quite obvious) use case.

An article in ITSecurity lists 51 'off-limits' areas for Google Maps. Amongst them, The Royal Stables in The Hague, Netherlands, sort of a limousine service to the royal durch household.

Wonder why this one has been blacklisted ...

Adena Schutzberg from AllPointsBlog has a funny story from The Scotsman about a 989-mile race in the UK. Three teams should find their way along several waypoints. A team was relying on road signs and locals' advice, another was using road maps, the third was guided by satnav.

Guess who won?

The satnav-guided car finished one-and-a-half hours behind the map car – driven by women – which itself came in half an hour behind the winning signs-and-directions-led vehicle – driven by men.

(...)  The satnav team were hampered by the gadget alerting them to non-existent roundabouts and exits and directing them into "no entry" streets and along slow country lane "short cuts" rather than motorways.

As the days are shorter, some beautiful morbidity may be allowed:

20 Abandoned Cities from Around the World: Deserted Towns and Other Derelict Places

(via Very Spatial)

Brady Forest from O'Reily Radar provides context in a recent story Google's GeoData, Open Street Map and Tele Atlas giving a clear interpretation of some notions we had here.

David Pogue, the famous Tech critter at NYT isn't really positive about the iPhone's GPS-capabilities:

According to Apple, the iPhone’s G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example.

Instead, all it can do at this point is track your position as you drive along, representing you as a blue dot sliding along the roads of the map. Even then, the metal of a car or the buildings of Manhattan are often enough to block the iPhone’s view of the sky, leaving it just as confused as you are.

Huups - Steve Lombardi who is with the Virtual Earth team at Microsoft completes this statement and pushes into the opposite direction:

(...) still a 2 minute perusal of the wikipedia article on GPS by Apple could help to avoid further clouding of this already very misunderstood technology. If you can get 2 successive fixes, you can calculate direction and speed. assuming you have access to the underlying street network, you can then calculate turn guidance. software and data!

Lifehacker has a intensly commented story on 'How your location-aware iPhone will change Your Life' also going into applications that opnly make sense with hyperlocal maps.

(screenshot taken from there)

Opening up map layers to make them user editable will be mandatory.

update:

gpsReview compiled a list of iPhone navigation applications from Apple's App Store stating ...

"So far it doesn’t look like any turn by turn direction type navigation applications have made their way into the new iPhone platform… but something must be coming along."

Google and Tele Atlas announced a five year agreement to continue using their digital map data. Many references and comments elsewhere.

What made us wonder was a statement like this:

The agreement also gives Tele Atlas access to edits for its maps from Google’s community of users, whose suggested changes can help the company further increase the quality and richness of Tele Atlas maps.

How would that work out? Tele Atlas already receives feedback of millions of TomTom MapShare users and it doesn't seem to be enough. So is it about more users or more usage? If you ever put a change request on MapShare - and didn't hear anything of Tele Atlas weeks later - how would this change with millions of additional changes by Google Maps users?

edit/addition:

Two updates from the AllPoints Blog:

1. The deal is not exclusive: "TeleAtlas already has an agreement with Google for which details aren't available. The new agreement is non-exclusive, Titiular said." (CNN)
2. Ed Parsons at Google: "This does not include Map Maker contributions."

There's a nice animation showing the maping progress at the OpenStreetMap Project.

So how does this relate to today's announcement at Google’s LatLong blog for Google MapMaker? Is it good or bad for OSM ...? While OSM is an "open collaboration between people all around the world that are trying to solve the problem of outdated and expensive maps for GPS systems" (quote), Google Map Maker gets bad welcome from the OpenGeoData blog "a kind of faux OpenStreetMap where they own all the data".

Adding some more:

"If you contribute to Google MapMaker, you are contributing to one single map view that looks how Google wants it to look. If you contribute to OpenStreetMap, you are contributing to a myriad of possibilities … most not even thought of yet."

