Posts tagged as "apple"

Map Wars; Are Apple's Maps Really That Bad?

Making a map isn't easy. Making a map of streets and land features is hard. Making a map of streets and land features that stays up to date is harder. Making a map of streets, features and places, businesses, services, points of interest is harder still. Making a map of all of the previous that stays up to date is really hard. Making a map with all of the previous, wrapping it up in an app that runs on your smartphone and making it useable is verging on insanely difficult. Yet that's what Google and Nokia have been doing and with the release of iOS 6, that's what Apple is now doing as well. So how is Apple doing?

Is This Apple's New Map? (It Doesn't Look Like Google's)

Updated 8/3/12 at 12.20 GMT

Judging by comments to this blog post, on Twitter and on Google Plus, the consensus seems to be that yes, Apple is using OSM data from 2010 outside of the US; inside of the US it's (probably) TIGER data and no, there doesn't seem to be attribution and Apple may well be getting a communiqué from OSM to that effect. Other sources of information on this include * The iPhoto for iOS Not Using Google Maps thread on the OSM-Talk mailing list * Iván Sánchez Ortega has put up a nice map comparison between OSM and iPhoto's map tiles. * There's also another comparison between Apple's, OSM's and Google's map tiles. * Jonas. K has put up a blog post which comes right out and says that iPhoto is using OSM and other public domain mapping sources. * Finally, as a nice touch, this post seems to have made it into OSM Community Blogs.

Through the Window

Looking out of my hotel window I can see into the heart of Silicon Valley in Sunnyvale. What do you mean it's fairly uninspiring? East of here is Mountain View, home of the Google-plex, west of here is the Yahoo! mothership, which is the reason I'm here and to the south is Cupertino, and 1 Infinite Loop, the home of Apple.

OK, so that is fairly uninspiring and nondescript. This one is much more interesting. This is the view from my temporary cube in the middle of the Yahoo! campus, looking out over Moffett Field.

That oval looking building in the middle is Hanger One which is one of the world's largest freestanding structures. It may not look that impressive but it's almost 3 miles away; it covers 8 acres, is around 1100 feet long, around 300 feet wide and around 200 feet high. It's big.

And that's a much more impressive and interesting view out of the window.

It's Time to Stop LAMB (Location Based SPAM) Before It Even Exists

We all suffer from SPAM, the unwanted and unsolicited commercial bulk emails that are the reason we have Junk Mail filters and folders in our email clients and servers. A quick glance at the Junk folder for my personal email account shows over 300 of these since the beginning of February alone. If you use some form of instant messenger, be it MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, AOL or any of the others on the market, you've probably come across SPIM, Instant Messaging SPAM. Then there's also mobile phone SPAM via text messages, comment SPAM, the list goes on and on.

We're poised to start seeing a new form of SPAM raise its ugly head. Let's call it LAMB for now, Location Based Advertising SPAM.

As Ed Parsons pointed out on his blog yesterday, Apple are banning location based advertising in apps. "If you build your application with features based on a user’s location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store."

This is a good first step in locking down potential abuses of a technology before it has a chance to get out of control. The reason we have SPAM and all the other variants in the first place is that the underlying technologies were designed in an open manner with no control mechanisms in place to thwart unsolicited and unwanted messages and content. But we need to go further than this.