PublicEarth goes live

Boulder-based startup PublicEarth, a free wiki for places, has gone live today. I've been on their Advisory Board since they started last year, so am excited to see them launch - congratulations to founder Duncan McCall (pictured below talking at WhereCamp5280), Chairman David Hose, and the rest of the team.

Duncan talks about his original vision for PublicEarth here:

So the idea for a wiki of ‘interesting’ or ‘long tail’ places was born, with ability for users to create, edit and share information in an structured, categorized and intelligent format – with the simple ability to get this information onto mobile and GPS devices.

I see PublicEarth being complementary to OpenStreetMap, which is of course another well known crowdsourced effort around geospatial data. OpenStreetMap is primarily focused on creating a free and open basemap for the world, with some basic points of interest. PublicEarth is not about the basemap, but about creating richer information about interesting places. For example, there's a lot of good information about Public Art in there - I just found out that the big Blue Bear sculpture in Denver was created by a fellow Brit, which I hadn't known before! That data came from Public Art Review - one of the things that PublicEarth has done, and is looking to do more, is to help a variety of organizations who have interesting datasets (like this one about contemporary public art) and make them more accessible, in a way in which they can be easily queried by location. There are all kinds of other interesting datasets in there, with more to come. And of course the whole idea of a wiki or crowdsourced approach is that anyone can create or update information, so I encourage you to give it a try and create some interesting places of your own!

Location Based Services in 2014 - Part 1

The AGI in the UK is currently carrying out a "Foresight Study" to look at where the geospatial industry will be in five years' time. They have asked several dozen people to contribute short reports on different topics, and I was asked to write about Location Based Services. I thought I would publish the current working draft here, and I encourage you to contribute comments and suggestions that I can work into the final version. This is Part 1 of 2.

As an aside, I think that predicting 5 years out for Location Based Services is not unreasonable right now - we have had several significant breakthroughs in the past year or two, and so can make some fairly safe predictions based on widespread adoption of those. Timing makes a lot of difference - 5 years ago we had no Google Earth and no Google Maps (both launched in 2005), so any 5 year geospatial industry predictions back then would have been way off! Of course there will still be plenty of innovations that we don't anticipate too!

Scope

For the purposes of this discussion, a location based service is defined as a software-based service where a key element of that service is the current location of the user, derived using location sensing technology. We also consider applications that are based on data derived from users of location based services (such as real time traffic flow information); applications based on sensing the location not of users, but other objects such as vehicles or equipment; and some applications where the location of the user is not derived from sensors (for example applications based on anticipated future location).

Current Position

Location Based Services have been widely touted as “the next big thing” since the late 1990s, just before the dot com bubble burst. We have (finally) seen significant progress in the past couple of the years, with the iPhone in particular bringing location based services to a mainstream audience for the first time. A key limitation with the iPhone currently is that applications cannot run in the background, which rules out an important subset of location based services, those that carry out notifications or other actions proactively based on your current location. Battery life is still a challenge for continuously logging location of a phone, as GPS is relatively power hungry.

Most new phones now have location capabilities. We are also starting to see new capabilities that are very relevant to location based services, including compasses built in to smart phones, and augmented reality applications that combine location awareness, compass and built in camera. These capabilities provide new and compelling user interface capabilities for location based applications.

Anticipated Changes

Location tracking will be pervasive in 2014 – all mobile phones will have location tracking. Location based applications will be able to run in the background, overcoming a key current limitation (this will require improvements in battery technology). Built in compass, camera and augmented reality capabilities will also be on most if not all phones (as a baseline, consider that the proportion of phones with cameras exceeded 70% globally in 2008, with 75% anticipated in 2009).

The great majority of phones will be “smart phones” with capabilities exceeding today’s iPhones, including high quality graphics, touch screens, and the ability to run sophisticated applications (a basic iPhone costs $99 today, and in 5 years we will have had just over 3 iterations of Moore’s Law, so price performance will have improved by a factor of roughly 10).

Crowdsourcing and widespread use of sensors means that a wide variety of good quality and extremely current geospatial data will be available for free, including:

• Road data, with relevant information for routing, including real time traffic information
• Footpaths and cycle paths, with relevant information for routing
• Points of interest such as restaurants, shops, petrol stations, ATMs, etc, plus relevant real time information such as gas prices

Additional types of location sensing technology will be common, including the following:

• Proximity sensors, for example RFID or Bluetooth, which can detect when two devices are within a short distance of each other. One current example is a smart key, which will cause a car door to open when it is within a short distance. Another might be a Bluetooth device in a museum that displays relevant information, or plays relevant audio, on a smart phone when it is close by.
• Continuous local sensors, such as WiFi or ultrawideband (UWB). UWB has a much higher degree of accuracy (~30cm) compared to WiFi (meters or tens of meters depending on number of sensors and environment). High precision sensors enable a variety of indoor location based applications that are not possible with GPS.
• Very inexpensive passive RFID sensors (will be a few cents in this timeframe), which will be used to track huge numbers of inexpensive assets (at discrete points where they can be scanned, for example the entrance to warehouses or stores).

Usage of social networking applications will be highly pervasive. Unlike today, users will be able to maintain one common set of information about their networks of friends and business associates, and share this among multiple applications. This will be important for location related applications, for specifying what aspects of a person’s location information may be shared with whom.

High speed wireless communications networks will be pervasive in most parts of the world. It also seems reasonable to assume that the majority of newer vehicles will include a location tracking device and wireless communications by 2014.

Update: Part 2 discusses the impact of these changes on the geospatial industry, look at various application scenarios, and summarize five key points.

Quick review of iPhoto 09 Places and Faces

I received my copy of Apple's new iLife 09 a couple of days ago, and being a keen photographer have spent quite a bit of time trying out the new features of iPhoto, especially Places and Faces. This is just a quick initial review - I may do a more detailed one in the next few days. Briefly, I very much like Places, with the exception of a few minor niggles, but Faces, despite an undeniable coolness when it correctly identifies someone, was overall a disappointment.

Places does a nice job of mapping geotagged photos. What I especially liked was the way that it clusters groups of photos that are close into a single pin on the map as you zoom out, and it breaks them out as you zoom it. Some other systems out there do this too, but most that I have tried have some issues (for example only displaying a limited number of pictures on a single map). I haven't done serious scalability testing so far, but have about 1700 geotagged photos on my world map so far and performance is good (these are a mixture of precisely geotagged photos with a latitude-longitude from a GPS stored in the photos' EXIF metadata, and others where I have just specified the city for a group of photos). It is easy to specify a location for a single photo or a group of photos, using Google search for geocoding so you can find the usual assortment of landmarks, businesses, etc as well as addresses. The system also generates a nice hierarchy of place names, so for example I can ask for all the photos in Stanley Park, Vancouver, British Columbia or Canada. There are some situations where the reverse geocoding doesn't find a name at some level of the hierarchy, and it uses a label of "Other", but overall this works well. Overall I think it's the nicest implementation of a system for viewing and managing geotagged photos that I have seen so far.

I really wanted to like Faces - the demo certainly looked really cool. I take a lot of photos and manage them in Aperture rather than iPhoto (I currently have 108,000 images in Aperture), and whenever I have time I tag the photos, including names of people in them. So good face recognition has the potential to be huge time saver. It's really cool when it works, and it does work well a good amount of the time, but overall it didn't work correctly sufficiently often that I'm not sure it is as fast as manually tagging names in Aperture. I will probably try to do a more systematic test of this impression over the weekend. There are two ways it can not work - it can find a face in the photo but not know who it is, or it can fail to find a face in the picture at all. The second case happened more often than I expected - it did very poorly with people wearing hats, large sunglasses, or with faces at an angle. Adding a face manually is a lot slower than doing a manual tag in Aperture (which can be a single key press for "favorite" tags, or a single drag and drop otherwise) - you have to click a button, drag to move a box, and drag again to resize a box, click a button, and type two or three characters of a name. There's also a confirmation process where you click to confirm that faces are who the system thinks they are, and (as far as I can tell) this has no ability to confirm multiple pictures at once (for example clicking on the first of a sequence and then shift-clicking on the last, as you normally do to select multiple items) - you have to click on each individual picture. The system could also be a lot cleverer about handling pictures that are taken in a sequence. It is very common with digital photography to take several photos of a group of people in a burst - and the date and time are stored so this situation is easy to identify. If you manually identify people in the first shot of a sequence, this should really carry through to other photos in the sequence, but it doesn't.

Also, as with iPhoto in general, Faces does not seem geared to handling large number of photos. I have 50+ people in my "Faces" already, a lot of whom just appear in a few photos, and there's no easy way to filter these down or organize them into groups etc, so it will be pretty unwieldy as I load more in there.

So overall, I think face recognition is a really exciting technology and it will be hugely useful in the future, but I don't think it's quite there yet based on my experience so far. In addition to improvements in the core recognition technology, there's a lot that Apple could do to make the workflow more efficient - it definitely has the feel of a "1.0" release (which is a little disappointing coming from Apple, with their strong focus on usability). I hope to see the face recognition capability come to Aperture soon though, hopefully with some improvements in the workflow for large volumes of pictures.

Britain from Above

Some very cool visualization of GPS traces in this short video from the BBC, from the series "Britain from Above". I suspect someone in the geo-blogosphere must have posted about this previously, but I hadn't seen it. The taxi cab traces are reminiscent of animations I have seen Steve Coast present when talking about the origins of OpenStreetMap - but with fancier BBC graphical production in this case! Thanks to Johnny Klein for referring me to this, via MindSpark.

Thief wearing GPS ankle bracelet apprehended - eventually!

This story from Engadget, crime spree ends thanks to GPS ankle bracelet, explains how an Ohio man carried out 6 robberies wearing a GPS ankle bracelet. What I'm curious about is how he managed to carry on that long before he was caught ... seems like there's some potential for a rather simple geospatial application there!

My GPS wins prestigious French neogeo award!

I was very honored to find that my Toyota Prius GPS navigation system received the award of "Le meilleur GPS de l’année" (best GPS of the year) from the French blog neogeo in their prestigious "le TopOfThePop Neogeo 2007" awards :). Je veux dire merci beaucoup, je suis très honoré!

The post has a pretty eclectic set of interesting links from la FrenchKissingMap to How I explained REST to my wife (or Comment j’ai expliqué REST à ma femme).

iPhone uses WiFi as well as cell signals to determine location

I just went out for a walk around my neighborhood in downtown Denver to test out the new "locate me" capability on my iPhone, and discovered something rather interesting: apparently the system is using not just cell phone signals but also WiFi to determine location, which explains the unexpectedly good first test result I mentioned in my previous post. I discovered this somewhat accidentally, but turning WiFi on and off on the phone made a big difference to accuracy. You do not have to be connected to a WiFi network in order to use WiFi for location determination.

Since I am in a WiFi-rich downtown location, using WiFi gives much more accurate results than triangulating cell phone signals. From a quick walk around the neighborhood here, I am consistently getting within half a block, or perhaps about 50 meters accuracy most of the time, and as good as 10-20m in some instances, when I have WiFi turned on. Of course it won't be nearly that good if you don't have a dense WiFi network, but this is much better than I expected. If I turned off the WiFi on the phone, the results were less accurate. It is a little hard to gauge the accuracy as the map display is zoomed out depending on the level of accuracy that the system thinks it can obtain (and there is a variable size circle displayed). But generally speaking, even without WiFi, the location generally seems to be within a block or two (say 100-200 meters) of the right location - though again this is in a downtown location with a high density of cell towers, so in a rural location it will be significantly less accurate.

