Aside from just telling you where you are, or letting you point our where you want to be, maps can do a fantastic job of recontextualizing everything you think you know about the world. You probably know that already, but here’s a run-down of maps that do it well.
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While Nokia continues to work on clawing back some of the once-market-leading smartphone business it has lost in the last few years to Apple and Android handset makers like Samsung, it has also slowly been building out a business based around its mapping and navigation division, rebranded as HERE earlier this year. That strategy — which has seen deals with the likes of Toyota, Volkswagen, BMW and Garmin for its in-car navigation systems — is going into high gear today. Nokia is launching Connected Driving, which included HERE Auto for embedded in-car navigation; HERE Auto Cloud for extra services like real-time traffic updates; and HERE Auto Companion, apps that will make it seamless to link up location data that you want to use or that you’ve created in your car, with what you are doing when you are outside the car and using your smartphone instead. On top of this, it’s upgrading its HERE Traffic system with a new data processing engine called “Halo.”
The launch today, in some regards, represents one of Nokia’s biggest challenges yet: it’s pitching itself as an operating system provider for other hardware makers (car companies; in-car system makers) to use as the platform for new products. Call it Nokia’s Android strategy.
Nokia is announcing the new products today and will be unveiling this suite of services at the the International Motor Show in Frankfurt, Germany on September 10. As with the rest of the products in HERE, Nokia’s intention is for all of this to be interoperable with different smartphone platforms. What that will mean in theory is that while HERE Auto and Auto Cloud will be loaded on to in-car systems, the apps in the Auto Companion will be launched for multiple platforms, including iOS and Android. In practice, though, Floris van de Klashorst, VP of connected cars for HERE, tells me that it’s likely that we will see the first services to be built on the platform that Nokia itself uses for smartphones, Windows Phone.
A rundown of the new services:
HERE Auto. This is Nokia’s embedded in-car navigation service. Using cached content, Nokia says it’s the first on the market that provides comprehensive mapping data even when a user doesn’t have a data connection. This includes turn by turn voice guided navigation in 95 countries, as well as 2D, 3D and satellite map views, with street-level imagery. Van de Klashorst tells me that Nokia is now also working on an SDK (yet to be released publicly) that will let third parties integrate services directly into this experience. He pointedly tells me that this will not include ads, which users they have surveyed have said are too distracting in cars. But this doesn’t rule out placing markers, for example, for a particular pizza joint when you are driving by it looking for some Italian food. Other features that are likely to come in by way of the SDK are music services and social networking services (not distracting like ads at all, right?!). Early users of this before the wider release include in-car system maker Continental, which is using them as part of its “Open Infotainment Platform.” I’d expect other app makers and navigation service companies to be added to the list soon.
HERE Auto Cloud. Like HERE Auto, this is also designed to work with and without data connections — useful for when you are in remote areas, or you are in regions where you may be roaming outside of your carrier’s network. This is Nokia’s own layer of extra services around driving — for example real-time traffic updates, helping drivers avoid congested areas, road closures or blockages that occur en route, as well as other services such as recommendations on places to eat, parking spots, information on where to charge an electric vehicle or where to find the most inexpensive fuel.
From the screenshots that Nokia provided to me, it looks like this is one of the fruits of its relationship with Foursquare:
HERE Auto Companion. This is the bridge between what Nokia is doing in the car and what it is doing outside of it. The Auto Companion, as Van de Klashorst demonstrated to me, works both on the web and as a mobile app, and it’s actually very cool: what it lets you do is create mapping instructions or take notes of a place that you’d like to visit, when you are sitting at your computer or on your phone, and then, when you get into your HERE-powered car, those data points follow you. If you start a trip in your car, and then park it, you can continue finding your way using your handset. Taking a page from the many apps that let users control what their TVs at home are recording, Nokia says that drivers can also use the app to find their car (using LiveSight augmented reality technology) and check stats for fuel levels and tire pressure. Part of this will be based on the new HALO platform, which basically will gather data using different sensors on the car. This will be used not just for app services for the consumer but to help gather more accurate information about weather in a particular place and more.
For cars that are shared between more than one person (say, in a family) each user can have his or her own interface in a vehicle:
Van de Klashorst tells me that the big idea here is to personalize those in-car experiences: “One thing that is apparent is that people have a strong relationship both with their cars and with their phones, but the in-car systems are ice cold. People cannot influence or modify or personalise them. To make them personal is a very important aspect.”
And when you think about this, it’s a potentially interesting area when you link it up with wider trends in the automotive space, such as with car sharing services like Zipcar. “With car sharing services, this car that you don’t own becomes your car. Systems like this once will be a very important part of elevating and experience to make it your own,” he notes.
Apart from the challenges of competing against other smartphone players (including Google, Apple and BlackBerry) who also have stakes in the automotive game — Apple already has integrations with several car makers and there are often rumors swirling of how this will expand over time; Google has gone so far as to create self-driving vehicles; and BlackBerry has QNX — Nokia is doing this from a position that is not without its own challenges. In Nokia’s last quarterly earnings, Here posted sales of $305 million, down 18% over last year, up 8% on the previous quarter and it remains loss-making, with a $116 million operating deficit, which is at least marginally better than the $120 million a year ago. (A HERE representative points out, however, that the division has “underlying profitability” and “strong automotive sales,” showing that it’s following through on establishing financial independence from Nokia’s smartphone business.)
Still, Nokia has in its hands a very key asset: it holds one of the biggest databases of mapping information in the world, meaning it doesn’t need to rely on third parties for it. And even with its many layoffs, it still employs hundreds of engineers that are thinking of clever ways of using that to Nokia’s advantage. Nokia has nothing to lose by trying to get out into pole position in this space at this still-early stage in the connected car revolution.
