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

One of the things we (meaning the LBS community) talked about in the early days of 911, was using call log histories to improve wireless coverage.  The idea is simple.  Take identity-ridden, non-intrusive logged caller locations (which include signal strengths) and create an interpolated GIS model to then isolate under served areas denoted by weak signals in a continuous field- red being strong, yellow being weak.  We saw this GIS modeling work as an opportunity to replace expensive drive-by systems used at the time by mobile operators to improve their coverage and optimize service.  While the idea was noble, it never took.  All the carriers we worked with just let the data hit floor and it was swept away into dust bins or saved only for odd court-issued subpoenas.  What a waste.

Since then, lots of folks have caught on to the idea that anonymous logged mobile locations in any transaction context can be used for all sorts of modeling and new data creation.  From traffic models to isolating target-rich advertising zones, modeling based on post-transaction analytics and business intelligence is the new trick of the Google era. 

Researchers at Northeastern University are with it (I think most around the world are.  City University in London was doing this in the late 90s).  Northeastern recently used 100,000 anonymous mobile locations to map social patterns of geographic interaction.  No surprise - we humans are for the most part sedentary creatures, staying within 20 miles of our homes (begs the question why we need TomTom's!).  Researchers hope to extend the data findings into epidemiological analyses and use it in a similar context to John Snow's famous cholera outbreak analysis map of central London produced in 1854.  It's good to see this advanced GIS work finally happening with LBS...

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. 

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.   

MapmyIndia reversed the map data provider sell-out trend with a non-conformist move down the Navigation stack to maintain independence but still offer D2C Nav via a branded P-Nav device—the MapmyIndia Navigator manufactured by Delphi—a move that makes sense in an emerging market and when you "have more coverage and more detail than any other provider out there"

-Rohan Verma, CE Info Systems 

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!

This email arrived my Inbox this morning.  With AND now on the block following the map data provider trend to sell, who's next?  What about the imagery suppliers?  I didn't think too much on it then, but at last May's Where 2.0 event, Jack Dangermond [ESRIs President who has seen it all] said "there are two sources for data - Microsoft and Google".  Funny, the map data providers are now doing everything in their power to ensure that statement doesn't come true.   

Nokia's series of LBS bomb drops on the industry over the last two years has changed perspectives, attitudes, and business models overnight—the kind of disruption to be expected when the worlds #1 "multimedia computer manufacturer" gets serious about a line of business strategic to continued worldwide domination. When emerging competitive threats from new disruptive entrants such as Apple [and purportedly Google] begin to surface, and their Mobility strategies hone in on Location as the key asset for contextual mobility, you'd expect the world's mobile leader to take note, and make aggressive competitive moves to counter the threat. Nokia's acquisition of digital map data provider and world leader NAVTEQ is just that move. I'm relieved NAVTEQ is joining the community that built the LBS landscape now diversifying beyond Telecom-specific offerings into other converged areas, versus becoming part of a community that thus far has reduced map data value to worthlessness at the expense of gains from other sources of sponsored revenues.

That said, as I've muddled through the thousands of pieces of press covering the Nokia-NAVTEQ story, and as I compared NAVTEQs move following Tele Atlas' own to join TomTom [which could lead to a further subsequent buyout by another suitor], I thought perhaps both aren't so great for Americans.  Nokia will be the first to admit their US presence is somewhat challenged—it always has been thanks to deregulation and a myriad of wireless technologies and spectrum in this country beyond GSM. TomTom is the European offline P-Nav leader but struggles against Garmin's leadership in the US. Both Nokia and TomTom don't do well here and their historical and future focus is elsewhere. With CRIB nations representing the bulk of the mobile demand going forward, focus will head in that direction.  What will be left of the hometown?  Is there an opportunity lost, or one yet to emerge?   

I was contemplating the future today [...I know, very dangerous], and tried Google Trends to capture historical global Web Search trends for personal navigation devices and map data, limiting my search keywords to Garmin, TomTom, Magellan, Mio, NAVTEQ, and Tele Atlas.

General deviations include traffic spikes during the holiday purchasing season, plus two notable anomalies for TomTom. The first coincides with the release of Google Earth and Maps in the summer of 2005 [most agree this time marked the beginning of explosive mainstream awareness in mapping].  The second arrives a month ago when TomTom announced their intentions to acquire Tele Atlas [reflected equally in the NAVTEQ-Tele Atlas comparison chart].  Other interesting trends include Magellan's relative flat traffic [which could indicate a well established brand], and Mio's domination in the news pointing to their aggressive marketing. One last observation... I conducted the analysis for all countries served by Google.  When limiting the analysis to the US, Garmin inched above TomTom, while the NAVTEQ-Tele Atlas numbers remained steady.