Maperture points to a NOKIA Lab research covering indoor navigation and orientation issues, stating the obvious:

Without explicitly riding a dead horse: you'll need to find your indoor location coming from outdoors first. If even larger buildings, malls, conference centers or touristic spots aren't mapped - the use case for indoor orientation certainly is a secondary advantage.

EDIT - via ITNews Australia via Slashdot

Modeling Wi-Fi Dead Spots

The technique identifies locations at which the network should be tested by combining wireless signal models with publicly-available information about basic topography, street locations and land use.

Opinions?

[BTW and kudos to Maperture -- this is a sentence you'd get punished for in school ;-) ]

Some of these projects are incubated under scientific exploration umbrellas working alongside academia within a consequence-free environment that encourages rapid risk taking.

via Mark Brown's Virtual Earth Blog - see full feature list there

• Maps for Mobile Devices - rich imagery optimized for mobile devices, including iPhone, supported in Virtual Earth Web Services.
• Reverse Geocoding - this is funky: select, mark point to a map and get back relevant content ...
• Near-Matching Capabilities - search and find fuzzily
• (...)

2 webcasts are on schedule.

... directly copied from AllPointsBlog:

(...) coverage suggests such technology will be useful for finding seats in sports stadiums, parked cars, or specific stores in malls. Nokia’s already prototyping the app in 40 of its own buildings.

Mapping of public places is also underway.

A commercial trial will launch later this year at a shopping mall in Helsinki aimed at, hopefully among other things, figuring out how it can make money. It'll be in Nokia's Beta Labs, too.

Pointed to Nokia Conversations.

Naturally, hyperlocal indoor mapping is the next frontier - after the immediate surroundings are mapped on a local scale.

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.

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!

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."

Here's part 3 of our little series "playing with numbers", offering some random datapoints mainly from mobile devices, PNDs and the usual suspects. Somehow focused on Germany ('cause this is where we are as you might have guessed already from our brutal use of Denglisch).

Don't blame the messenger on missing numbers - we harvested what is out there (pretty much, by the way).

No extrapolations, no nothing: if a number is missing, we don't have or need it. Everything future is guessstimated by the original sources.

Even if some of the estimates are completely exaggerated or an analysts' wet dreams: something is going on out there.

And this brings us back to our shameless self promotion: how will people navigate on the small screens of those mobile device they'll all be carrying around? Using maps made for vehicles ...?

Some details need cartographic checking, adjustment or different parametrization.
Colors and symbols are arbitrary and all but final.
(Note to ourselves: develop a color scheme that doesn't make you sick on small screens)

See how detailed near-field orientation can become:

See still pics on the extended article linked beyond.

We'll have a demo of true pedestrian routing ready end of week 10.
It already works on the sample data (but lab rats need some rest).

Continue reading "First glimpses on sample data" »

Mapping is older than browsers

From a wonderful story of the April 2006 edition of The NewYorker:

In 1909, an engineer named J. W. Jones invented a device called the Jones Live-Map, which connected to a car’s odometer. It consisted of a glass-enclosed dial, on which you could place a disk representing a particular trip. The disk had mileage numbers around the perimeter and driving directions printed like spokes on the face. As you progressed down the road, the disk would rotate, telling you where you were and what to do. Live-Map No. 16, for example, guided the “motorist tourist” from Columbus Circle to Waterbury, Connecticut (specifically, the Elton Hotel), telling him, at various intervals, to “take right fork at flag pole,” “pass under trolley arch,” or “caution for dangerous curves.”

In the early '90s, Xerox Parc ...

Continue reading "A brief history of online mapping" »