Thursday, July 30. 2009

French Web Mapping Firm Sues Google Over Google Maps

Bottin Cartographes filed a complaint in Paris commercial court against Google France and U.S. parent Google Inc. The basis of the complaint: "Google strategy is aimed at undercutting competitors by temporarily swallowing the full cost until it gains control of the market." In particular, "Google is undercutting the market by offering map services to some companies for internal use for free – if they use Google Maps on their internet site," according to one report.

Bottin seeks 500,000 euros (706,000 dollars) in damages.

- AFP

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, Geospatial Business at 06:53 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |

Friday, July 24. 2009

Google Latitude on iPhone = Fail

Eric Zeman at InformationWeek echoes sentiment heard round the Web about the new addition to the iPhone's browser, Safari, that enables Google's location sharing app, Google Latitude. The issues he points out include poor location determination (it does not use GPS) and more importantly, it runs into the chronic "apps can't work in the background on the iPhone" problem.

To Google's credit, it notes this limitation publicly, which is just another poke at Apple to solve the problem.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, Apple at 08:08 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Wednesday, July 15. 2009

GeoEye Uses Best of Breed Tech and the Cloud to Better Serve up its Imagery (#ESRIUC)

I got a real "two-fer" when I spent some time with Deke Young, the Director of Business Systems at GeoEye. I got the inside scoop on the back end of its new GeoFuse applications and I learned more about the cloud and its use.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, ESRI, Microsoft, Remote Sensing, Google Earth, ESRI UC 09 at 16:38 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

Tuesday, July 14. 2009

Is Google Chasing Bing Features?

I didn't bother to blog this Google Maps announcement since I figured the Google Maps/Earth bloggers would. I did notice it was like a Bing feature I did blog.

What I didn't do was try Google's implementation. But Michael Hickins at InformationWeek did and he declares it lame and a suggests its a quick response to playing "feature match" with Bing.

To achieve this effect, Google simply mashed up user-generated photos with its map, resulting in a mish-mash of semi-effective information. There's definitely a place for user generated content, but crowd-sourcing information should be a conscious decision, not something that's foisted upon users in the guise of reliable information. People who use Google maps aren't looking for views from apartments they'll never see or points of interest to people completely unlike themselves.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, Microsoft at 06:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Friday, July 10. 2009

New York State Recovery Map

The map's here. Google Maps and Google Earth and Excel. Far different than that from other states.

Per a press release:

The map uses the State’s Critical Infrastructure Information System, a state-of-the-art geographic information system that utilizes hundreds of mapped data layers, in combination with Google Maps for map display and searches, as well as integration with Google Earth for more advanced searching and display. An easy-to-use Excel spreadsheet export function allows users to download the underlying data, enabling unlimited ways to examine, analyze and make use of project-specific information.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, Stimulus, Google Earth at 09:16 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

Thursday, July 9. 2009

How Google Maps uses the W3C Geolocation API and Google Location Services

There's a lot of excitement (sample) about browsers (notably Firefox and Chrome, but actually any implementation that include Google Gears) implementing the W3C Geolocation API. Why? In the past few days Google announced that Google Maps (desktop) can now take advantage of it. All good. My concern: all this discussion may be "fuzzing up" what the API does and does not do.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, LBS, Standards, Wi-Fi at 17:13 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |