My wife Lisa, loves the Channel 4 TV programme Location, Location, Location in which Phil and Kirstie our friendly property experts, try to find a new house for a member of the general public who think they know what they want, but almost always don’t have enough money.
I mention this, as today I attended the Location Intelligence Conference, and was on a panel discussing “For how long will spatial data be free” – the short answer is that is isn’t now and it never will be!! – more on this in a later post…
Anyway Phil and Kirstie come into this because I was amazed at the number of mash-ups presented which were ‘Real Estate” applications, clearly the first real mash-up of Google Maps and Craigs List was groundbreaking, but over a year later I was looking for a bit more innovation.
Maybe this is a reflection of where the money is, the excellent theme of the conference is profiting from Location Intelligence Technology, and clearly there is a real market here which can be addressed by tools build using Microsoft Live Local technology for example. But in many ways the mash-up session felt like a similar session 10 years ago, when the same applications were developed using the first generation of desktop GIS, the technology has changed but the commercial markets are the same ?
Eye Candy remains important, and the best audience response was reserved for the wonderful “Pirate map” interface developed using the Yahoo Flash api.
An interesting question was posed at the final Q&A session of the day, and was left unsurprisingly unanswered… When will there be a standard mapping api adopted by all the portal vendors so that an application developed using google local, would work with MapQuest and Microsoft ?
Written and submitted from the Parc 55 Hotel, San Francisco, using the hotels broadband connection.
5 replies on “Location, Location, Location”
Ed, why do you think that there are so many Google mashups for the US, and none generated by UK-based companies based on mapping data?
It’s only a semi-leading question.
Hi Charles
A leading question ???
It is interesting I must admit, why is there a perception that there are no UK mash-ups, as the data content is the same, the API and T&C’s are also the same.
There are in fact quite a few UK based Google map mash-ups including OnOneMap which is a “real estate” application as I was discussing.
Other include
Pub Crawls http://www.barcrawl.co.uk/
Schools http://www.schoolmap.org.uk/
Traffic (Virtual Earth ) http://traffic.dotnetsolutions.ltd.uk/
Traffic (Google) http://cyber-junky.co.uk/projects/map/?file=traveldata
Restaurants http://www.bitefinder.co.uk
And my personal favourite.
Dr Who Locations http://www.bitefinder.co.uk
ed
[…] Following a comment by Charles Arthur (yes he of the Free Our Data Campaign) that there were no UK based mapping mashups, I did a bit of a search and came up with this page which lists at least 22 mashups in the UK, and yes they all contain Ordnance Survey data licensed through partners. […]
[…] Ed Parsons, the chief technology officer of the Ordnance Survey, picked up on a comment I’d left on his blog about the number (or lack of them) of UK-based companies generating mashups. (A mashup grabs two sets of data and creates something new from them; here’s a Guardian article explaining it at length.) […]
I think google earth is so powerful, some of the detail is pin point.