Google currently sources data for their maps from a large variety of sources, but I don’t think it should come as too much of a surprise to see Google make their own maps in the very near future if they so wish. With the all the street level initiatives under way as well as the recent acquisition of Imaging America many of the pieces are there for Google to begin building build their own navigation maps from data they already own or can now more easily acquire. For simple road navigation the existing maps are likely more than adequate and my guess is that NavTeq and TeleAtlas have priced the maps low enough for online players like Google that there is not a financial motivation for developing their own. Only 5% of Navteq revenue comes from Internet and Wireless, which must means many orders of magnitude smaller revenue on a per-map render or user basis that in the auto segment… my guess is that this is in part a defensive maneuver, to keep folks like Google from turning from a customer into a competitor.

One short year ago, Navteq shares were getting beaten up in part because of concern by Wall Street types that technology such as the very high resolution photos that Imaging America’s equipment makes possible, would soon mean that detailed maps could be created by a variety of new market players. Buyers of the images would simply need to use the images to build their own maps using a few folks in a back office somewhere using some CAD software rather than via the more expensive and time consuming process of driving the nations’ roadways. That threat still exists, particularly for consumer navigation quality maps, but I don’t think that is as interesting to Google as the acquisition of previously unmapped items ranging from fire-hydrants to pine trees and street signs which will continue to feed the need for more and more data that is Google’s lifeblood.

Then a few days later I open up an email about a Directions Magazine article about how a town is nationalizing its mapmaking. The town of Johannesburg is taking matters into its own hands and embarking on an aggressive project looking to create its own LIS (land information system) to create a centralized and comprehensive resource to service its citizens improving “deliveries to their properties, response time of emergency services and delivery of council services.”

Now I am not a fan of nationalizing stuff in general, whether maps or banks, but it did get me thinking again about the experience of finding things via digital maps and how we are not where we need to be here in the U.S.

Mike Blumenthal had an interesting post on his blog a couple of days ago pointing out just such an example. It seems that a bunch of nefarious pirates have hijacked the business listings that are later used in places like Google Maps or your cell phone providers 411 services, and have inserted hundreds if not thousands of bogus business listings for locksmiths. When an un suspecting customer calls one of the bogus businesses, lets just say that when they arrive the business practices are not always above board.

His post reminded me of my experience trying to use a variety of LBS apps on my iPhone to find an ice cream parlor the other day, while nothing nefarious happened, it was just plain lousy. We bribed my two sons that if they were well behaved at a “grown up dinner” at a Korean BBQ restaurant that we’d treat them to ice cream… so upon leaving the restaurant I of course expected finding a nearby ice cream place should take all of 20 seconds on busy 34th street in midtown Manhattan, armed with a half dozen or so location/finding apps that I’d dutifuly installed on my iPhone.

I was wrong. I ended up using Google which sent us on a wild goose chase throughout Macy’s, but quickly tried a few others and here is a sampling of the advice I was offered by the location aware applications I looked at:

Google Maps (results: probably the best of the weak lot, but still sent us on wild goose chase around Macy’s and not very consistent with providing good information on businesses)
- Empire Ice Cream (presumably at top of empire state building? I didn’t see it on the ground floor and the security guy had no idea, but the link from Google was to their health inspector page where they had 4 points violation last May so we decided not to find out.)
- Three different Baskin Robbins locations
- Emack & Bolio’s which 20 minutes, and 10 escalator rides later we discovered didn’t exist, but there was a Ben & Jerry’s on the fourth floor deep inside the massive Macy’s store.

Yelp (result: not bad but one listing was not even a retail store, one store was closed and Yelp missed a number of places that were closer)
- Pinkberry
- La Salle
- Crazy Bananas
- Silhouette Brands (not a retail store)
- Tasti DeLite (currently closed)

Loopt (result was bad, 3 of the 5 were not ice cream places at all, and closer ice cream places were not shown)
- Rare (a steak and burger place)
- Murray Hill Market (grocery/bodega)
- Crazy Bananas
- Subtle Tea (a tea room)
- Pinkberry

Limbo (results were bad: two were not particularly close, one was maybe 100 floors up, two didn’t exist)

First, the geo encoding is performed by Navteq in case anyone was wondering.

Second, besides the usual suspects of Navteq and TeleAtlas, I was surprised at the number of other map related resources that are working together behind the scenes to power Google Maps… many not so well known names such as Euro Geographics, Top Map and GeoNext.

Third, also interesting to note that the foundation of business POI data seems to be from infoUSA and Acxiom… but Google of course adds to this through both business listings submitted via the Google Local Business Center and its patent on scraping address data from web pages.

