Same day, same hemisphere - different fortunes:

German news site golem.de reports Navigon MobileNavigator 2.5 for Android is ready for sale at the Android Market (can't find it though). Until May 2 a 30-day-trial for DACH is €50, Europe bites €75.

As the 'Monster Shark' is G, the poor little White Shark equals the rest of the industry: navigation, mapping, location.

All just a bite away.

The quoted fisherman rounds it up:

"It certainly opened up my eyes.
I mean the shark that was caught is a substantial shark in itself (...)"

Notorious TechCrunch had a breaking story, announcing Google Maps Navigation For Android 2.0 as the "absolute killer app".

Arrington notes the features and mixes up pro and cons.
I am undecided if he's sure on where to put what.

The "connectedness" is a prerequisite for receiving map tiles. So please don't drive too fast and stay in areas with 3G coverage (and few other data hungry users). Otherwise you won't get much assistance with connected navigation. Exaggerated? Try yourself and drive any highway, anywhere: mobile data simply doesn't come in as fast as you wanted to have it. Result: nice positioning icon on the small screen - zero map around, below zero satisfaction.

USA only, isn’t it?

However, there's mentionable back pedaling after the scoop. No, this is by far not the end of PNAv and PND makers, TomTom is not out of business, Garmin will pursue as most other players also will.

Think again.

Nevertheless, the app seems to be smartly engineered.

Despite this rather shallow criticism Google (again) intrudes into an industry giving many veterans a headache. Good timing. This must have been planned at least 3 cycles before - around beginning of 2009.

Hey - it's buget time in the U.S., Excel-sabbat ... everyone struggling for 2010 funds ... couldn't you have waited until this is over, Google ;.) ?

Wind back: No, Navigation For Android 2.0 is a gamechanger and it is a tornado - just define the teacup.

... so states the honorable New York Times in reviewing a handful iPhone nav apps:

(...) most navigation apps are monsters: since most of them store maps on the phone itself, they are usually at least 1.2 gigabytes in size, which means a lot less room for your music and photos. That also means that these apps can’t be directly downloaded to the phone, but must first be transmitted to a PC. With a standard broadband connection, that can take hours, plus more hours to transfer the app to the phone. Download a new map or program update every few months, and the process starts all over again.

This is a drawback, indeed: whenever I have to update my Navigon app on the iPhone, a lot of housekeeping needs to happen first as the large install only will work if there's enough free space on the device. Naturally, there isn't, so throwing away tons of beloved music and audiobooks just to be reinstalled after Navigon is being updated isn't a pleasant sidestep.

As the NYT quotes a report from iSuppli, GPS applications for smartphones are about to explode, growing from 2.5 percent of users today to 10.5 percent in 2013. And half of those will be iPhone owners.

Of the four GPS apps I tested — from major navigation companies — each crashed several times, jolting my iPhone back to the home screen. Occasionally, the iPhone did not seem to recognize that I was even using the GPS feature, and the phone simply shut off. None of the apps could keep up with my driving. I often made a turn or reached an intersection before the map redrew to indicate that I had. At other times, the app showed me making a turn before I actually had.

So those big monsters don't keep up with the promise they were bought for: navigate you savely. Naturally, an app that needs to fetch maps online stands behind if you drive to fast and 3G signal falls back to GPRS. The alternative is to preload maps to the device and render it there - the approach Nokia took and used gate5's technology to display maps on the small screen. The single point of possible failure then remains the paid routing calculation being transferred from a remote server back to the device - a much easier task than have the device limited processing capabilites doing this on top.

With this in mind, our upcoming United Maps iPhone walk&ride app will both render and route you onboard: staying safely away from urban canyons and transmission leaks. It'll even work without GPS activated - as finding your urban position can easily be accomplished by finding the street crossing you're at.

Quickly after its launch on the appstore on Oct12, german Skobbler out of nothing skyrocketed to #1 at all payed apps.

No wonder at a competitive price of €3,99 for Navteq maps on Germany, Austria and Switzerland (DACH) and fully fledged (yet hybrid) auto and pedestrian navigation with voice guidance and turn-by-turn instructions.

That's a bargain compared to Navigon, TomTom and all the other navi apps at much higher price tags.

What started as a scoop turns into just another scoop:
as Skobbler communicates through both its (german only) blog and the descriptive page in the appstore, the initital introductory price is skipped and raised to €7,99 - and still a hot deal.

Surprisingly and effective on March 10, Skobbler announces a switch from Navteq base maps to OpenStreetMap. For whatever ever reason this announcement needed to be made in the first week premiering Skobbler on the appstore, the tactics remain unclear.

What happened?

skobbler was founded in September 2008 as a management buy-out of NAVIGON AG. The company is privately funded and shareholders are former employees of NAVIGON AG. Majority shareholder and general manager of skobbler GmbH is Peter Scheufen, who led NAVIGON AG over almost a decade as CEO. In February 2009 and out of 186 applications, skobbler promptly won the the European Navteq LBS Challenge with its cross-platform LBS application as happy Oliver Kühn received an applauded 100.000U$ worth of Navteq licences in Barcelona.

As skobbler started out as a "daily companion to urban people, combining city maps, city magazines and real-time information on connected handsets" generating suspectedly random revenues via sponsored links, the move to a competitive navigation market seemed to be too much of a stretch. Wonder who didn't like a raising star?

Will skobbler get the turn and make OSM professionally routable or did we just witness the opening episode of "one-trick pony vs the empire"?

Holy cow!

United Maps' UM-DE, our comprehensive map of Germany on hyperlocal scales consists of 101.629.970 datapoints. Slightly more than one hundred million.

Of course that's comparing apples and pears - however the volume is amazing. Compare this to your conventional datasets and you'll like see a tenfold increase in data: streets, places, POIs and much more you won't see on conventional services.

By the way: here's our latest company profile, detailling what it's all about - German and English versions.

Content rich maps bring much more value.

You only recognize that if you overlay conventional map service like Google Maps (base data by Tele Atlas), Microsoft BING (base data from Navteq), OVI maps, Yahoo! Maps or OpenStreetMap with United Maps' professional vector data.

Stunning.

If the detail is gone - you suddenly want to have it back.

A 2' video is on the frontpage, also on YouTube and Vimeo:

When we recently touted "United Maps goes iPhone - yes, we bring our own maps." we started scoping the app, quickly running into a number of issues. Some tend to clear up, others remain. The biggest (potential) show stopper yet is open:

Will Apple positively allow a third party navigation app if own maps are provided?

Sort of a crucial question to avoid sunk cost.

Search the web. Search more. Study the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, branch over to many more documents and talk to people that claim to hear the whispers offstage ... no real-world answers. Finally sent an eMail to the legal department. Wait.

The breezy B.Y.O.M. statement given by Scott Forstall when introducing iPhone OS 3.0 still is the only information available. It could be possible to connect to a third party mapserver with the MKMapView component. Since then: silence. So either Apple is heavily working on that or something else is coming up.

quote, headline and line of thought is all courtesy of Geoff Zeiss:

One of the things that strikes many visitors from Europe is the concrete and asphalt wasteland of many North American cities, which were built primarily with commerce in mind.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Americans spend 4.2 billion hours a year stuck in traffic at a cost of $78.2 billion a year in wasted time and fuel costs, about $710 per motorist. 

• The average daily percentage of vehicle miles traveled under congested conditions rose from 25.9% in 1995 to 31.6% in 2004, congestion in large urban areas exceeding 40%.  
• As a result of increased congestion, total fuel wasted climbed from 1.7 billion gallons in 1995 to 2.9 billion gallons in 2005.

As much the car is an integral part of the U.S genome, habits may change slowly. Or as Geoff puts it:

On more than one occasion in several American cities I have been in a hotel literally 100 meters from a customer location and have had to take a cab to get there because there is no way to walk there short of playing "chicken" on a freeway.

I myself felt like a teleported extraterrestial in Menlo Park, where I lived for a couple of days, attending Where 2.0 and WhereCamp in San Jose. Like Stanford and the residential areas around, Menlo Park and Palo Alto is not California as the Valley isn't the U.S.

Streets within residential areas are as wide as multilane intercity roads in Europe, 15 meters I'd guess. Mostly empty streets, taking up a lot of land.

Only very few people walk - and riding my borrowed bicycle (thank you again, Elizabeth!) to the Caltrain station at Palo Alto I was friendly greeted regularily by children - naturally in cars driving by. The Caltrain itself has a huge carriage at its top, taking on at least 30 bicycles. The week I happily travelled the Caltrain, at average it was filled with 5 bicycles at most - so it is not about the options, it's about need.

Does this tell us anything?

Of course not. You don't go by bike or walk if infrastructure is all made around the car - why should you bother if gas is cheap like water. Even the latest announcement that "automakers must meet average U.S. fuel-economy standards of 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016" is just a drop of gas on the wide streets. 35,5 MPG is 8 l/100 km translating roughly to the "Volkswagen Golf class". The average price in CA is $2.524/gallon = EUR1.803 per 3.875 l = EUR 0,46/L (checked that twice, still can't believe the ludicrously low prices). 

What will hapen to all those overpowered, gas thirsty MPVs on Americas streets?
Presumably not too much as this a genetical defect turned into a national habit turned into a way of life.

Does it tell something for United Maps?

Oh yes. Despite the country-by-country approach we pursued, for the U.S. a "walkable city"-approach makes much more sense. Pedestrian maps are made for people out of the car - so where are these in the U.S.?

A Brookings Institution survey from 2007 ranks the 30 biggest metropolitan areas according to the number of “walkable urban places” relative to the area’s population:

(I wonder how Los Angeles and Miami made it onto the list ...)

The bold cities are those that we should concentrate on to produce large scale pedestrian maps including public mass transit services and multimodal navigation. Whereas "modes" are the option to seamlessly switch the mode of transport: drive your car, go by train/tram/bus or walk.

Makes sense?

(via Slashgeo)

Slashdot discusses a story named Chimps Have a Built-In GPS:

"European researchers have discovered that chimpanzees have a built-in mental GPS, keeping 'a geometric mental map of their home range, moving from point to point in nearly straight lines.' Using GPS, two primatologists followed 15 chimpanzees for 217 days, and determined that the apes were 'using a mental map built around geometric coordinates.' They're not just identifying landmarks in their surroundings, and in fact, even when swinging through trees, the chimps planned out their route several trees in advance. Here's the paper in the journal Animal Behavior ." (...)

Remember that cows point North?