These three trends are coming together in new and interesting ways: now just about every smartphone comes with an onboard GPS, further driving down their costs. Hyperlocal search is becoming more important as businesses try to forge better ways to connect with their customers in a specific geographic area: witness the rise of apps such as Foursquare, Facebook Places, and Gowalla, which allow you to "check in" your location and find out where your friends are located within a few hundred feet. Another example of this trend is Everyblock.com, a hyperlocal news site that is currently available for 16 different cities around the US. On this site, you can search on a particular address and pull up events happening nearby, calls for city services, crime reports and properties for sale.
And the number of open source mapping tools is also on the rise, making it easier for programmers to add mapping features to their apps without having to tie themselves to a particular mapping provider.
Online mapping used to be simple: go to a Web site, enter an address, and view the street map of the surroundings. Then came a series of innovations from Google, who sent out teams of drivers with car-mounted cameras to capture the street view, showing homes and other buildings as they drove by. (Google also got into trouble with capturing open Wi-Fi networks as they photographed things, but let's not get into that imbroglio right now.)
All that has changed lately, and the mapping arena is getting more complex. Innovations are happening literally all over the world: Take a look at this sample video from Nokia's Ovi mapping unit (or check out the screenshot below), showing you a more natural three-dimensional view flying over San Francisco where you can see buildings and terrain much as you would in real life.
And there's another app from Pete Warren that takes all the data from where your iPhone has been (you did know that it stores this information for the past year, did you?) and consolidates it into a map.
Maps also quickly go stale as the physical world changes: new streets are added, buildings are built or torn down, and floods and other natural disasters change the face of the planet. So mapmakers are looking to outsource these updates to the people who live nearby and who are interested in keeping things up-to-date.
Google recognized this and announced in April that anyone could submit an update to its maps with its MapMaker service. These updates are posted to the main Google Maps collection, starting with US-based locations; Each entry will be reviewed before being posted for accuracy. And, this being Google, you can watch in real-time as people add points of interest to Google's maps. This is a clever enhancement, because it means that Google's maps are getting more detailed and accurate every minute, as hundreds or thousands of users annotate and update the maps.
But Google isn't the only one making it easy to add crowd-based content to its maps, and indeed Microsoft's Bing, Yahoo Maps, and MapQuest have their own collection of maps. The open source community has also gotten behind mapping, and there are a number of tools that make it easy to collect geographic data from mobile phones and publish it across the Internet, including Crowdmap.com, OpenStreetMap.org, and MapServer.org. These services promise to do to maps what WordPress and Blogger did for blogging and Web sites in general. A good comparison of several mapping services can be found at Wikipedia.
These tools make it easier to do things such as collating all pictures taken at a given landmark, showing the progress over time of development of a particular block. You could also easily create a map that pinpoints all of your corporate office locations so that customers can find the closest one by either entering their ZIP code or clicking on a map. Before open source mapping came along, you would have to learn Google's or MapQuest's particular programming interfaces and write code that would only work with that individual mapping provider.
As an example of what is possible from the open mapping interfaces, take a look at the iPhone app Skobbler. It provides spoken turn-by-turn directions (unlike Google's iPhone app) for free (unlike most turn-by-turn apps for the iPhone).
Not all is rosy with the mapping world, though. One of the weakest links is the GPS satellite network itself. There are a number of GPS jammers (illegal in US and many other countries), which are now commonly available at numerous online electronics stores for $250 or less. The issue is two-fold: GPS signals are easy to block, given that the satellites don't put out much power to begin with. And the jamming sources are very hard to locate, also because they don't radiate much power to do their dirty work. One jammer -- a trucker trying to get around paying tolls on the New Jersey Turnpike -- located near Newark Airport took months to track down. A trucker who was trying to get around paying tolls on the adjoining New Jersey Turnpike would interfere with a new system that the airport was trying to deploy.
To prevent this, the Defense Department has proposed a smartphone app to detect GPS jammers that people can use to report problems. Of course, then we all have to be persuaded to keep these apps running (and suffer the battery life consequences on our phones too).
No comments:
Post a Comment