I guess with all these different sources, I shouldn’t find it surprising that I can often more reliably find a local retail businesses location through a search on Google Maps than through the retailers own web store locator.

For anyone looking for a new business to start, I can see this area of Digital Location Management developing into a full blown cottage industry, as we’ve seen with search engine optimization (SEO).

As the digital world turns more and more to finding things via maps, whether on the web, a PND or mobile phone, the reliable representation of retailers on those digital maps will become increasingly important and a consultancy/management market will need to be created to help anyone with a retail presence in the bricks and mortar world to ensure that their locations are properly reflected in all the various digital map data sources for such information, and to ensure that retail location information is accurate and updated.

What do you think?

News
http://twitter.com/directionsapb – Directions All Points Blog
http://twitter.com/directionsmag – Directions Magazine
http://twitter.com/geospatialnews – GeoSpatial News
http://twitter.com/LBSzone – LBS Zone
http://twitter.com/geotechnology – GISUser.com
http://twitter.com/MobileLocation

People
http://twitter.com/geoparadigm
http://twitter.com/localseoguide – Andrew Shotland (Local SEO)
http://twitter.com/davidmihm – David Mihm (Local Search and SEO)
http://twitter.com/unitedmaps – United Maps
http://twitter.com/vicchi – Gary Gale (Yahoo Geo Products)
http://twitter.com/gsterling – Greg Sterling (local search, Internet analyst)
http://twitter.com/dan_gilmartin – Dan Gimartin (Where.com)
http://twitter.com/SeanGorman – Sean Gorman (Fortius One)
http://twitter.com/twbell – Tyler Bell (Geo Technologist, ex Yahoo)
http://twitter.com/nick_b – Nick Black (CloudMade)
http://twitter.com/copetersen – Christian O Petersen
http://twitter.com/mprioleau – Marc Prioleau
http://twitter.com/muratny – Murat Aktihanoglu (Centrl)
http://twitter.com/schapsis – Claudio Schapsis (LBS Exec)
http://twitter.com/StevenFeldman – Steven Feldman
http://twitter.com/si1very – Chris Silver (Local Search and SEO)
http://twitter.com/ChrisPendleton – Chris Pendleton (Microsoft)
http://twitter.com/JuhaC – Juha Christiansen
http://twitter.com/mblumenthal – Mike Blumenthal (Google Maps, Search)
http://twitter.com/dens – Dennis Crowley (Foursquare)
http://twitter.com/jspinney – Jon
http://twitter.com/chris_ackermann – Chris Ackermann  (Travel Channel)
http://twitter.com/skobbler – Philip Kandal (skobbler)
http://twitter.com/tedmorgan – Ted Morgan (Skyhook Wireless)

 
Corporations
http://twitter.com/cloudmade – Cloudmade
http://twitter.com/loopt – Loopt
http://twitter.com/click2map – Click2Map
http://twitter.com/MapQuest – MapQuest
http://twitter.com/ESRI – ESRI
http://twitter.com/YahooGeo – Yahoo Geo Team
http://twitter.com/Cisco_Mobile – Cisco Systems
http://twitter.com/MobileInnovator – Samsung
http://twitter.com/deCarta – DeCarta
http://twitter.com/NN4D – Navteq Dev
http://twitter.com/googlemapsdev – Google Maps Dev

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

“Garmin Mobile XT is easy-to-use and affordable, with no monthly charges,” said Charles Morse, Garmin’s director of mobile and PND marketing. “It’s a one-time investment that gives customers full-featured GPS navigation on their smartphone whenever and wherever they need it, including areas outside of wireless network coverage.”

Garmin Mobile XT is preloaded on a microSD card (with miniSD and standard SD card converter) that includes Garmin navigation software for the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico, or Europe. Once the card is inserted into a compatible smartphone with embedded GPS, the Garmin Mobile XT application will launch automatically. Customers are then greeted with Garmin’s intuitive “Where to?” and “View map” welcome screen. With a few screen or button taps, customers can easily route to a specific street address or choose from millions of points of interest — such as restaurants, hotels, ATMs, and gas stations. In addition to turn-by-turn, voice prompted directions, users will also see their exact position on a detailed moving map. If a turn is missed along the way, a new route will be recalculated automatically.

Thanks to Garmin’s vast product line and ability to leverage technology from the other GPS markets Garmin serves, Garmin Mobile XT builds in unique features such as support for travel guides, topo maps and custom points of interest, as well as advanced features such as route planning with saved routes, custom avoidances and visible trip logs. Garmin Mobile XT users also have the benefit of routing to the location of a contact in their phone’s address book or to a calendar appointment (on supported platforms).

