Gary's Bloggage » navteq

Getting You There; The Battle Between PND, Mobile And Car

Gary — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 17:39:50 +0000

Attempts to predict the growth, success and uptake of technology are rife. Accurate predictions, less so. “There’s no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home“, said Ken Olsen, then founder and CEO of DEC in 1977. “I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers” is apocryphally attributed to Thomas Watson of IBM in 1943.

It’s easy to say “well … duh” with the benefit of hindsight in 2010 but consider this. The first generation of in-car GPS units appeared in 1996. If anyone had told you that 14 years later you’d be running something infinitely more sophisticated and customisable, more powerful than one of Olsen’s DEC VAX computers that I started out on, on a device that you stuck in your pocket and which, by the way connected to a global network of computers and was also a telephone, you’d probably not have believed them or suggested that at a minimum they cut their coffee intake back.

Fast forward back to 2010; the big two mapping data providers, Teleatlas and Navteq, have both been acquired, Garmin, once synonymous with GPS is looking increasingly less and less relevant and both Google and Nokia are offering full turn by turn navigation on mobile devices, for free.

So how will this play out? What will dominate? PNDs, telematics dashboard “info-tainment” systems or mobile phones? It’s probably going to be all three but not in their current form thanks to the headlong convergence of computer, phone, camera, internet terminal and PND.

In 1996 the first GPS navigation systems were the preserve of the high end, executive car marques; both prestigious and viewed as a luxury commodity they were the precursor of today’s info-tainment consoles. Skip to 2004 and TomTom’s GO was one of the first of the now ubiquitous PNDs at commodity prices. Six years later and GPS enabled mobile phones are capable of running the same, turn by turn navigation systems but for free and they come preloaded with the handset. Sensing that most consumers are unlikely or unwilling to pay for a dedicated PND when they can have a free navigation system on their mobile the market is reacting and we’re seeing the first interfaces between smartphone and info-tainment consoles such as that from Harman and Nokia.

Surely this means that we’ve come full circle and moving back to in-car based systems? I doubt it. The mobile offering has all the advantages; multi modal routing, pedestrian routing, your music collection, a camera, a phone, an internet console with email and social media apps yet none of the disadvantages; additional subscription cost, another gadget to carry, only works in the car.

The mobile phone and the in-car console are here to stay; the PND is destined for extinction. But like Messrs. Olsen and Watson, I could be wrong.

Written for and originally published in the June edition of Coordinates magazine.

Photo Credits: Unhindered by Talent and Paul Robinson on Flickr.

Written and posted from the Ramada Hotel Berlin Mitte in Berlin (52.529858, 13.383858)

The Changing Face of UK Geo Data … But Changing With a Bang or a Whimper?

Gary — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:02:45 +0000

This is not the blog post I set out to write. The one I set out to write was about Flickr, about machine-tags, about noticings and about transport data feeds. I had it all mapped out in my head during one of those wide awake in the middle of the night and your mind’s buzzing moments. But as I started to research the blog post that I had set out to write, it mutated.

So with the caveat that I’m well aware that I’m making a sweeping generalisation whilst simultaneously doing a large disservice to a lots of specialist UK data providers …

Until recently, if you wanted a source of geo data in the UK you had three choices.

Choice One. Go with one of the big global players, who primarily specialise in the personal navigation market. You could go with the chaps with the blue and white mapping cars, Navteq, who were acquired by Nokia in December 2007. Or your could go with the chaps with the orange and white mapping cars, TeleAtlas, who were acquired by TomTom in July 2008. The pros? Great global coverage, maybe lacking slightly outside of the traditional US heartland. The cons? It comes at a price and with a whole set of derived data and associated licensing restrictions.

Choice Two. Go with OpenStreetMap, the freely available, user generated, maintained and contributed wiki-map of the world. Launched in 2004 and contributed to and supported by invididuals, and by companies such as AND and Yahoo! OpenStreetMap is the antithesis of proprietary licensed geo data and offers an open licensed data set downloadable at a variety of granularities. The pros? Ever expanding coverage and freely and openly available. The cons? Dependent upon the OSM community and with limited coverage outside of urban areas when compared with competitors.

Choice Three. Go with The Ordnance Survey, the UK’s national mapping agency, which covers the country in totality at more levels, representations and data forms than most people would ever need. The pros? Amazing coverage with resolution down to a few metres. The cons? One of the most restrictive data licensing regimes, claiming ownership of derived data and with often heavy handed enforcement.

But then, to clumsily paraphrase a certain 70′s album … and then there were five.

Choice Four. Go with The Ordnance Survey. Yes, you read that right. Earlier this month the UK Government announced that many of the Ordnance Survey’s data products were to be made available as open data and for free download. Whilst it’s not the complete opening that the Guardian’s Free Our Data campaign has been, err, campaining for, it’s a start. It’s taken a while but as ex-OS and Google Geo Technologist Ed Parsons put it “Now why was that so difficult“?

Choice Five. Go with UKMap. This new UK geo data source, built from scratch the old fashioned, man on the street with pen, paper and GPS way, first surfaced early this year, launched at the British Computer Society in July 2009 and was at the Society of Cartographers Summer School in September 2009. Whilst not free, not open and not even with total UK coverage, UKMap is the first major player in the UK geo data market since OpenStreetMap launched in 2004.

