Here Be Dragons

Posted by Mike Walsh

1/23/08 10:42 PM

here_be_dragonsThere’s something big happening in the mapping space. All the indicators are there – significant M&A activity, a dramatic rise in the number of GPS enabled devices and exponential growth in geotagged content. Don’t be fooled. This is not Geography 2.0. Its something much more interesting.

For anyone in the location business, its deal time. In the last year, Nokia bought digital map company NAVTEQ for $8.1 billion, TomTom took out Tele Atlas for $2.8 billion, and there have been a dozen other smaller transactions. There are two forces driving this. Mobile players are waking up to the potential of personal navigation. And secondly, car navigation manufacturers have seen the opportunity to consolidate and scale their products into a broader web connected platform.

And what is that platform? Well, for starters - its more than just Google Earth. Like everyone else, I played with Google Earth for five minutes when it launched. I looked up my house, the Pyramids and the Eiffel Tower – and then I didn’t touch it again for ages. That is, until recently. You see the power of Google Earth was never really the cool satellite images at all. It was the ability to add extra layers of content. And its only lately that geotagged content has started to reach a critical mass.

2008 will be the year of location enabled devices.

According to iSuppli, there will be 250 million GPS-enabled phones shipping per annum by 2010 alone. Add to that GPS enabled cameras, cars, computers and other portable devices. The more consumers create content marked with location data the more what we know of as the Internet will begin to acquire a physical context. It’s what people are already calling the Geoweb.

New GPS units like Dash will not only show you directions but give you an overlay of reviews, rating, hyperlocal news and other web content. Mobile applications like Socialight will display notes that other people have left when you walk into a space they have been in previously. And many of us will start using personal location broadcast platforms like Dopplr, Plazes, Loki and the upcoming Fireagle from Yahoo to not only share what we are doing, but where we are going.

On my last trip to Tokyo I was fortunate to meet some of the researchers at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory. They were pondering an interesting question. Most of us generate a huge amount of digital content without even realising it. Photos, messages, music you listened to, places you went to. So how do you identify what’s important so that you can archive your memories?

The Sony researchers came up with an interesting solution to this problem. With a route tracking application they observed where a person went everyday. By separating the ordinary (going to work or the supermarket) from the memorable (holidays, a walk in the park, a day trip to another city) - you could create automatic content albums based on significant days.

This, to me, is a great example of what the Geoweb really stands for. Not just clever GPS car navigation units or 3D spinning globes, but a mesh of the real world with the organising logic of the web.  In truth, the more that our physical environment is mapped to online data platforms, the more the former will start to resemble the latter.

The webification of the world.

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