Garmin Mobile XT also includes PeerPoints(TM), a powerful feature enabling users to send their position to any other phone as well as view and navigate to the location of other Garmin Mobile XT users. PeerPoints is the perfect way to keep track of friends and family and navigate to them with the touch of a button.

In addition to navigation, Garmin Mobile XT includes free access to Garmin Online(TM) so that customers have useful, constantly-updating information at their fingertips like real-time traffic, fuel prices, hotel prices and weather forecasts. The real-time traffic service from traffic.com identifies accidents, road construction or other incidents affecting traffic, and routes users around the congestion. The fuel price feature displays the filling station’s name, fuel price, type of fuel, and distance to the station (U.S. only). Garmin Mobile XT users can also help customers find hotel information, ratings and discounts from hotels.com. Real-time weather information provided by Custom Weather lets users see weather forecasts at their current location or anywhere in the world. Garmin Online is accessed through the phone’s wireless data service.

Garmin Mobile XT is available now for a suggested retail price of $99 in the U.S. Garmin Mobile XT products purchased in the U.S. include maps of all North America. In Europe, Garmin Mobile XT includes map data for 30 countries, a feature that makes it a valuable software to GPS-enabled mobile phones UK. Map data is provided by NAVTEQ(TM) — a world leader in premium-quality mapping.

Visit the Garmin Mobile Buyer’s Guide, http://www.garmin.com/mobile, for more information or to purchase Garmin Mobile XT.

Well it seems that the connected PND is getting closer and closer to reality. TomTom announced that they’re working with Google to allow users to send locations to their portable navigation devices through the “send to GPS” feature within Google Maps. Try the video above, it pretty much explains it all. I am sure that no one at TomTom would admit it but they seem to be conceding that so far Google has developed the best method for getting accurate and updated POI data via their multi pronged approach (purchased data + Google Local Business Center + html page scraping patent). If consumers take advantage of this on a regular basis I wonder if TeleAtlas could also be keeping a copy of these POIs for themselves as a tool to help plug holes and fine tune in its own TeleAtlas POI database? If so, TomTom should promote the heck out of this service, with funding from the TeleAtlas product development budget!

On a related note, I am still not sure why this type of process still requires use of the tethered TomTom Home connection. Wouldn’t it be better if folks could pass this information around over the air? Say you’re trying to find a place to meet up with someone navigating around with a TomTom device, it would be great to pick a place to meet on a Google map and just send to your friends device directly via a wireless connection. I can certainly understand PND manufacturers not wanting to get into the MVNO businesses, but this is the logical next step and with the bluetooth connection already present in so many of these devices, all the parts are already in place. Anyone with any clue as to why this is not yet happening? Whats the hold up to sending map or POI data to PNDs over the air?

Now in the olden days when you just bought a printed foldable map this didn’t really matter much, but nowadays in the modern inter networked world of digital maps and folks creating a dizzying array of new services helping connect people with locations, it matters more.  Now within a single stand alone application like say a TomTom navigation device there is probably not much thought put into what you name a place, but in the web2.0 world where interoperability and information sharing reign, everyone needs to know what location everyone else is talking about when someone is talking about the business at 4151 North Central Expressway.

So rather than just getting everyone to try to agree on a standard, which could take years and years and would probably be a lot like herding cats, Placecast has announced today that it has developed a technological solution to the whole problem and they’re opening it up for free use.

The product is called the Placecast Match API…. and it’s described as “a Rosetta Stone for location data”. For those that need a refresh on their ancient Egpytian artifacts, this basically just means that they will provide a way to translate between the different “languages” that different services use to describe locations for the purposes of enabling interoperability between those services.

There is a great article on Tech Crunch that demonstrates how this problem manifested itself in the hot area of mobile social networking and the battle of the check-ins where folks may want to check in somewhere on a number of different services without having to fire up each service independently and do it manually. Given the viral and social nature of services like Foursquare and Gowalla, I guess it’s not surprising that this is where we’d first see the need for better interoperability between services.

One area where this is particularly interesting is around the area of location based advertising. One of the things that needs to happen to help ramp up growth in this area is more scale in order to make hyper local and location oriented advertising finally get on the radar screen of folks that control advertising dollars. It’s not that there are not a lot of consumers using these types of services today, there are… but usage is spread around among a lot of player.  Consumers may look up directions via Google Maps, Yahoo Maps or Mapquest, others may rely on their Garmin or TomTom devices, while urbanites without cars may just be checking in with FourSquare, Goawalla or Loopt or using one of a hundreds of local discovery services like UrbanSpoon, Yelp, Where, Geodellic, etc.