In contrast to its happy visits to the Eiffel Tower and Burj Khalifa, Street View’s exploration of Dead Island may have given you the wrong impression of Japan. Luckily, one of the country’s most picturesque symbols, Mount Fuji, was recently scaled by what must be some of Mountain View’s most athletic trekkers. The fruits of the 12,400-foot climb and incessant photo stops are 14,000 separate panoramas, including many sunrise shots only available to diligent night climbers. They’re now live on Maps, so hit the source or panorama after the break for a far less taxing peek.
Via: TNW
Source: Google Maps (Blog)
It goes by the name of Hashima, or Gunkanjima (“Battleship Island”), or even “The Dead Island”, since it inspired the water-locked cyberterrorist HQ in Skyfall. As you can see for yourself, courtesy of the new Google Street View (and official “making of” video) embedded after the break, it’s a very a real place off the coast of Japan’s Nagasaki Peninsula, and it’s even lonelier than its fictional counterpart in the Bond film (which wasn’t actually filmed there). There are no tourist offices or giant Oedipus Complexes, as far as we can see, just long stretches of overgrown roads and collapsing apartment blocks that once housed 5,000 people, before they abandoned the island in 1974 following the demise of its coal industry. It took a Google employee two hours to map the place and preserve its crumbling visage for posterity using a special backpack, but don’t be surprised if you want to leave it after just a few minutes.
Filed under: GPS, Internet, Google
Source: Google’s Japanese Blog
LIDAR scanning has recently become cost-effective enough for archaeologists to use on large historical sites, and they’re taking full advantage. A helicopter jaunt last year has revealed a massive urban site below the jungles near Angkor Wat in Cambodia that likely housed thousands of people. New canals, temples and other man-made structures were discovered during a two-day scan, which emitted up to 200,000 laser pulses per second and would have taken years if done by traditional excavation methods. The technique can scope out features as small as a footprint, and is also being used in cities around the Egyptian pyramids and other archaeologically interesting regions — marking another way that Indy-style archeologists are becoming obsolete.
Source: MIT Technology Review
Sick and tired of hearing about New York’s bike share and the irresponsible weirdos that populate it? Well, here’s a change of pace: this excellent real-time map illustrates 85 different bike share systems from all over the world.
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TomTom is looking to beef up its location based services portal by joining forces with TrafficLand to bring real time traffic video to its developers. TomTom’s LBS will now incorporate TrafficLand’s network of over 13,000 roadside webcams, enabling developers to integrate live footage into their location-enabled apps via the Traffic Camera API. TrafficLand’s real-time video will join the other cloud-based location services TomTom provides to devs, like map content, routing and geocoding. For right now, TrafficLand covers only the US, UK and Canada, and it’s not clear if the company plans to expand beyond those three countries anytime soon. For more information, you can take a gander at TomTom’s full press release, embedded after the break.
Filed under: GPS
Just hours before its I/O event, Google has apparently had a little accident: the sign-up page for “the new Google Maps” briefly went live, revealing a slew of extra details about what’s coming in the rumored refresh before quickly being pulled. Droid-Life managed to grab some screenshots, including the one above, which gets to the heart of what Google is trying to achieve. The central idea is that Google will create maps tailored to the kind of information you’re looking for, using a “smarter search box” to highlight just the “things that matter most,” whether those be flights, ground transport or the new Earth View that integrates directly with Google Earth without the need for a plug-in. According to the leaked sign-up screens, the bringing together of all Google’s data will result in layers of information that reach “from outer space down to the streets” — but there’s still no evidence about how (or whether) this might work on mobile. Stay tuned to our Google I/O opening keynote liveblog for more.
Filed under: Internet, Software, Google
Source: Droid-Life
While patrolling the halls of the CHI 2013 Human Factors in Computing conference in Paris, we spied a research project from MIT’s Media Lab called “Smarter Objects” that turns Minority Report tech on its head. The researchers figured out a way to map software functionality onto tangible objects like a radio, light switch or door lock through an iPad interface and a simple processor / WiFi transceiver in the object. Researcher Valentin Huen explains that “graphical user interfaces are perfect for modifying systems,” but operating them on a day-to-day basis is much easier using tangible objects.
To that end, the team developed an iPad app that uses motion tracking technology to “map” a user interface onto different parts of an object. The example we saw was a simple radio with a a pair of dials and a speaker, and when the iPad’s camera was pointed at it, a circular interface along with a menu system popped up that cannily tracked the radio. From there, Huen mapped various songs onto different positions of the knob, allowing him to control his playlist by moving it — a simple, manual interface for selecting music. He was even able to activate a second speaker by drawing a line to it, then “cutting” the line to shut it off. We’re not sure when, or if, this kind of tech will ever make it into your house, but the demo we saw (see the pair of videos after the break) seemed impressively ready to go.
Noam Bardin, CEO of Waze, just took the stage here at D:Dive Into Mobile, taking part in a wide-ranging discussion hosted by Liz Gannes. Aside from dodging questions about potential acquisitions, Bardin made no bones about how he saw the future of mobile playing out. Of course, this is a man who spends essentially no time focused on the desktop web — given that Waze is mobile only, one shouldn’t be surprised. According to Bardin, “the next five years will be about fighting for time with users,” and he pointed to Facebook Home as the de facto example of that.
Rather than crafting their own OS and “doing what Microsoft has done — fighting a war that ended five years ago” — Facebook decided to make a time play on a massive OS. From there, Bardin confessed that in major markets, he sees Waze as Google’s “only real competition.”
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
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