So here’s the questions that have yet to be answered. Who does UKMap threaten? Is it a challenge to The Ordnance Survey’s lucrative government, local authority, surveying and emergency service market. Will UKMap open up some of their data to challenge OpenStreetMap’s position as the geo data source of choice for the geoweb developer community in the UK? Or will UKMap, The OS and OSM form an uneasy alliance for UK geo data? As 2009 comes to a close it’s too early to say but 2010 will allow each of these valuable data sources to reposition and prove themselves as the geo data market grows and reacts to change.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

The (Geo) Data Dichotomy Dilemma

Gary — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:30:57 +0000

Before Web 2.0, before mashups, before FreeOurData.org.uk and other pleas, before the Internet itself, things used to be so much simpler for geo data. You were either an end user and accessed the data as a map or you were a GIS Professional and accessed the data via a (frequently very expensive and very specialised) Geographical Information System. But now we have geo data, lots of geo data, some of it free, some of it far from free, both in terms of usage and cost and a fundamental problem has replaced the paucity of data.

Everyone wants free, open, high quality geo data and no one wants to pay for it. But it’s not quite that simple.

The recent acquisitions of Tele Atlas and Navteq, the two big global geo data providers, by TomTom and Nokia respectively show the inherent value in owning data. But owning the data isn’t enough any more as the market for licensing the data is a shrinking one, despite the phenomenal growth of the satnav market, both in car and on mobile handsets. Why is the market shrinking? Because no one wants to pay for it, at least directly.

TomTom, primarily a hardware vendor, are differentiating into the software and data market, seems to be concentrating on the PND usage of the data, although we’ve yet to see how the outlay necessary to acquire Tele Atlas coupled with the overall economic downturn will effect their overall 2009 earnings. Their Q1 2009 report somewhat dryly notes that “market conditions were challenging” and that “we are making clear progress with the transformation of Tele Atlas into a focused business to business digital content and services production company“. There may be other aspirations at play here but for now at least, the company is keeping quiet.

Nokia, also primarily a hardware vendor in the form of mobile and cellular handsets, are also moving away from their roots and into a wider market, hopefully in an attempt to stop the encroachment of upstarts such as HTC, Apple and RIM into Nokia’s traditionally strong smartphone heartland. Again, Nokia has yet to make a public play into this arena but all the composite elements are in place to enable this to happen.

Taking the opposite route, Google, which started off as a software player are now moving to being a player in the data market by gathering high quality geo and mapping data under the smokescreen of gathering Street View. This has allowed them to gather sufficient data to supplant Tele Atlas as a data provider, at least in the Continental United States.

All three companies are either making or have the prospect of making determined plays in the location space but all three of them have ways of leveraging the value inherent in their data. Google has their unique users, their search index and a vast amount of advertising inventory; TomTom their satnav customers; Nokia their handset customers, albeit one level removed with the Mobile Network Operators as an uneasy partner and intermediary.

So what of the open data providers? It’s important to remember here that open doesn’t always mean free, it means the ability to create derived works and to use the data in ways that the originator may not have immediately foreseen. True, a lot of open data is free, but even then it’s the Free Software Foundation’s definition of the word.

“Free (software) is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer.”

The poster child of open geo data is OpenStreetMap, the “free editable map of the world”. Founded in 2004 by Steve Coast, OSM has enjoyed phenomenal growth in users and in contributions of data that can be used anywhere and by anyone and which espouses the values of free as in speech and as in beer. As with all community or crowd sourced collaborative projects, OSM’s challenge is to sustain that growth and once complete coverage of a region is reached, in keeping that coverage fresh, current and valid. We’ll leave aside that fact that complete coverage is an extremely subjective concept and means many things to many people.

Traditionally strongest in urban regions, one of OSM’s other key challenges is to match the expectations of their user community who consume that data rather than those who create it. Both internationalisation of the data and expansion out of the urban conurbations will potentially prove challenging in the years to come. That’s not to say OSM isn’t a significant player in this space and the quality of the data, though varying and in some places duplicated, is for the majority of use cases, good enough. This was backed up by research undertaken by Muki Haklay of UCL which answered the perennial question of “how good is OSM data” with a pithy “good enough”.

Attempts to capitalise on and monetize the success and data corpus of OSM through the Venture Capital funded Cloudmade have yet to deliver on the promise and with the exception of a set of APIs, Cloudmade has announced the loss of their OpenStreetMap Community Ambassadors and the closure of their London office. All of which lends credence to the fact that simply owning the data isn’t enough.

So how to solve the dichotomy of geo data? Everyone wants it but no one’s willing to pay for it with the exception of the big players, the Googles, the Yahoos and the Microsofts of the world and control of the proprietary data sources has centralised into TomTom and Nokia, both of whom are well placed to capitalise on their data assets but who haven’t yet delivered on that promise.

Maybe the answer is twofold. Firstly develop an open attribution model whereby the provenance of an atom of data can be tagged and preserved; this would remove a lot of the prohibitions on creating derived works at the original data provenance could still be maintained. Secondly allow limited usage of proprietary data at varying levels of granularity, accuracy and currency, thus creating a freemium model for the data and stimulate developer involvement in donating data to the community as a whole.

It’s too early to see whether this will come to pass or whether an already tight hold on the data will become tighter still.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous