Personally, I don't care which company Google licenses its mapping data from, as long as it is accurate. 

-Eric Zeman, Information Week

When asked about implications of the Google deal with regards to Navigation on the iPhone...

We are making sure that navigation is an application that is allowed.  If there is any restriction on the platform, that indeed has to do with the restrictions that we have in our contracts. Navigation is allowed, provided that the right fees are paid

- Alain De Taeye, Founder, Tele Atlas

Capturing and leveraging user contributed data (voluntarily or inadvertently produced) is the new business of the Web, enterprise computing, and Mobile.  The idea is that if user data can be harnessed and made sense of through backend analysis, then whoever has the most of it gains the strategic and competitive advantage by growing smarter through collective wisdom generated by millions of people unknowingly amassed into one monster publishing organism.  This is of course just a theory though because anything generated unknowingly, organically, and in chaos is by definition constantly mutating and without predictability, constancy, or deliberate decision making intelligence.  Ok Darwin.  

While the Web, and to a lesser extent mobile, have clearly evolved towards crowd-smart hyperspaces of information based on mass contribution, it's hard to draw a similar parallel for GIS mapping and maps.  Aside from OpenStreetMap, which is nothing more than a social experiment aimed at challenging authority and reducing expert-edited premium goods to a commodity, there really aren't any sources of real map data (sorry chumps, dots don't count).  The real stuff of choropleth regions, complex networks, and continuous fields of environmental phenomenon are part of a school of GIS professionalism where cartography and geostatistical interpretation is science, and the skills of geographical interpretation are rooted in mathematics and other scholarly pursuits requiring people to take time to study and learn.  

To argue for this favor of discipline, I leave you with an example map from Google with a piece of user-created geodata, devoid of any expert-edited oceanic basemap information such as bathymetry, buoys, passages, channel restrictions, etc.  Do you see the value?  No. It's the data, stupid, that is missing - the expert-edited variety. 

In exchange for Nokia N95's and $250, 100 University of California at Berkeley students have signed themselves up to become part of a human sensor network experiment for modeling Bay Area traffic.  According to project research director Alexandre Bayen, the Mobile Century experiment is "applying data assimilation algorithms to traffic flow models (hyperbolic first order conservation laws) to integrate measurements from cellular phones into the estimation of the velocity field on the highway. Applications include travel time prediction, estimation of traffic density and congestion and ramp metering."

-ZDNet

Dr Batty says he's coming out of the woodwork soon to unleash his spatial networking invention onto the facebook masses.  In other developments, team FOKUS is equally boiling-up some pioneering broth to not only include geospatial contexts but others like presentity, unified calling & conferencing, and instant messaging coupled with geospatial. 

Hyperlocal content of the citizen-generated variety isn't hard to come by these days, it's harder to filter its abundance for relevancy.  Paul Lamb in the Idea Lab at PBS suggests using mobile GPS/Location to not only filter and automate proxemic distribution, but also to simplify contribution and reporting in the case of hyperlocal news.  These types of location-based symbiotic content management systems can (and should) be used with any community-of-interest information service - here's a couple maritime examples off the cuff - I've been thinking about boats today. 

• A fishing service that uses contributed geotagged multimedia hot spots for anglers.  Today they use radios and backcountry tips usually found in local retail stores
  
• A sailing/boating service that offers regional mariners up-to-date audio media on ports, harbors, anchorages, and prices, plus descriptions of places frequented.  Today most sailors use out-of-date printed sources of information which lack much needed subjectivity and bias based on user experiences
  

Aaron Katsman thinks P-Nav devices are "just another way that as a society we are getting lazier and dumber".  On average, most car drivers (on a daily basis) commute from home to work/school and back again.  Places frequented in between are etched into brains like a geointuition.  A box telling them it's there and how to get to it is like listening to a broken record of life - just like staring down the barrel of an electron from a TV.  Someone please reverse the brain-shrinking by making these systems more interactive with access to content that changes - geoviews published by interest groups, communities, and loved ones.   

-BloggingStocks 

Just because it's technically possible to do something from an engineering perspective, doesn't always mean that you should do it.  For example, TomTom's integration with Google Maps for POIs (be they expert edited or user generated) allows users to update their P-Navs with the freshest content via a save to GPS option in Google maps.  The data is then uploaded to the device via a desktop offline sync and then users are ready to go.  Sounds like the iTunes-iPod paradigm to me, and well, I think most acknowledge that works just fine for music content.  So why not maps? 

A connected PND with access to the Internet doesn't make it any better than an offline one.  In this particular argument, adding a chip to connect to the Internet means the user gets charged twice - once for the device and many many times more for the service - and that sucks.  I'll take the offline iTunes-iPod paradigm, thanks.   

The last question of this morning's Garmin earnings call set the record straight with a priceless answer.  "You can call it fear, you can call it strategy.  We think our planned acquisition of Tele Atlas is inline with our corporate strategy."  Following that remark, Garmin, like Nokia-NAVTEQ before them, and TomTom-TA before them, again said the same thing - "the acquisition will not impact the open market conditions of supply to those who use our map data."  If that's true, then why does Garmin feel pressured to step up and counter TomTom's bid?!

The Microsoft VE team outdid themselves again and released a ton of features in the latest Live Maps and Virtual Earth Gemini release—what the author calls the "Live Maps 2.0" release. With some reports suggesting the effort narrowed to 411 and mobile local Search, there's much more to this release than mobile. Case in point—check out the photosynth drapes atop their amazing Vexcel 3D imagery.  This stuff is in a league of its own!

Motricity's move to acquire InfoSpace's mobile platform business is the latest in a series of recent content & applications consolidation indicators, in a mobile data industry experiencing another growth spurt [with the associated pains].  How many more M&As will we see over the next 18 months?  

For this one, in addition to gaining dozens of Carrier-distribution partnerships along with a content & applications distribution platform augmenting an already mature Carolina offering, Motricity also now joins the league of mobile local Search providers battling for local ad biz.