Map Happenings

Mapping Industry Tidbits, Activity and Musings

  • The Underlying Angst of Google Maps and Apple Maps

    So, if I may, I’ll start this week’s post with a little personal history:

    I first set foot in Silicon Valley back in 1985 with a freshly minted computer science degree from the University of York. Having only a tourist visa, a few hundred bucks in my pocket and no return ticket to the UK it was a case of “beggars can’t be choosers”.

    Little did I know the journey I was about to begin. 

    I stumbled around, dealing out my feeble CV, sorry, résumé, to anyone that would take it. After much unsolicited prodding and poking I arrived at just two options: one was with a somewhat boring pre-IPO relational database management company based in Redwood Shores1 and the other was with a rather exciting startup called Etak who had invented an in-vehicle navigation system, the likes of which you would only have seen in Q’s laboratory. It was an easy choice, and looking back most definitely the right one. 

    But Etak was way ahead of its time — about 20 years it turned out. It took that long before personal navigation devices — or “PNDs” as they were called at the time — started to become common. The price of the systems was partly to blame, many hundreds of dollars for a PND and thousands of dollars if you chose the navigation option from an auto OEM. Ouch.

    Mapping and navigation technology didn’t really reach the masses until February 5, 1996 when a new website called MapQuest launched. I was working at MapQuest at the time and, boy, was it thrilling stuff. Initially providing just interactive maps and later providing driving directions MapQuest took off like a rocket, riding the dot com wave to internet stardom. At that time If you got on a plane nearly everybody had their MapQuest printout, giving them turn-by-turn directions from the rental car facility to their ‘final’ destination. 

    Of course back in the late 1990s many people were still using paper maps. In the US it was the Rand McNally road atlas, in California it was the Thomas Brothers Guide. In London it was normally the “A-Z”.  But tremors ensued. Rand McNally’s response to MapQuest was, shall we say, “limited” and it wasn’t too long before business schools used Rand McNally vs. MapQuest as a case study on the impact of the internet. 

    With the advent of Google Maps in 2005, MapQuest sadly suffered a similar fate to Rand McNally. By then MapQuest had been acquired by AOL and AOL was wholly distracted with its acquisition of Time Warner. MapQuest was subsequently left to wither and Google took over. 

    But neither Rand McNally nor MapQuest suffered a fatal blow. Both still exist today (yes, really!)

    So now let’s fast forward to the present day. In the western world we have grown accustomed to two prominent mapping apps, one from a company based in Mountain View and another from a company based in Cupertino. Together they are the most dominant mapping apps in many countries around the world.2

    Upon launch their mission was almost identical to MapQuest. Their tag line could have easily been: “Find it, Get there!”

    This focus on finding a location and getting driving directions to a destination has remained the signature dish of these apps for many years. Now they both have a few more tasty morsels on their menu with the addition of navigation for pedestrians, public transit and, more recently, cycling. 

    But underlying all this has been a distinct ambition to offer more.  I think their aspiration has always been not only to enable “Find it, Get there!” but also to enable “Explore & Discover”. 

    You can see this through the evolution of the apps over the years. It was of course apparent with the inclusion of restaurant ratings and reviews. It has also been made clear with ever increasing features and eye candy to entice you to poke around more: from Google we got StreetView and, just announced, “immersive” maps. From Apple we got Flyover, Flyover tours, Look Around and, I would say, some rather delectable 3D city renderings.

    Google has remained steadfast in their process to crowdsource data, particularly for information about places. Apple, on the other hand, has tended to take a much more curated approach, as is their tradition. This difference is best illustrated by the now extensive set of guides from well known publishers that are built right into Apple Maps. 

    The question is, will all this effort work?

    Will people use Google Maps and Apple Maps as their favorite starting point for exploring where to go and discovering new places? Or will people just continue to use Google Maps and Apple Maps primarily for navigation?

    There’s been a lot of chatter about this lately. 

    Some of you may have seen the recent TechCrunch article where Google’s SVP for Knowledge and Information, Prabhakar Raghavan, stated:

    In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search … they go to TikTok or Instagram.

    Gulp. Pretty scary, right?

    I must credit Kevin Dennehy for pointing out this fascinating article from Slate on his Location Business News blog: Why I Use Snap and TikTok Instead of Google. It’s written by Julia Moon who’s starting her freshman year at Brown University in the fall. In it she says:

    I’m sure that idea sounds wild to older readers who are deeply enmeshed with Google’s simplistic search engines. But Raghavan’s research is spot-on. It all comes down to the fact that teenagers don’t just want straightforward information. We want a richer experience, one that is more visually appealing, and one informed by our friends and people who are like us.

