Yesterday and today I'm at Location Intelligence, a conference in SF about location-based technology and tools. It's mostly technical and thus over my head. But the mapping aspects of the conference are fascinating.
The big players are all there (Google, Yahoo!, MapQuest and Microsoft). But there's also many smaller companies doing interesting things and stuff on display that represents the next generation of Internet and in-car mapping tools, including 3-D. For example, check out Planet 9's "Virtual Cities."
Companies are taking demographic/census data and combining it with all kinds of other information (e.g., Dun & Bradstreet data) to create visual, mapping representations of that data. There are tons of BtoB, as well as BtoC applications here. I don't even think the folks at the conference are themselves totally aware of all the possibilities.
In the not-too-distant future we will see video and chat, among other applications, embedded in the balloons/infowindows of the Local Search mapping tools. We really haven't seen anything yet. The question is when will the mainstream user get beyond driving directions? (We're probably 6 mos. to a year away I'd say.)
I go back to a striking finding of the recent AOL-Pew mobile user survey: 51% of respondents said mobile maps were a "must-have" feature (MapQuest launched new directions and navigation tools recently for mobile). By contrast only 31% said "mobile search" was a must-have feature. I wrote about the survey results here.
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Related: Search Engine Watch (Chris Sherman) has a write up of a new book on Google Maps Hacks.
March 12, 2007 at 3:55 pm |
[...] and demographic data onto dynamic mapping interfaces. I discovered this at last year’s “Location Intelligence” conference (a small show) in SF. Beyond the interesting consumer-facing things that can be [...]