If you look at Google's explanation of how "My Location" works, they only mention using cell tower location. I suppose that most of the other phones which have previously run Google Maps Mobile do not support WiFi, so this makes sense. Other vendors such as Navizon have used WiFi location for a while, and indeed they announced a version for the iPhone a little while ago (if you had hacked your phone, since of course it is still officially closed to third party applications at this point). But in general I haven't seen anything saying that Google was using WiFi for location determination.

I did find that the accuracy varied a fair amount from one attempt to another - I could stand on the same street corner and locate myself multiple times in quick succession, and get three different map scales (representing different accuracy levels) back. The true geo-geeks among you can check out this flickr album, which shows photos of the location given by my iPhone as I walked around the neighborhood, and each one is geotagged using my Garmin handheld, which gives a pretty accurate location. I have added various notes as I went through. On an individual photo you can click the map link to get an accurate view of where the photo was taken (you'll need to zoom in a little), and you can also see a map of the whole set.

Anyway, in summary, I am very pleasantly surprised with the performance of the location capabilities so far - the use of WiFi gives a much higher accuracy than I had expected. Not good enough for in-car navigation applications, but definitely good for local search applications.

Update on my original post: Slashgeo reports that the WiFi positioning technology used in the iPhone is from Skyhook Wireless. One other comment I forgot to make before is that the location determination is pretty quick - typically 3-5 seconds for the map to refresh with the location, most of which is probably just the time to redisplay the map using the EDGE network.

Location awareness on the iPhone is here

Well, the widely reported rumors were true, and today Apple released the 1.1.3 firmware update for the iPhone which provides location awareness, using cell phone triangulation. My first quick test had a much better result than I expected:

I am at home in my loft in downtown Denver and the center of the cross hair is pretty much exactly where I would have placed it on the map - within a few tens of feet of my location. I will do some more tests shortly, but it passed the first test well!

Incidentally, the photo above was automatically uploaded to flickr using my new-ish Eye-Fi card, which is a pretty cool gadget in case you haven't come across it. It's an SD card which includes Wi-Fi, and once you've done some setup, it will immediately upload pictures wirelessly to flickr or other online photo sharing services. I don't always want to do that, but for situations like this where you just want to take a photo and get it online quickly and easily, it's great!

Location awareness for iPhone coming soon?

There are unconfirmed rumors via various Mac blogs (GearLive which has photos of what is claimed to be the new update, and this was commented on at MacRumors and The Unofficial Apple Weblog) that the iPhone will soon be getting a firmware update which will add "locate me" functionality to Google Maps. This functionality was released a month or so ago on other Google Maps Mobile platforms, as Ed Parsons and others reported, so it would certainly make sense for it to appear on the iPhone sometime soon. It uses cell tower information to give an approximate location (reports seem to suggest accuracy to within a few hundred meters in urban locations, and lower accuracy in rural locations). Glenn at AnyGeo also just posted about a hardware add-on called locoGPS which will provide real GPS on the iPhone, which of course will give a more accurate location. This currently requires a Jail Broken iPhone (i.e. one that has been hacked to allow third party applications to be installed), but presumably this will change when Apple opens up the iPhone to third party apps in the next few months.

The report at GearLive also says that the new release of iPhone Google Maps will support the hybrid display mode (it currently just provides "Map" and "Satellite" displays), and the new Options screen that they show also adds a new "Drop pin" function, presumably for visually marking a location on the map.

So one way or another, it looks as though hopefully the location determination options for us iPhone owners will be improving soon!

Where the fugawi?

I just received an email announcing a new service called Touratel from a GPS company called Fugawi. My first thought was surely that's not a real company name, but it is, apparently they've been around since 1995, though I don't remember running into them before. There are a few old discussions about the company name if you google around. It makes a change to see a bit of a sense of humor in company names rather than just some boring old acronyms, I guess!

Back from Mexico - some experiences with geotagging

Well hello again, I am back from Mexico and had a great time. I managed to avoid blogging, the following was a more typical activity :)

This was my first vacation where I managed to reliably geotag all my photos - previously I had made a few half-hearted attempts but had failed to charge enough batteries to keep my GPS going consistently, or hadn't taken it everywhere. I used HoudahGeo to geotag the photos on my Mac, and this seemed to work fine, with a couple of minor complaints. One is that when it writes lat-long data to the EXIF metadata in the original images, for some reason iPhoto doesn't realize this, and doesn't show the lat-long when you ask for info on the photo (unless you export and re-import all the photos, in which case it does). The other is that most operations are fast, but for some reason writing the EXIF data to the photos, the final step in the workflow I use, is very slow - it would often take several minutes to do this for several hundred 10 megapixel images (a typical day's shooting for me), when the previous operations had taken a few seconds. But it did the job and all my photos have the lat-long where they were taken safely tucked away in their EXIF metadata.

Flickr provides its own map viewing capability, which uses Yahoo! maps (not surprisingly since Yahoo! owns flickr). If you click here, you can see the live version of the map which is also shown in the following screen shot, showing the locations of my "top 40" pictures from the trip.

If you zoom in to the northeast location, there is some high quality imagery, in Cancun, which gives a good basis for seeing where the photos were taken. However, the imagery is very poor in the two main locations where we stayed, Tulum (to the south) and Chichen Itza (to the west). I looked in Google Earth and Google Maps, and they both had much better imagery in Tulum, though unfortunately not in Chichen Itza. Microsoft didn't have good imagery for either location. So I thought I should poke around a little more to explore the latest options for displaying geotagged photos from flickr in Google Earth or Google Maps.

