Even if you're not a cartographer, when you first see a map there's almost always a gut feel for whether you like a map or whether you don't. Critiquing a map is a deeply subjective thing. You may not know why you like a map but you can tell whether the map's cartography works or it doesn't work, for you at least.

The image at the top of this post is a great example of what I mean by this. It's a map of Berlin on the inside of an umbrella. Which is a great idea and this map is one I'm very fond of, both because of the time I spent in Berlin and because it was a present from one of my old HERE Maps team. But as a map, it's far from pleasing to me; I love what's being mapped, I just think it needs a better cartographer.

So much of what appears on today's digital maps is crowdsourced. Whether it's a totally crowdsourced map such as OpenStreetMaps' or a more focused effort such as HERE's Map Creator or Google's Map Maker, the so called wisdom of the crowd is an integral part of so many maps. But what would happen if you tried to crowdsource the critiquing of maps rather than the map itself?

Imagine for a moment you're in the city you live in; you know it like the back of your hand and yet you know there's shops, businesses or services nearby that you haven't yet come across. Or maybe you're in an unfamiliar city and you want to explore and stay away from the same old global brands that you see everywhere, in every city and on every street.

Now imagine putting this on a map.

"Ah hah!" you might say, reaching into your pocket and brandishing your smartphone. "I can do that easily" you say triumphantly as you fire up Google's or Apple's or HERE's mapping app.

But no, I'm talking about something a little more focused, a little less broad. "No worry" you say, firing up Foursquare, or Yelp or Facebook or TripAdvisor.

The geo industry has always been a fairly vaguely and nebulously defined industry and it takes a brave conference organiser to try and cover everything that's geo related in a single conference. But that's what GeoBusiness tries to do and it almost succeeds. This year's conference agenda and trade booth sideshow managed to cover the whole lifecycle of all things geo, from dodging drones, centimetre accurate GPS devices and LIDAR cars outside the Business Design Centre in London, through use of geo-data, with far too much BIM for my personal tastes, through mapping and cartography and ending up with crowd sourcing mapping data and using maps for emergency responses.

This year's high points were a jaw dropping talk on using airborne remote sensing to search for illicit nuclear explosions, surely a first for any conference I've been to, if only for the title alone and Chris Sheldrick from what3words recapping his talk on addressing the world. Less than high points were conference coffee that tasted like it had been brewed the month before and wifi that recalled the heady days of a 19.2K baud rate dial up modem. Thankfully the impending coffee emergency was prevented thanks to an espresso machine in the middle of the Leica exhibition stand and some rather fine coffee shops around the conference centre.

Last month, in response to the news that Uber had acquired LBS platform provider deCarta, Marc Prioleau penned an article asking is this the start of a mapping war?

A few days ago, Bloomberg announced news that Nokia is looking to sell off HERE, the maps business forged from the, sometimes unwilling, union of NAVTEQ and Nokia's Ovi Maps. Potential buyers for HERE include ... Uber.

This looks like either a skirmish before an all out map war offensive or this is the start of that mapping war.

Somewhere around 1510 what is now known as the Lenox Globe was made. Apart from being either the second or third oldest globe in existence, the Lenox Globe is infamous for the first appearance of the Latin Phrase HIC SVNT DRACONES, which is today loosely translated as here be dragons. This is probably not a reference to the precise location of dragons, but is thought to be a reference to the Kingdom of Dragoian in Sumatra which was noted by Marco Polo during his travels. Nowadays the phrase is commonly taken to mean "here is stuff we don't know about or which hasn't happened yet".

All of which reminds me of a conversation I had with a member of the finance team in a previous job; the company name is redacted to prevent embarrassment. The conversation went something like this ... "So, when will this map of yours be finished?" "It won't; the world is always changing". "Well I need a date for reporting against, so can I say the map will be finished at the end of the financial year?"

CartoBot is a small robot who lives in the office in my loft. He accidentally achieved consciousness when his charging cable was accidentally plugged into a Raspberry PI and he started to look for information. His only source was my library of books on maps and so CartoBot became obsessed with them. He now spends his days sitting on my home wifi connection and scouring the web for maps and mapping related stuff, which he Tweets about through his very own Twitter account.

None is this is true. Sorry CartoBot, it's just not. Cartobot is a Twitterbot, written in Node.js, that searches for Tweets about maps and cartography and also scans my GetPocket queue for bookmarks tagged with maps and Tweets about these as well.

At the beginning of 2013 Google launched Google Maps Engine Lite, a simpler and easier to use version of their commercial Maps Engine, which was designed as a successor to Google's My Maps feature. In essence, My Maps and GME were web based, simplified GIS tools, allowing a user to create maps with overlays of their own data. Call it GIS for people who don't know about GIS if you will. Maybe GME never got the traction Google hoped for but they have now announced that GME will be shutting down in a year's time. What happens next for GME users and what alternatives are there? Who will benefit from the demise of GME?

There's 3 likely contenders to the throne of the GIS-lite approach of GME; ArcGIS Online, CartoDB and MapBox via their new Turf product.

There’s much irony here, given that GME was originally positioned as a web savvy alternative to traditional GIS platforms. Both Esri and Mapbox will need a significant advertising push and awareness campaign to attract GME emigres. CartoDB on the other hand is positioning itself as the official successor to GME with the launch of CartoDB for Google Maps Platform, apparently developed in conjunction with Google.

Not all Geographic Information conferences are created equal. A great proof point for this is IRLOGI, the Irish Association for Geographic Information. Today I've been in Dublin at their annual GIS Ireland 2014 conference, which is in its 19th year. I'd been invited to give one of the opening keynotes; who could resist such an invitation?

Held in the hidden conference centre that nestles unassumingly under the Chartered Accountants of Ireland's offices, GIS Ireland ticked all the boxes. The conference team had obviously worked hard to ensure that there was a wide range of topics being discussed and managed to avoid the "same people, same talks, same topics" trap that some conferences fall into. The coffee was hot and plentiful and the wifi (almost) stayed up and running all the time.

The starting point for the talk I have was an article called Today's Mapping Industry Really Does Need To Please All People, All The Time, which I'd written for GPS Business News in September. As there was an article length limit, I couldn't go into the detail I think this topic merited, but a conference talk is a different beast. This is what that article morphed into. This is B2*.