Monday, November 2. 2009

Cloudmade Chairman/CEO on How Google is Blowing it With Mapping Devs

Sadly, Juha Christensen does not identify himself as Chairman/CEO in the post on his blog. Further, he didn't identify that it was an e-mail sent to partners; I learned that from Mike Arrington at TechCrunch, who reprinted it at his request.

His starting point:

Google betting on one-size-fits all model
Google is betting on building a horizontal, local search franchise. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but please read on, it gets clearer. Google is building a one-size-fits-all set of services around mapping, and will serve the masses with those. Think about Google Maps, Latitude or Earth. They are horizontal one-size-fits-all web apps with little or no segmentation. Everyone uses the same app.


Meanwhile, in the process of building out end-user applications rather than sticking to being a platform player, Google is causing considerable collateral damage. Its move into the territory normally occupied by mobile operators, OEMs and small, medium and large developers is turning the marketplace against itself. The honeymoon is over and the do-no-evil days have ended. Google has declared any monetizable pocket in tech a target, including the key franchises of Apple, Microsoft, the mobile operators and now also mobile application developers. The problem with Google’s approach is, the value is not in horizontal services, but in leveraging the democratizing effect of the app stores to use the 100,000+ vertical apps as a way to divide the market into tiny segments and let them flourish and gain traction.

Friday, October 30. 2009

OSM in Uganda

Just yesterday I noted AfricaGIS was held in the capital of Uganda, Kampala. Google had quite a presence in part because of new efforts to map the country. Today, there's word that OpenStreetMap is also active in country as part of a DevelopmentSeed effort. Locals are using QGIS for mapping and uploading data to OSM.

Ironic that the final line in Jonathan Bennett's report is: "Now imagine if some proprietary software company or mapping data provider had got involved?"

- ZDnet Blog

Thursday, October 29. 2009

Quote of the Week

"27 members of Google’s staff and around 200 people from around the world and Africa (I’ve heard conflicting reports of higher numbers) descended upon the capital city of Uganda for a technology conference dedicated to the topic of geospatial data and information systems."

- Jonathan Gosier writing in his AppAfrica.Net blog about the AfricaGIS conference this week. The review covers the venue and social media participation. This effort could explain the huge number of Googlers at the event.

My Thoughts on Google Navigation Beta

Last I looked there some 300 news articles about Google announcement yesterday of the beta of Google Navigation for the Android (and perhaps other) platforms. Stocks of PND players like TomTom and Garmin were down (though there were other reasons for the slipping stock prices, too). Mostly, though the sentiment was "Google will be killing off another industry." Perhaps.

After a day of watching I have just a few thoughts.

Back when Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ were acquired by TomTom and Nokia the general sentiment was that no one could possibly challenge "the big two." Why? Collecting and confirming mapping datasets for the large areas they already cover (with very good, if not perfect, accuracy) was too hard and costly and they had such a big headstart. Smaller players, like AND and Germany's United Maps, have toughed it out, working to state their differentiations (better licensing for the former and feet on the ground to fill in the holes for the latter). Neither has taken on the big two, but my sense after speaking to senior company reps recently is that they are doing fine, thank you. No, no one seemed to think that Google, the company that wants to organize the world's information, was going to work to collect and conflate and update geodata. But, apparently, we were not thinking like Google. Sure Google still licenses some data (parcels and imagery and even some road data) but clearly, they've taken on the big two, the two that now have no only a headstart with data, but also a headstart in cell phone hardware and navigation, when paired with their larger owners.

My other thought as the errors in Google's dataset become the butt of James Fee's jokes and real concern by those in Canton, Ohio, is that most people are doing just fine with the data. I'm one of them. Even though we at Directions Media were the ones to contact Tele Atlas to confirm Google was using its own data in the U.S. a few weeks back, I use Google Maps exactly as I have in the past. In fact, two weeks ago I routed myself to, then printed out Google Maps of key areas in a marathon my friends were running north of Boston. No issues. In fact, until I returned home from the event, it didn't occur to me that maybe, just maybe that was not such a great choice. For most people, for most things, Google Maps seems to work fine. And, as many are pointing out, online navigation services that use NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas data have errors and sometimes route "oddly." Google has an edge that will likely get their quirks fixed better and faster: the "report a problem" button. I've written time and time again how the Yahoo and MapQuest and Ask.com (and other services) don't provide direct ways to report errors. Nor do NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas. Oh, the websites are out there (and TomTom does have MapShare). The number of people using those tools can't possibly compare to those using Google's in app "report a problem." The tools never got the buzz that Google Maps is getting, either.

Finally, on the day Google rolled out the new app NAVTEQ reported on a survey (which I guess it financed, though it was not stated in the press release) that showed that 72% of users of nav tools it powers are "ok" with ads in the apps and some 19% click on the ads. Another 6% actually visit the businesses. So, it seems Google's business model (advertising) is a good one.

Wednesday, October 28. 2009

Update: Google Maps News RoundUp

The non-news turned out to be true: Google announced a nav app (with voice, for free) for Android today.

Tuesday, October 27. 2009

The Canton, Ohio Google Issue

Big news: try to find Canton, Ohio on Google Maps and as of this morning, it's a "no go."

How did it happen? Well, someone made an error, admits Elaine Filadelfo, a spokeswoman for the California-based Web browsing company.

The renaming of Canton apparently happened last week when the folks at Google updated the maps. Someone reported the mistake to the company on Friday and the complaining hasn’t stopped.