Flickr actually has some nice native support now for generating feeds of geotagged photos in either KML or GeoRSS. So this link dynamically generates a KML file of my photos with the tags mexico and best (though both Safari and FireFox don't seem to be able to recognize this as a KML file automatically, I have to tell them to use Google Earth and then it works fine). Unfortunately though, flickr feeds seem to return a maximum of 20 photos, and I haven't found any way around this. I can work around this by creating separate feeds for the best photos from Tulum, Chichen Itza and Cancun separately, but obviously that's not a good solution in all cases. These KML files work well in Google Earth, and one nice feature is that they include thumbnail versions of each photo which are directly displayed on the map (and when you click on those, you get a larger version displayed and the option to click again and display a full size photo back at flickr). However, the approach of using thumbnails does obscure the map more than if you use pins or other symbols to show the location of the photo - either approach may be preferred depending on the situation. These files don't display especially well in Google Maps - you get the icon, but the info window doesn't include the larger image or the links back to flickr - here's one example.

I looked around a little more and found this post at Ogle Earth which pointed me to this Yahoo Pipe which can be used to create a KML file from flickr. After a bit more messing around (you have to find things like your internal flickr id, which is non-obvious), I managed to produce this KML file which contains all of my "top 40" photos in a single file (you may need to right click the link and save the KML file, then open it in Google Earth). Of course I also needed to upload this file to somewhere accessible on the web, so all in all this involved quite a few steps. This KML file uses pins displayed on the map (with photo titles), rather than thumbnails, and again the info window displays a small version of the photo with an option to click a link back to flickr for larger versions. This KML also includes time stamps, which is interesting - if you are using Google Earth 4, you will see a "timer" bar at the top of the window when you select this layer. To see all the images, make sure you have the whole time window selected (at first this was not the case for me, so it seemed that some of the photos were missing). But if you select a smaller window, you can do an animation to show where the pictures were taken over time, which is also pretty cool.

So in general conclusion, the tools to easily geotag your photos are pretty solid now - I have used both HoudahGeo on the Mac, and previously RoboGeo on the PC, and both worked well. The software available to display geotagged photos is getting better, but there's still room for improvement - but I'm sure things will continue to move along quickly in this area. I would like to see flickr add a "KML" button to their map displays, which would be much simpler than the current process!

Off on vacation for a week

I'm off to Mexico on vacation for a week from tomorrow morning, so don't expect too much blogging! We're staying in a cabana by the ocean with no electricity for four days, though they say they have a wireless network connection - not sure if that is good or bad :). If they really do then I may have to do one post from the outdoor bathtub before the iPhone batteries expire, just because I can ... but in general things will be quiet for a week or so!However, I did just buy myself a new Garmin 60CSx handheld GPS (since I still can't get any software I'm happy with to save tracklogs on the BlackBerry), and plan to test out the HoudaGeo application I just bought for the Mac to geocode all my photos (we will be going to the Mayan pyramids at Chichen Izta too, which I'm really looking forward to). I did a quick test of the HoudaGeo application in Denver this afternoon and it seemed to work fine (I had previously used RoboGeo on the PC, but that doesn't work on the Mac).

Cheers for now :).

Google Maps local search on the iPhone really has some serious flaws

Yesterday I posted my main review of Google Maps on the iPhone, as well as my general impressions of the iPhone. To say some positive things first, I really think that while I've commented on a few areas for improvement, I really think the iPhone is great - it's definitely a jump forward in terms of user interfaces, and I think introduces a lot of ideas in this regard which will become much more widely used. It's just a lot of fun to use. On Google Maps specifically, I talked about a lot of things I liked yesterday, and one other nice feature I have discovered is that the Bookmark page also has a "Recents" tab which saves all your recent searches, routes, etc, and will restore those with all the context - this is especially nice for retrieving routes. Oh, and the built in camera, which I had low expectations of, actually isn't too bad - here are a few sample snapshots in case you're interested.

However, I expressed some reservations about the way that local search was implemented yesterday, and having played around with this some more I really feel that there are some serious issues that need addressing here. There are two main issues: one is the way that the functionality has been implemented, and the other is the quality of the data for points of interest.

Let's take the functionality first. Frankly, Google seems to have lost track of the basic user scenario for local search. I suspect that probably a (conscious or unconscious) contributor to this was the desire to include establishments which paid for placement higher in the list of results, as I commented on yesterday, without it being too obvious that they are doing this. But anyway, the basic scenario for local search is that you identify a location, which might either be where you are now (the most common scenario), or perhaps an address where you plan on being in the future, or where a friend is located. You then search for something close to that place - this might fairly specific, like "tattered cover" (a bookstore I used in my example yesterday) or might be more generic, like "coffee". In either case, knowing how far away each of the search results are from the specified location is a really crucial piece of information in deciding whether that search result is of interest to you. Sorting the results by distance, and knowing that the closest (or the closest 3, or 5, or whatever) results have been shown to you are fundamental requirements. And then if you decide that one of the search results is of interest to you, by far the most common follow up action is that you want to figure out how to navigate from the point you first specified to the search result you have selected.

Most other local search implementations I have used meet these requirements pretty well, but local search on the iPhone fails pretty badly. Using the TeleNav software on my BlackBerry 8800, I choose "Find business" and the first thing it asks me for is the search point, and I have six options for specifying this: current location (which it knows from the GPS, which is of course its big advantage over the iPhone), recent addresses, favorites, key in an address, near airport, or contacts. You then specify the search term, and are immediately given a list of results sorted in order of distance from the search point, and showing how far away each result is. You click on a result and it shows more information including the address, and gives you the option to drive to it, save it, map it, or call it. The one feature which TeleNav does not provide which the iPhone does is the ability to display multiple results on a map at the same time - but it meets the main user scenario much better.

Google Maps online also addresses this user scenario well. You type in the address of the point you are interested in, and hit "Search maps". Then you choose "Find businesses" and you now have two text boxes, one containing the address of the search point, and one for your search term. You hit search and get an ordered list back, by distance, with the distance from the search point displayed for each result. If you click on a search result and ask for directions, the start point is already filled in with the address of the original search point.

But all this goes by the board in Google Maps on the iPhone. You will typically precede a search by centering the screen on a location, most often by typing an address (or retrieving a bookmark). But that point is not explicitly used by the search on the iPhone. Instead, you just get back any ten results which satisfy your search term and which are somewhere within the bounds of the current screen display - except that it's not just any ten, it seems that there is a ranking order which is presumably determined by how much establishments have paid for placement. There is no guarantee that the closest (or closest 3, or 5, etc) are returned. There is no easy way to find out how far away a given search result is from the point you were interested in (the only way I have found is to select a result, display its details, choose "directions to here", and then you have to fill in the start address, which you can do by selecting a bookmark or recent search address, and then calculate a route - and you have to repeat this for every item whose distance you want to know).

I tested a couple of scenarios where there were fewer than ten results in the original map display window, and in this case the map window stays the same and displays pins for the results which are in that area, but you still get a list of ten items (not sure if these are guaranteed to be the ten closest in this situation or not). A bad thing in this scenario is that if you select an item from the list which was not in the original map window, it pans you to that location, but now you have no idea how that relates geographically to your original search point (beyond re-entering the original point and calculating a route).

If there are no search results in the original map window, the map window zooms out so that it fits in all the results (at least in the cases I tried). However, there is no symbol on the map showing where your original point was, so you risk losing your orientation in this situation if it's an area you don't know well, unless you calculate a route from your original point again.

So functionality wise I really think someone lost the plot here. Yes, if you are zoomed in close (i.e. at the default scale which is displayed which you search for an address), the system will find you some results that are "sort of close" to the address you typed, and you get a nice pretty display with animated flying pins. But there appears to be no guarantee that the closest result will definitely be returned (though it probably will in most cases, especially if you are zoomed in close), there's no easy way of determining how far away any given result is (you have to calculate routes individually), there is no way at all of sorting results in order of distance, and in order to calculate a route to a search result you have to re-enter the original search point again (which you can admittedly do via a bookmark or recent result, but this still adds at least two or three clicks which shouldn't be necessary). One other thing I noticed while thinking about distances in this context is that there is no scale bar on the map, so you can't even estimate graphically. I know it's not a big screen, but all in car navigation systems I have used have some nice compact scale bar, so I think this should be added in there too.

So anyway, that's the functionality rant, sorry about that :) !! Now for the data rant!

These issues are exacerbated by the fact that Google's point of interest data really seems to have a lot of issues. I mentioned some examples in yesterday's post, but categories of error that I have found in more than half of my test cases so far include incomplete addresses (either no street number, or no street), establishments which have closed, and incorrect categorization (examples below). I tested Google Maps online and it had the same errors (which is at least consistent - you would hope that they use the same data). For comparison, I went to try MapQuest (online) and it did MUCH better. Here are just a few example searches I tried, centered on 1792 Wynkoop St, Denver, CO:

• King Soopers (a local supermarket chain): in the top 10 on Google, there were three entries with an incomplete address (just Denver, CO), all of which show as being closer than the closest real King Soopers, and one entry which says in Google Maps online that it is an "unverified listing" (at 1150 Stout St) - but on the iPhone this just appears in the list without any indication that it is unverified (this one does not appear in MapQuest and I am pretty sure that it is not a real location). So 4 out of 10 results are wrong (non-existent), therefore you would have a 40% chance of ending up somewhere with no King Soopers. On MapQuest, 10 legitimate addresses are returned, though in some cases they appear to have multiple addresses for the same store (e.g. entry points on two different streets) - but this is not a serious error as you would still find a King Soopers.
  
• Tattered Cover (a well known Denver book store with 3 locations, which I mentioned in my post yesterday). MapQuest returns just 3 results, all correct. Google Maps online returns 8 entries in its initial list, of which two have incomplete addresses (duplicates of entries which do have complete addresses, but they show up at entirely different locations on the map), one is a store which closed a year ago, one says it is unverified and is in Boulder (where there is no Tattered Cover), and one is a duplicate of a correct store. The same 8 entries appear on the iPhone, again with no indication that the Boulder one is unverified - so in this case you have a 50% chance of not showing up at a Tattered Cover.
• Searches for Office Depot and Home Depot were more successful, with no obvious errors - hooray :) !!
• Searching for grocery in Google Maps online returned Market 41, a nightclub which closed a year ago, and four entries with incomplete addresses (two King Soopers which we saw before, and two Safeways). The iPhone returned a different list in this case, but included Market 41, two entries with incomplete addresses (one the same, one different), and Lemon Sisters market, which was a small grocery store but closed several years ago. So a 40% chance of going to the wrong place in this case. The same search on MapQuest did not return Market 41 and had 10 complete addresses, all of which looked legitimate.
  

So anyway, I won't belabor this. Maybe I'm just having really bad luck here. And because I live close to the center of Denver, I am picking up more of these incomplete addresses than some others might. And if you are aware that there is this sort of junk in the Google point of interest database, you can manually ignore results that don't have complete addresses (if you check their details) - but many users will not do that and will trust the pin that they see on the map. Hopefully the overall quality of the Google point of interest data is not as bad as in my random tests, but nevertheless I think that they will see significant pressure to clean this up as people use it a lot more, which should be the case as the iPhone (and other mobile systems) make it much easier for people to use this data on the go.

So anyway, to finish on a not entirely negative note, let's reiterate a few good things. Overall, the iPhone rocks! Google Maps on the iPhone has a lot of great features - the quality of the map display is great, panning and zooming using the touch screen is really fast and intuitive, routing works well and the way that it saves the full state of complex operations including routing and searches in "Recents" is really nice. BUT, the local search really doesn't match up to the high standards that we all expect from Google. Yes, it will give you what you want in many cases, but is missing key functionality like displaying and sorting by distance, common workflows like navigating to the point of interest you want to go are much more complex than they should be, and in my tests I have encountered way too many data errors to be comfortable relying on it. The good news is that fixing the functionality really shouldn't be difficult technically, though I think it will need Google to accept that sponsored results should be displayed separately somehow (as they are with regular Google search). Fixing the data problems may be a bigger effort, but others have done it as the MapQuest comparison shows.

Fixing local search on Google Maps for the iPhone is now top of my wish list, but I also still think that auto-correction of typing and rotation of the map are high priorities, as I mentioned yesterday. That's enough iPhone reviewing for this weekend I think :) !!

Another update on BlackBerry 8800 GPS / Mapping software

A few more updates on mapping and GPS software for the BlackBerry 8800, following on from my previous posts on this topic. I plan to pull all my experiences in this area together into a more detailed review shortly.

I have become more impressed with BlackBerry Maps over time. While it lacks the step by step directions capabilities of TeleNav and WisePilot, and its maps aren't as detailed or nice looking as either of these or Google Maps Mobile, it does have some advantages. One which I became acutely aware of while I was in Europe and on a data plan where I had to pay by the kB (as opposed to getting unlimited data in the US), is that it requires much less data to be downloaded. I have used it for probably several hours altogether, and it tells me that it has only downloaded around 300kB of data during that time. In contrast, a single map screen is often around 100kB or more in Google Maps Mobile. If you just want to track on a map where you are going in a moving vehicle (like a car, taxi or train), as opposed to following a route, then BlackBerry maps is probably the most effective for that. Aside from the cost issue, I found that Google Maps would struggle to keep up with tracking in a reasonably fast moving car, just because it needed to download another 100kB plus of data every few seconds, whereas the more compact data stream needed for BlackBerry Maps meant that it had no problem keeping up. Another interesting little technical snippet is that I realized that the annotation on BlackBerry Maps is vector based and is dynamically rendered on the client, which means that they can do things like having a "heading up" orientation to the map, so the map dynamically rotates with the direction that you are heading in always being at the top, and the annotation always stays the right way up. In contrast, Google Maps only offers a "North up" orientation. BlackBerry Maps also tells you your current speed and travel direction, which Google doesn't.

I continue to like Google Mobile Maps for the quality of both the street maps and imagery, and the addition of support for the internal GPS is a great feature.

I recently downloaded WisePilot, which is more focused on navigation, with turn by turn routing capabilities and voice directions, so it's similar to Telenav. As I mentioned previously, Telenav only works in the US and Canada, whereas WisePilot supports almost all European countries in addition. I like both applications - they are both well designed and do a good job. WisePilot has a nice clean screen layout and a few features which TeleNav doesn't, like showing you your current heading and speed in addition to giving you directions. One drawback with WisePilot is that I found that its geocoding often seemed to work just at the street level, it couldn't determine the correct location on a street - this happened to me both in Europe and the US. If I give it my home address of 1792 Wynkoop St, zip code 80202, it comes back with a section of Wynkoop St in zip code 80216, a couple of miles away. If you search for points of interest it seems to do a better job finding the correct location. For this reason, Telenav still ranks as my first choice of navigation software for the BlackBerry 8800 in the US, but WisePilot is definitely worth a look. One other nice feature is that they have a web site where you can log in and create locations, save favorites, etc, which automatically download to your BlackBerry.

I bought MobileTracker for BlackBerry from Skylab Mobilesystems (who also develop Spot), which records tracklogs in the background, which is something I was looking for, to let me geocode photos. Unfortunately it is no use for this purpose, as it just saves a KML file with a list of coordinates, but does not include and timestamps. It would be much more useful if it exported GPX format, which is the standard for GPS tracklogs, which includes both coordinates and timestamps. I also found that running in the background wasn't very reliable - twice I just set it running at the beginning of the day, and in one case it collected a couple of minutes worth of data, in the other case none at all, even though it appeared to be running at the end of the day. You can open up a simple user interface screen while it is running, but there is no indication as to whether it is running correctly or how many points it has captured, just a button you can press to stop recording and save a file. So I'm rather disappointed with this one so far I'm afraid, it would need GPX support and improved reliability and usability for me to recommend it.

There's been quite a bit of hype over the mapping software on the iPhone recently, and I certainly like the look of a lot of aspects of the iPhone, but I think that for mapping applications, lack of a GPS is going to be a big negative versus other devices which do have this, like the Blackberry 8800.

Tele Atlas use Inrix to model traffic flows

An interesting story at Technology Review (via gizmodo) on how Tele Atlas is using software and data from Inrix to better predict traffic flows, by making extensive use of historical traffic flow data.

Google gets it right

You have to hand it to Google, they do a lot of things very well. I am in the UK and was just testing my various BlackBerry 8800 mapping applications as I took a short train ride. BlackBerry Maps actually did best this time - I have found that it has a pretty nice real time tracking mode, which shows you your speed and bearing as well as a dynamically scrolling map. Telenav gave me a lat-long but never managed to download any map data, just gave a "loading" message (while great in North America, it hasn't been any use to me in the UK so far). Spot didn't manage to download a map either, MGMaps still isn't recognizing my internal GPS and Google Maps didn't support GPS when I was on the train.

