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“The biggest threat facing the two competitors [NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas] in the future may be user-generated map content – a mapping equivalent of YouTube, as it were.”
David Carpenter, Associated Press, in an article about NAVTEQ
“Researchers and strategists at IBM think that the cure for transportation problems is not building more roads or adding flight.”
- Daniel Dias, Director IBM’s India Research Laboratory quoted in the India Times in an article about new IBM innovations for “artificial intelligence in vehicles and traffic management systems, voice recognition technology and traffic-related information transfer through cell phones.”
A bunch of bloggers picked up the announcement of the new Google Earth Enterprise from the Lat Long blog. (Google doesn’t typically issue press releases on such things, so it counts on bloggers to pick up and spread the word, which many do.)
PC World actually explains what the product is (I confess, I don’t keep up with such things) and highlights the “innovation”: now you can publish your data in 2D via a browser instead of being restricted to stand alone 3D Google Earth.
This confirms something I’ve suggest before: many folks don’t need to fly other things; it’s too much information (and makes me woozy). Many folks need fast, easy to use, good old 2D maps. And, clearly, Google Earth Enterprise users are among them.
Now, the 2D seems to be Google Maps-like (per the post and the image provided). Do we think down the road Google Maps will be more GE-like so the two integrate better - that is beyond KML support? This to me would be a logical first step.