Sjors Provoost gets speculative for future options:

• Worst case: Google does not collaborate and we’ll have duplicate effort, which is not a problem because there is an astounding amount of disposable man power available on the planet.
• Best case: Google does collaborate and the OpenStreetMap project will be finished in a year or so.

Nevertheless - obviously Google (Maps) does have licence contracts with Navteq and Tele Atlas that simply hinder them from expanding inbound data with user generated map changes.

Why else would you bite hands that feed you?

Techcrunch has it: Nokia aquired Plazes for a (still undisclosed) amount.

A bit misjudgingly, Plazes is shortened to a “mobile social network”, putting it into the same basket as the Danish startup ZYB, that was acquired by Vodafone in May for an alleged €31.5 million.

Is Nokias buying spree signal or noise to location based services? Mechanically, Plazes doesn't do that much. Connect people with plazes they like. Scale it up and ... put it on a map. We'll see all this as part of ovi.com soon. It'll be interesting to see, how Plazes will integrate.

Here's the nifty badge we were won at the recent NoAE-Innovation show.

170 innovative project were sent in, being laurated and having made it to the finals is an honour.

Ed Parsons has a story based on news from NetworkWorld.

Googles' recently opened Nairobi office suspectedly didn't find its own location on Google Maps - and kick-started a new Nairobi city map that didn't exist before. A map is definitely better than no map.

Here's the merged satellite/map view - seems to me that pretty many roads are represented:

View Larger Map

Will Google follow the OpenStreetMap or is this a one-timer?

Will other parts of Kenya also be crowdsourced?

Mit besseren digitalen Karten für verkehrsmittelübergreifende multi-modale Navigation gewinnt United Maps den Innovations-Wettbewerb des „Network of Automobile Excellence – NoAE“ im Rahmen des Würzburger Automobil Gipfel 2008 am 11./12. Juni 2008.

Digitale Karten mit situativ relevanten Informationen sind der Erfolgsfaktor für Location Based Services und Navigationslösungen innerhalb und ausserhalb des Autos.

Auf Basis routingfähiger Navigationsdaten der weltweiten Marktführer Navteq und Tele Atlas integriert United Maps europaweit zusätzliche relevante Informationen, Wege und Straßen zu einem dichteren Geoinformationsnetz. Continue reading "United Maps gewinnt ... »

... with a little help by DHL, to be seen at YouTube:

Maperture lists 10 Reasons Why Garmin Might Acquire Motorola.

TUAW has a nice article commenting on how the iPhone brought prominence to location-based computing, opening with ...

Where you compute has become as important as what you compute. (...)

With Apple's announced Core Location support, the trend is only going to accelerate. A billion new location-aware startups have launched in the past few months. Fireeagle.com, outside.in, rummble.com, brightkite.com, and plazes.com, not to mention many many others are joining players like Flickr and Twitter, who already offer basic location support.

Kudos to Erica Sadun, concentrating the value of connected mobile device into a clear line of thought:

The iPhone is a platform that lives in your pocket. So you can pull it out, check your options and make some decisions without all the overhead associated with laptop use. It's this fundamental difference in the way we use the iPhone with "pants-based computing," with a device that travels with us and knows where we are, that powers this paradigm shift. We're sitting at the edge of a location-based computing revolution, and the iPhone is pulling us there. From our pockets.

There's rumor being boiled at Techcrunch that Google might allow third party developers to make use of its geolocation API.

Combining locational information from cell-, and WiFi-networks into an approximation of the user's (handset-)location nags at one of mobile carriers' few golden eggs.

via fscklog:

Die Vorstellung eines GPS-fähigen iPhones lässt bei mindestens einem Hersteller von GPS-Navigationsgeräten angeblich unkontrollierte Furcht aufkommen:

«I recently sat down with the president of a GPS navigation system manufacturer to ask him how he felt about the prospect of a GPS-enabled iPhone. "Scared [expletive]-less," he said.»