However, I am just waiting for someone to collect me from the station and thought I'd quickly surf the web on my BlackBerry. My home page is Google Mobile. Right there on the front page, with just a handful of other links, is a link saying "download google maps mobile with GPS support". I click on that, and have a page which says "download google maps with GPS for the BlackBerry 8800" (so it obviously recognized my device automatically). It told me that it was a 200k download in advance, so I know it wouldn't break the bank despite the fact that I'm paying by the kB here. It takes about a minute or so to download, and now I have a very nice Google Map (either a street map or a satellite image) centered on my current location, accurate to 3m. And I can blog about it while I'm still waiting to be collected!

I wish that all my software installations and upgrades were that simple! (Though now I think about it, I'm a little surprised my existing Google Maps Mobile didn't tell me that there was an update available - so still room for improvement!) I'm still planning to provide more details on various new BlackBerry location applications shortly, as mentioned in previous posts.



Sent via BlackBerry from Cingular Wireless

Short update on BlackBerry 8800 GPS software

I have multiple connection challenges at the moment - am in England and only have access to a PC with dial up connection, and a slow GPRS connection on my BlackBerry (compared to EDGE back home) which I have to pay for by the kB rather than having unlimited bandwidth. So just a short update on my previous BlackBerry 8800 posts for now. I have found out that Telenav, the navigation software which I really like as I've said previously, only does road navigation in the US and Canada. At the same time I had a comment on my earlier posting which suggested I should also try Wisepilot, and they happen to offer a 5 day free trial with European data, so I'll give that a try later this week and report back. In addition to navigation capabilities, they also offer functionality which warns you when you are approaching a speed camera (in Europe) ... not that I will have any need to use that, I hasten to add, in case there are any traffic police reading this!

The second piece of news is that Skylab Mobilesystems, who produce the Spot for BlackBerry software which I reviewed previously, have announced a new product called MobileTracker for BlackBerry, which creates GPS tracklogs in the background, which was one of the top things I was after. It saves these in KML so you can directly display them in Google Earth and Maps (and elsewhere). The software I have been using to geocode photos, RoboGeo, expects a GPX file as input rather than a KML file I think, so may need to mess around a little bit to overcome that, but I'm sure I can work around that.

And finally for now, the technical support team at Mobile GMaps, which I also mentioned in my previous post, tell me that they have an update which they think will enable the use of the BlackBerry 8800 GPS, which didn't work for me before - again, haven't had a chance to try that yet but will do so soon. Also, I did try the "phone positioning" used by the underlying Navizon software, which uses some sort of signal triangulation, on my travels, and that did locate me in Chicago airport, though not in Calgary or in the UK.

So some promising indications, will report back as I am able to try each of these out.

More on BlackBerry 8800, and Nokia N95

Stefan at Ogle Earth has a great post about his experiences in Whale Valley in Egypt with his Nokia N95, which was very interesting both from a technology and a more general perspective. The Nokia N95 is one of the main alternatives to the BlackBerry 8800, as a smart phone with built in GPS. He talks about several applications which I would like but haven't seen yet on the BlackBerry, as discussed in my previous post on this topic. One is Mobile GMaps, and the associated GMap-Track, which lets you track your location in near real time and upload it to a web site and display it on top of Google Maps. I downloaded this application, and while the mapping application ran, sadly it didn't recognize the internal GPS on my BlackBerry 8800, so I couldn't get at the cool features I was after. MGMaps uses a technology called Navizon for the positioning, which says it supports positioning using either GPS or triangulation of cellular and/or WiFi signals - but when I tried to configure this to use GPS, it wanted me to pair with an external GPS receiver, so no luck. It couldn't work out a position based on phone signals either - I'm in Calgary at the moment, am not sure if this is dependent on where in the world you are, I will try it when I get back to Denver. Hopefully Navizon and/or MGMaps will add GPS support for the BlackBerry soon.

Stefan also talks about an application called ShoZu (at shozu.com), which lets you directly upload photos from the your cell phone (the Nokia N95 has a 5 megapixel camera, which is another advantage over the BlackBerry 8800, which has no camera) to flickr and other sites - and on phones with a GPS, it will geocode the photo so it can be displayed in the right location on a map. I have been talking about this possibility for a while, it's great to see that it is a reality now. As this type of technology becomes more universally available over the next few years, it will have great application in various ways - such as leveraging "the power of crowds" to get a near real time view of the aftermath of a natural or man-made emergency, which could be incredibly useful to emergency responders or utility repair crews.

Finally, I'll just mention a couple more differences between the Nokia N95 and the BlackBerry 8800 - I was just comparing notes with Ed Parsons after our panel at the GeoTec conference today, he has the former and I have the latter. In addition to the features I already mentioned (camera and software), the Nokia supports WiFi connections, which the BlackBerry doesn't. Strengths of the BlackBerry are that it has a QWERTY keyboard, whereas the Nokia just has a regular phone keypad, so you need to use SMS-style text entry, so this is a plus for the BlackBerry if you want to do a lot of email or other typing. And of course the BlackBerry has its usual email, contacts and calendar software which are all very good. Ed said that he thinks that the nicest implementation of Google Maps Mobile currently is on the BlackBerry. And as I mentioned in my previous post, I am very impressed with the TeleNav navigation software which is available on the BlackBerry (it is supported on other platforms too, but from a quick Google search I couldn't find confirmation that it is available on the N95, so it may not be yet - but I'm not sure on that). The Nokia is quite a bit more expensive than the BlackBerry, in the US at least - currently around $800 on Amazon for an unlocked phone, while they currently have the BlackBerry on special offer for $99 with a service plan commitment (so not an apples to apples comparison, but nevertheless quite a difference). I paid $299 (with a service plan) for my BlackBerry recently, too bad :( !! The BlackBerry is slimmer than the Nokia but a little wider.