    To be clear: I use Google products regularly. But I use them for only the most straightforward tasks: checking the spelling of something, looking for a quick fact, finding directions. If I’m looking for a place for lunch, or a cool new pop-up, or an activity my friends would enjoy, I’m not going to bother with Google.

    So let’s dig into this a little:

    Snapchat, for some time now,  has had a prominent map feature — Snap Map. You can use it to discover where your friends are and to discover the location of Snapchats around you. The map includes place search, popular places and even a heat map of where the action is taking place. 

    I suspect partly in response to Snapchat, Instagram has recently added their own map feature. I’m no doubt missing something, but the Instagram map does appear to be somewhat buried. The interesting part of what Instagram has done, though, is add local guides. Unlike Apple Maps the guides are crowdsourced rather than curated, but because of Instagram’s reach there’s a ton of them — for example 500+ in San Francisco alone.

    TikTok doesn’t have a map. But does that even matter? In her post, Julia Moon tells us:

    But I do use TikTok, even if it doesn’t have a map component. When the algorithm brings you to a certain video, it can be like finding a gold mine. I recently saw a video from a woman in my area sampling a new doughnut shop, complete with details on menu items, the best flavors, and a quick tour of the interior. Just after watching it, I made plans with my friends to go next week. Finding that shop on Google search would have probably required wading deep into results crammed with chain and established stores.

    I love recommendations I find on TikTok, because I get so much more information from a video than I would from perusing a restaurant’s menu or looking through Yelp reviews. For a technology-addicted generation with short attention spans, there is little incentive to go out of our way to find new restaurant openings, or click beyond the first page of a Google search for nearby activities. TikTok videos with recommendations are quick, informative, and visually immersive—factors that easily convince us to try something new.

    So the question I have is this:

    Will Google Maps and Apple Maps succeed in being the prominent “Explore & Discover” platforms, or will they forever be stuck in a “Find it, Get there!” world?

    That, I propose, is their underlying angst. 

    1 err, Oracle anyone?

    2 Baidu Maps, KakaoMap and Yandex Navigator are, I believe, the most popular mapping apps in their respective countries.

  • Tsunami Warning: Indoor Maps

    So here we are in 2022 and we’ve been digitally mapping the world in earnest for about the last 37 years. 

    Back in 1985 the nascent in-vehicle nav industry began mapping street centerlines and road names. Later they added attributes like turn restrictions and one ways. As technology allowed, the world of national mapping agencies digitized even more — land use, hydrography, contour lines, key landmarks as well as building outlines. Local governments did the same, focusing on all the information needed to run their cities such as parcel boundaries, sewer lines, water lines and fire hydrants. Utility companies joined the club, mapping their infrastructure so they could better manage and operate their investments. 

    2022 is a remarkably different world for digital maps than it was back in 1985. 

    Just as consumers would be lost (literally!) without their favorite consumer mapping app I venture to say that all of us in the corporate and government world would be lost without our enterprise maps and apps. How could we even think about running our cities or our businesses without them? It would be like going back to typewriters.

    However, there’s something still missing — and you no doubt guessed it from the title of this post. 

    While we’ve been earnestly mapping the outdoors we’ve been more or less steadfastly ignoring the indoors. There are exceptions of course — and I’ll get to that in a moment. 

    But think about it. 

    For indoor maps we’re maybe just beyond the era of the brick phone and about to enter the world of the first flip phone. Back then the only people who commonly had mobile phones were CEOs and VPs. Even in the late 1990s you would have to ask the question: “Do you have a mobile phone?” before you asked the question “What’s your mobile number?”

    We’re at about the same point today with indoor maps.

    How many of you have detailed indoor maps of all your facilities and buildings? I’m not talking about the CAD drawings or BIMs that were used in construction. I’m talking about interactive indoor maps and associated apps that get used to operate your building and provide valuable services to its inhabitants. 

    I’m guessing very, very few of you …

    So if we fast forward to the point of indoor map versus outdoor map equality, what might it look like?

    Well first of all you’ll be ridiculed if your buildings and facilities are not fully map-enabled. It would be like not having a smartphone. Anyone selling or leasing a building would be at a significant disadvantage if their buildings were not fully map-enabled, just as they would be if their buildings didn’t come with power, water and a high speed data connection. 

