Public Earth Launches
So about three years ago I came across a description of a soon to be service called Public Earth that was to become the defacto source of data related to geographic spaces. And as of yesterday it seems as though that site at publicearth.com is now live and ready for use… positioning itself as “the wiki for places”.
It initially “only” contains a database of 5 million places across 400 categories… interestingly, by comparison the nearly decade old Wikipedia just reached the 3 million (english) article milestone in August 2009. But even so, as you start to do some initial searches on Public Earth you quickly realize that even at 5 million records strong, there is still a lot not there.
It seems that 5 million places is just an initial seeding to get things kicked off. The hope seems to be that the general public takes it from here and starts to fill in the rest. Read more
Navteq.com: Consumer Map Portal or Showcase Site?
I saw the screaming headline from TechRadar this week that Navteq had launched a beta site at navteq.com ‘as a clear rival to Google Maps’ and the All Points Blog folks going along with the corporate line that it seems to be more of a showcase site. Since Navteq had acquired Mapsolute/Map24 over a year and a half ago, this development wasn’t totally out of left field, but it’s interesting to think about what is potentially going on here.
Navteq positions the new service simply as a “showcase” for their products and services, which makes a lot of sense, specifically highlighting that it will contain the most fresh data available. As they layer on new and interesting data and capabilities into the database, a directly accessable web front end seems like a great sales tool to be able to actually demonstrate some of these things in action immediately.
For example… lets say Navteq Direct Access just sold in McDonalds and corporate bigwigs want to be able to SEE the result of the deal now? Great have em go on over to navteq.com and search for “McDonalds” to see what they got. The inability to ‘look’ at a database as well as the lagtime in how long it takes some of their clients to pick up and distribute the new data must have been a challenge.
But on the flip side, this tool appears to now have pretty much taken over as the purpose of the main navteq.com website, with the previous content shuffled off to corporate.navteq.com. That and the fact that they did of course buy into a consumer map portal with Map24 has to make you wonder.
I also found it interesting that they seem quite interested in asking for feedback on and presumably improving the features and capabilities of the online map application. And much of the veribiage like “Let Navteq find it for you.” could be perceived as consumer oriented.
My guess is that they’re trying to delicately put their big toe in the water… or maybe their whole foot at this point, since Map24 could have been considered the big toe… to start to play in the consumer map portal market. But today in the here and now there is more money to be made from selling data to other map portals versus running your own as the uber map portal.
But potentially Navteq sees the day when this will no longer be the case and is preparing for that day?
Retail-ization of Google Search Results
What’s the fuss about? Well before the recent change if you performed a Google search for a term like “dentist”, “florist” or “lawyer” you would normally get links to other WEBPAGES with content about “dentists”, “florists” and “lawyers’. So for example a search for the term lawyers would have links to the Wikipedia entry on lawyers and lawyers.com, and about 100 million other pages like it… in other words connecting the Google searcher to more and more INFORMATION about the subject of “lawyers”. But now with the change that seems to have been put in place, Google is trying to infer the intent of the searcher in some instance… assuming that maybe the user doesn’t want to find more INFORMATION about lawyers in the general sense, but instead wants to be able to locate a real nearby lawyer.
In case you’re wondering, Google evidently uses standard IP lookup to determine the location of the searchers computer in order to give the appropriate geographically relevant results… see above an example of the SERP from a search for the term ‘coffee’ from a PC in midtown Manhattan.
Enormous leap toward Google embracing location awareness as a core element of search? Or simply Google trying to further improve the search experience and giving people the results that they most often want?
55% chance that New York joins the EU by July, BTW nice maps!
If you haven’t already checked it out, go have a look at geocommons.com… it’s a web mapping initiative by a company called FortiusOne which essentially make its easier to work with and display data on map overlays. There are a ton of interesting datapoints (including the crazy KGB guys) that you can search through from the site, to look at various data all from a geographic perspective… like mortgage foreclosures by zip code, wine distribution in the U.S. and my favorite the Top 25 College Football coaches salary map… evidently they take their football very seriously throughout the Texas Republic.
You Deserve a Rake Today at Ickdonalds
Some interesting posts over at Blumenthals.com (currently one of my new favorite blogs along with Maperture) about Google’s decision to allow anyone to modify Google Maps placemarkers and the information contained within, until the listing is claimed by the true listing ‘owner’. It turns out that disgruntled customers (or employees) are taking the opportunity to disparage businesses that have wronged them by taking over their listing and doing not so nice things to it… perhaps you’ll really enjoy the fries from that Ickdonalds, even if it is strangely situated in the middle of Lake Erie!
It does bring up some interesting issues like why in the world would Google not regulate this more closely and why they feel the need to allow users to have free reign over a core part of a Google product… even when it has the potential to erode the quality of the product.
I think the answer is tied to both the economic and ideals over at Google.
While Google of course has more money than God and can and does spend money easily without a clear path to a return on investment, the time and effort it would take to develop a monitoring and filtering technology to handle this is not insignificant, particularly for something like Google Maps which is probably not yet a significant contributor of revenue. In fact Google set this precedent as the preferred modus operandi back when they acquired YouTube and opted at first just to take down copyright infringing content rather than trying to filter videos as they went up. The Viacom suit of course changed that.
What it also seems to be saying is that the current state of POI map data is not where it needs to be. Afterall, if everything was accurate and up to date, why would you need to leverage the crowdsourcing in the first place. And if Google WERE to build or license something similar to what they used to filter for copyright infringement for YouTube, they’d need a “master copy” of the “correct” data against which to cross reference… which of course doesn’t exist and would be a full time job to create and maintain… ask Navteq… and besides if they had that in the first place, there would be no need to crowdsource it and the issue would be moot.
The other part of the answer is that Google is not a content company… ie their mission “is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible” … so nothing in there about creating original information itself or ensuring the quality of the information, they just help you find it… no matter how much it may suck. So the ideal in Googleland would likely be that all the POIs just existed out there in the world and they would happily make a copy, store, index and help you find the stuff you’re looking for and be on their merry way.
But alas, all the worlds information doesn’t always cooperate they way you’d sometimes like.
Tid Bits from TeleAtlas 2007 Full Year Results
It’s all driven by the PND market for TeleAtlas right now…
Overall revenue increased 17%
• Six of the eight leading portable navigation device providers worldwide use Tele Atlas maps.
• PND growth 35% – 14.7 Million map units (bundled with PND sale).
• Map units in PND average selling price was just over 11 euro
• America’s PND revenue grew 136% year over year
• Wireless grew 66% on the backs of customer’s like Google, RIM, Mappy and Wayfinder
• Also helped by selection of Teleatlas to power Google Maps for mobile and Google Earth in Europe
• TomTom was largest customer representing 32% of revenue
• Automotive business saw declines in part due to loss of VW business, although picked up BMW business which should ship in 2008
• Expects 2008 revenue between 375 – 385 euro, versus 308 euro in 2007