So there are pros and cons to both, but the Nokia certainly has some nice additional features, with the camera, WiFi and some extra software capabilities (at the moment).

Mapping software for the BlackBerry 8800

Ed Parsons just posted about actionable location intelligence on mobile devices, and talked about recent enhancements Google has made to its mobile service in the UK. I think Google Maps Mobile is great, but I think it's still a good bit behind the Telenav software which runs on the BlackBerry (and also the navigation system in my Toyota Prius! - I posted about both of these previously - see also my short photo-based review of both of these on flickr).

The two key features which Telenav provides which Google Maps Mobile doesn't yet are integration with the built in GPS (or any other location determination capability), and the ability to give directions which are safely usable while you're driving - i.e. a combination of spoken instructions and large turn graphics. A third feature which is helpful too is integration with contacts on the BlackBerry - the ability to type a contact's name and use their address as a destination (TeleNav has an advantage here in developing their application specifically for the BlackBerry, it is harder to do this if you're supporting a broader range of devices).

I currently have four different pieces of mapping/geospatial software on my BlackBerry 8800. Here is the very short review on them (I will try to do a longer one at some point), in order of ranking from most favorite to least favorite:

Telenav - a really outstanding piece of software, I have been extremely impressed. The user interface has been very well thought out, it fully takes advantage of the built in GPS, either to give you a map of your current location or to do real time route guidance, and it has excellent spoken directions with clear turn graphics in either 2D or 3D styles. The business finder works very well both on categories and business names, and appears to be very up to date (I tried one example of a business which had moved about three months ago and it found the correct address). Its maps are pretty nice but it has no imagery capabilities, just street maps. There is a charge of $9.99 a month for this service.

Google Maps Mobile - my previous favorite until I got Telenav. As noted above, the main things it is lacking are integration with the GPS and lack of spoken driving directions. However, the step by step directions capabilities are still very usable - especially if you have a copilot while driving, or if you are walking to your destination. But the map quality and performance are great, and it supports imagery which Telenav doesn't. The quality of the "Satellite View" images on the BlackBerry 8800 are really impressive. You can scroll around the map in all directions using the "pearl" trackball, which is another nice feature. There's also a "show traffic" option which is cool - if I'm not mistaken, this appeared on the mobile version before the standard Google Maps. It shows traffic congestion on freeways, with a green / yellow / red coloring scheme. This is a free offering.

BlackBerry Maps - I haven't used this too much, to be honest. The maps look clunky compared to both of the previous two. It has pretty basic GPS integration - you can center the map on your current location. The directions capability is rudimentary - it gives you a text-based list of turns, or an overview map, there is not a step by step turn capability as with Google and Telenav. I just found that there is a "Send Location" capability, which is a cool idea - you can send your current location to someone via email, SMS or MMS, which includes a link with your latitude and longitude and the ability to display a map. However, what is less cool is that the link only works on a BlackBerry with BlackBerry Maps installed. But this is a great idea for someone to implement in a more generic way. This is also free software.

Spot for BlackBerry - frankly I have been disappointed in this, it doesn't seem ready for prime time. It touts some interesting features, like the ability to import and export GPX files. I was interested in this for geotagging photos using RoboGeo (which just cross-references to a GPS tracklog based on time, and so records the location of all the photos you have taken). However, after quite a lot of messing around, I found that while Spot apparently records a tracklog (you can see this on the map, if you look hard), the export GPX capability doesn't export this, it only exports waypoints which you have specifically logged. It has the ability to access any WMS map server, which is interesting, but the default maps it is set up with are not nearly as nice as the other three. I found the user interface very clunky compared to the other three. With some work, this could have some good capabilities, but it's not quite there yet. This costs $49 (a one time charge with no subscription).

So I'm still looking for some software for the BlackBerry 8800 which will be able to record a GPS tracklog of where I've been (just running in the background while I'm using other capabilities), and be able to export that to my PC. I'd also like something which can report my location regularly back to a server (TeleNav has a workforce management solution which includes this capability, but it's a bit more heavyweight than I need). This may be my opportunity to brush up on my Java coding :) !

Navigation systems make your car depreciate faster

Adena at All Points Blog references a story about how cars depreciate faster if they have built in navigation systems. Which on the surface of it is not good news for those of us who always buy cars with cool built in navigation systems :) !! However, when you think about it, this is just a logical consequence of the fact that cars are becoming more high tech devices. When you buy a digital camera, you can guarantee that within a few months there will be something better and cheaper on the market - you don't expect to have a good resale value on it in 3 years time. Over the next few years we will see a lot more technology coming into cars, including much more in the way of online information systems - real time traffic information, gas prices, etc - so I think the trend of cars depreciating more rapidly will continue. And I don't think that this necessarily indicates that portable systems will overwhelm factory installed systems - the latter tend to have various features that the former don't, for example they mute music playing in the car when they need to speak directions, and many of them integrate with inertial systems in the car so that they can continue to work when a GPS signal is not available (for example when going through a tunnel). However, I think that car manufacturers will need to work on making their software systems (not just for navigation) more easily upgradeable - though again I think this will be a logical step as we move to a situation where most cars have wireless connectivity.

Finally, as Adena mentions, there is a quote in the article that navigation systems are now being "sold everywhere. You have Bed Bath & Beyond selling portable navigation these days. It's bizarre." I guess navigation systems would fall into the "Beyond" category :) ?!