    Just as the use of outdoor maps is broad, the use of indoor maps will be equally broad. Yes, of course people will use indoor maps for wayfinding. That will be a given. But they’ll also use them for so many other important things:

    • to guide people with accessibility challenges, providing them with ‘stepless’ routes or voice navigation 
    • to locate people and mobile equipment, providing substantial increases in operational efficiency
    • to supercharge facilities management, so workers don’t have to wander aimlessly, hunting for that fixture in need of repair
    • to optimize resource allocation by using indoor analytics to determine the best location for a department or a piece of equipment like a copier
    • to get first responders to where they’re needed, fast
    • to help people in emergencies, allowing consumer mapping apps to flip automatically to “emergency” mode and guide users to the nearest exit

    This isn’t a complete list. There are sure to be new inventions along the way. Who, for example, predicted Uber or Pokémon Go when iPhone launched?

    For any building there will be multiple views into the map, just like any modern database provides multiple views into the data. So, from the single map-of-record there will be the visitor map, showing only the publicly accessible areas. And there will be the map for staff, showing offices, meeting rooms and “back-of-the-house” corridors. And then there will be the map for facilities management, helping them easily visualize the underlying building infrastructure. In large public facilities like an airport there might even be a map for security, perhaps showing locations of armories or a jail. 

    But how will all this happen?

    Well, there are a fair number of companies focused on indoor today, but we’re still a few years away from indoor map ubiquity. Some companies are more focused on indoor mapping while others are more focused on indoor positioning. 

    The list of companies includes: Apple, Dent Reality, Esri, EVS Software, Google, IndoorAtlas, IndoorVu, Inpixon, Magicplan, MappedIn, MapsPeople, Mapsted, Mapxus, Navenio, Navv Systems, NextNav, Office of Museum Research, Point Consulting, Pointr, Pole Star, Situm, VenueX, Visioglobe and Yinzcam. If you think I’m missing someone please let me know. I suspect I might have to add Amazon to this list shortly, given their intention to acquire iRobot. Ha ha.

    I hope to go into greater detail about the players in a future post, but in the meantime I’ll highlight a few companies that I think are distinctive:

    • MappedIn: MappedIn has a super easy content management system (CMS) to create, edit and maintain indoor maps of your facilities. And … you don’t need a degree to use it. As a result they’ve had a lot of success: MappedIn is used by the majority of US shopping centers and many of the Fortune 500 are using it for their corporate campuses. But the game changer may be MappedIn’s entry into public safety: they just launched a product developed with the US Department of Homeland Security to give first responders the situational awareness they so desperately need.
    • Mapxus: Mapxus is having similar success across the Asia Pacific region. They’ve map-enabled about 150 buildings across Hong Kong, including museums, hospitals, shopping centers and train stations —  with many more in the works. In partnership with Kawasaki Heavy Industries they’re expanding into Japan. What distinguishes Mapxus is their work to support accessibility by providing ‘stepless’ routes and non-visual guidance. You can see a video of their app here — it’s in Cantonese, but you’ll get the gist. 
    • Navv Systems: Navv Systems has developed an amazing indoor platform to supercharge logistics inside hospitals. They call the system “Care Traffic Control”.  As you might have guessed it’s inspired by the FAA’s air traffic control. Hospitals using the platform gain complete, almost real-time visibility into the precise location of doctors, patients and equipment. This makes dispatching and patient transportation incredibly efficient. It also eliminates the situation where doctors waste valuable time trying to find their patient. And equipment management becomes much simpler, for example: you can use it to quickly locate those 649 IV pumps that are still subject to a recall. 

    So what’s holding back the indoor maps tsunami wave? 

    I think there are three key things: 

    • First we’ve got to make it even easier to create “as built” maps. The problem is many floor plans of existing buildings fail to match ground truth due to the various building modifications and renovations that happen over the years. One set of plans might match one part of the building, but there’s no single version of the truth for the whole facility. Collating plans and making sense of reality is time consuming and expensive. Another more efficient way needs to be devised. Apps like Magicplan do an awesome job of this and iOS 16’s new Room Plan API should only make them better. By simply scanning a room with an iPhone you can more or less instantly create a floor plan 1. There may be some limitations with these apps due to the range of the LiDAR sensor, but it’s still a huge step forward. Here’s a challenge to Trimble: why not do the same with your longer range scanners?
    • The second issue is getting from the scan to a reusable floor plan with zero effort. The scanning apps that create floor plans should go one step further: they need to support export of the floor plan into a standardized format. One such format might be IMDF which is becoming a popular data exchange format for indoor spaces. Imagine if you could take a high-end LiDAR scanner, hit ’Start’, wheel the device around the facility, hit ‘End’ and the resulting vector floor plan was then exported as IMDF ready for importing into your favorite indoor CMS. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think anyone’s done that yet. What I’m saying here (and will emphasize in more detail in future posts) is that widely adopted data exchange standards are fundamental to success. For example, where would we all be without PDF? Thank you Adobe!
    • Lastly there’s one piece of the puzzle that has to be solved to make everything work: you have to have an incredibly easy way to enable indoor positioning, so you know exactly where you are or where things are — not only the latitude and longitude but also which floor. For those of you who aren’t GPS nerds: GPS doesn’t work indoors and it doesn’t provide floor numbers. Fortunately there’s a ton of activity in the indoor positioning space, but there’s still more work to be done. No one has made enabling indoor positioning insanely easy. Some approaches require installing (and maintaining) substantial infrastructure. As a result they are expensive. Other solutions don’t require infrastructure, but still require walking the entire building to record the ambient radio waves from Wi-Fi and other devices. None are instant or perfect. The take away: it’s not like GPS. I hope to go into detail about the state of indoor positioning technology in a future post. 

