Every phone using the app can contribute to your map data. If you combine magnetic data plus wifi data plus user behavior data, I expect you'd be able to continue to provide good 3D data to users.
I'd bet the hard part is getting building owners to update things regularly. Who's going to remember to change the map when the grocery store moves the cereal from aisle 2 to aisle 7?
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by integration; are you proposing that the mapping app contain the complete map data, which is then occasionally updated as needed? There's a clear advantage to not storing several GB of data you rarely if ever need on a device with very limited storage space.
Maps on my phone are crucial to me. The single most important feature is offline use - I often sit on the Underground (no Internet) going in the general direction of my meeting, but needing to know if/where I need to change lines, and then how to get from the tube station to the meeting location.
So while this looks like it will fill a gap on iOS, it's something I'm unwilling to wait for.
Hardly an impossible feature to add to a mapping product tho? We are basically talking downloading the map tiles to the device you want to browse from.
Happy birthday. What's the easiest way to contribute data to it using my phone? I want to start mapping my city but I really have no idea how to do this. Any google maps style app that asks you questions about your surroundings?
For most of the data, it's already possible to siphon it off. Just browse with a instrumented browser and you can download all the 3D map data for a city in a few minutes from a single session, simply emulating a user zooming around the city.
Business data can likewise be methodologically downloaded, thousands of businesses per user account per day doesn't hit their rate limits.
The polygons of roads and stuff are also easily extracted from a browser.
And the Android/iOS mobile apps allow you to 'download for offline use', which is obfusticated but not properly encrypted.
Charging $1 per 1000 records for API access would cost massive amounts for a competitor to download all the data - and besides, maps data is fairly easy to hide a few erroneous entries in and catch anyone using the data to start a clone of Google Maps.
Except you could build pre-loading of map data into the app. On Symbian phones with Ovi Maps the app will download map data on-the-fly, or you can choose to pre-load it (for example the full maps for Europe or whatnot). I see no reason Google couldn't do something similar.
Did you read the article? The very next paragraph explains that:
> If a user agrees to having their map data viewable on their mobile device, then the map that the Roomba creates during a cleaning job is sent to the cloud where it is processed and simplified to produce a user-friendly map that ultimately appears in the iRobot HOME App.
I always seem to lose data connection just when I really need it with google maps on iOS. The whole data everywhere thing works great in big mostly flat low density cities like LA but it doesn't seem to work so well in London and barely works at all in mountainous rural areas. It would be great if the mapping data were stored on the phone.
I love OrganicMaps but lacks in certain situations.
When I want to be able to zoom into any and all of my bookmarks, I have to keep the map data of all countries I've ever been visiting. Thats tens and tens of GB of data on a mobile phone.
And everytime there are maps updates I have to redownload all of it. Tens and tens of GB of data.
When you're traveling and forgot to DL everythibg beforehand and have to use some WIFI hotspot you might not be able to get your maps downloaded. Happened to me multiple times.
Would be interesting to see how large this would be. I remember a few years ago (3-4?) when there was a project for mobile devices that would cache Google Maps for your city onto your device.
Anyone know how this integrates with Maps? I could imagine some really cool innovations by applying machine learning or somehow connecting the data from this app to Maps users.
I'd bet the hard part is getting building owners to update things regularly. Who's going to remember to change the map when the grocery store moves the cereal from aisle 2 to aisle 7?
reply