Great article on Google mapping

[+user13371]

This Sunday's NY Times Magazine. Very long but great reading.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/googles-plan-for-global-domination-dont-ask-why-ask-where.html

 

Fascinating story about how Google Maps came to be, and where it's going. But to me, this excerpt is the most important bit:

 

Today, Google’s map includes the streets of every nation on earth, and Street View has so far collected imagery in a quarter of those countries. ..At this point Google Maps is essentially what Tim O’Reilly predicted the map would become: part of the information infrastructure, a resource more complete and in many respects more accurate than what governments have. It’s better than MapQuest’s map, better than Microsoft’s, better than Apple’s.

 

“You don’t see anybody competing with Google on the level or quantity of their mapping today,” says Coast, who now works as a geographic-information professional. But, he adds, “that’s because it’s not entirely rational to build a map like Google has.” Google does not say how much it spends on its satellite imagery, its planes, its camera-equipped cars, but clearly it’s an enormous sum. O.S.M., by contrast, runs on less than $100,000 a year. Google’s spending is “unsustainable,” Coast argues, “because in the long run, this stuff is all going to be free.”

Edited December 14, 2013 by user13371

[+ecanderson]

Hard to imagine the difference between Google vs. Google + API. It's everywhere now, though at a price for the big users.

Edited December 14, 2013 by ecanderson

[+GeoTrekker26]

Hard to imagine the difference between Google vs. Google + API. It's everywhere now, though at a price for the big users.

 

Note that article doesn't say that Google will provide the information free. Rather it is saying that eventually all of the basic information will be available free, perhaps from other sources such as the referenced OSM.

[39_Steps]

I got a real chuckle out of the use of backup lightning rods in the Grand Canyon boating story.

 

As to the future, I had similar thoughts about using gps routable cameras to detect RailRoad mechanical and lighted signals from the cab at about the time of the head-on RR collision in Chatsworth, CA a few years back:

 

" According to Peter Norvig, Google’s head of research, it’s a hard problem for computer vision and artificial intelligence to pick a traffic light out of a scene and determine if it is red, yellow or green. But it is trivially easy to recognize the color of a traffic light that you already know is there. "