    So in summary, dear readers, indoor maps are a Map Happening in the making. I will go on record to predict that indoor map ubiquity is not too far away.  

    Get ready for the tidal wave.

    1 The issue of correctly geo-referencing the resulting floor plan to latitude and longitude coordinates is also part of the challenge. There’s more work to be done by organizations to make this super simple and easy. 

  • The Intriguing History of the Map Navigation Symbol

    The question is: who out there knows the provenance of that vehicle symbol used in nearly every navigation app worldwide? As a follow up question — and perhaps even more intriguing — who knows why it was used?  What symbol am I talking about? Well this one of course:

    If you look at nearly every navigation app out there today, they use this symbol. The list includes Apple Maps, Google Maps, auto OEM navigation apps, Baidu Maps, KakaoMap and Yandex Navigator. It is the global standard. 

    So here’s the little story behind this ubiquitous symbol …

    It all starts in 1983 at a small start up called Etak, based in Sunnyvale, California. Etak was founded by the amazingly brilliant Stan Honey who had the idea of building the first truly ground breaking auto navigation system, the Etak Navigator. Stan is a sailor, and a world class one at that. He is renown for his marine navigation skills. One of the people that Stan sailed with back then was Nolan Bushnell, famous for founding Atari.

    Nolan agreed to provide Stan with the angel round to get Etak off the ground. He also provided Etak space in his incubator building in Sunnyvale. It was in this building that many of Nolan’s tech companies did their work.

    Etak also happened to be the place that yours truly got his start as a young engineer. The Etak Navigator was well on the way to launch by the time I got there, but there was still a ton of work to do and many problems to solve. 

    You have to remember how limited the resources were. GPS was not an option1, LCD screens and CD-ROMs were barely invented and hard drives were small capacity. All the latest technologies were cost prohibitive. On top of that CPUs were puny and memory resources were extremely limited — the Etak Navigator used an 8-bit Intel 8088 CPU which had just 29,000 transistors — take that M2! 

    Finally, pixel displays were, well, ‘pixelly’ and not good for showing detailed maps. They also required too much memory. The only good option was a vector display (like an oscilloscope). The downside of vector displays was that you could only draw so many lines on the screen at once or the screen would start to flicker. Maps and street labels meant tons of lines, so the engineers were always looking to optimize. 

    A traditional symbol for a car — 🚗 — required a lot of lines. It also didn’t clearly connote direction. Something simpler was needed. 

    But the Etak engineers had an inspiration. The inspiration came from one of the other Nolan Bushnell companies housed in the same building as Etak. 

    That company was Atari and one of their most popular games was … Asteroids.

    The spaceship symbol used in Asteroids was a natural choice. Just four lines! Clear indication of direction! Perfect!

    History was set.  The Asteroids spaceship has been enshrined in navigation systems worldwide forever more.

    So there, dear readers, is your first Map Happening. 

    1 GPS did not become fully operational until 1993. In the early days of GPS the receivers were large and expensive. Even if all of these barriers could have been overcome it would not have been a good choice: from the early 1990s to 2000 the accuracy of GPS signals was deliberately downgraded by the US government using a process called Selective Availability.

  • Welcome to Map Happenings!

    So after 37 years in the mapping industry I thought it might be fun to inflict my view of happenings in the geospatial technology world on a few of you.

    I’d like to throw you the occasional tasty tidbit of various ‘goings on’ and, from time-to-time, do a deeper dive into some relevant topic or company. Oh, and I might try to invoke a reaction from one or two of you through a particular musing or postulation.

    While I’m sure much of the focus will be on what’s happening now, it’s always fun to make guesses about the future. And, of course, let’s not forget the past. As Churchill said: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

    I will aim for quality, not quantity. Hopefully I’ll meet your expectations.

    Thanks for reading and stay tuned…