The amount of traffic to any one hyper local area on any one of these systems is likely not significant enough to create a media buy, but centrally tether them all together with a common reference point and pretty soon you have what begins to look like the beginnings of a network… a point of interest advertising network. 

Putting banners in apps and on wap pages is one approach to the location based advertising opportunity, but there certainly seems to be just as much opportunity if not more around “listings ads” connecting mobile users with the businesses they’re looking for from mobile search and discovery services and then capturing, sharing and aggregating the related check ins at scale across the ecosystem.

I am not saying that this is the Placecast end game, but something like the Match API and other similar offerings by competitors certainly seem like it could help spawn competitors to what folks like CitySearch are doing with CityGrid around the creation of ad networks tied to places.

What will be interesting  is to see how publisher view participating in such a system and the more thorough socialization of content from their system… when the depth, richness and accuracy of that content may be a significant source of unique competitive advantage.

Their platform and API support seemed to rival that of their 800lb gorilla competitors and being a small company, we figured we may get better individual support from someone like Placebase. And although I would have loved to have supported the little guy, ultimately we didn’t end up using them… there were a few factors involved, but price was one of them. But nonetheless their offering was impressive.

As a stand alone business trying to go after a mass market they were at a distinct disadvantage competing head to head with the likes of Google and Microsoft, and they seemed to be concentrating on more personal level of support for more sophisticated/complex users needs who wanted to take advantage of the platforms flexibility around layering a variety of geographically related data on top of a map… I got the feeling that they did a lot of government related work and were more likely to have a client needing to show the 100 year flood plain rather than the latest mobile social networking application.

I’ve seen a couple articles criticize Placebase for the inferior quality of the underlying map data… an argument which misses the point of the company. The company is trying to be a platform for others to create create a great map based experience… and from what I’ve seen the company’s PushPin solution is significantly more robust in its ability to handle a wide variety of underlying data and integrate it into the map experience. The Placebase business is not about having the best underlying data, its about the best way to present and manipuate underlying data as well as the tools to help create a great consumer experience. To criticize them for the quality of the underlying data would be like criticizing Facebook for only having profiles of ugly people.

To me, Apple’s interest in aquiring this company makes all the sense in the world. Apple was already a leader in opening location up to the masses with the way it made location front and center in the iPhone, but it doesn’t make sense to play that role as a leader in acquiring location and then just handing off the consumer experience for each location oriented interaction over to Google.

Location based services and location based advertising will only continue to grow in importance and the map displaying experience is just too important for Apple to continue to outsource.

Before getting into the details of this, a couple of interesting stats from the MetaPlaces conference that I picked up last week as background:
• There are currently 21 million small and medium sized local businesses spending an average of $4k per year on yellow page advertising (~$25B ) and other local advertising
• 75% of Internet user have used the internet in the past three months to look up a place on a map or to get driving directions

In other words:
1. there is a lot of money being spent locally, by local business to get customers to patronize their businesses
2. customers are increasingly consulting with internet base maps to find their way around and to find new businesses to patronize

So it’s just a matter of time before those local business owners begin to direct some of that $4k per year to the providers of internet and mobile map services.

For users of Google map, the Place Pages make it easier for you to find some of the important information about places in a single, simple webpage without having to interrupt your experience and getting side tracked on a mini research expedition to determine if the place is worth a visit. Place pages include an ‘entire page of rich details, like photos, videos, a Street View preview, nearby transit, reviews and related websites.’ According to Mike Sterling, Google is running a separate algorithm that ranks content providers like review sites within the pages.

While certainly a benefit for consumers and users of Google Maps, you can’t help but note that this will be a very compelling tool to help Google in its efforts to sell in advertising to local brick and mortar businesses which may not have had a meaningful website or online presence before now.

Businesses that have a big, or solely, e-commerce business have for years been big users of search engine marketing , but the e-commerce market is still just a tiny fraction of the total commerce market, and Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt famously noted in Davos last year how a truly mobile Web, offering a new generation of location-based advertising, is set to unleash a “huge revolution.” Google Place Pages are just the beginning of this revolution…. the battle on Yodle and Yelp Hill.

Google Place Pages pull brick and mortar businesses online whether they like it or not. They now all have a web page at http://maps.google.com/places/us/city/street/ZIP/-business-name which in many cases may be quite simple information, but all the better reason to engage with Google to claim that listing and potentially turn into an AdWords client.

A quiet, but nonetheless impressive and potentially game changing development.