Hugh Garry

SXSW - The Power of Here - Google's Marissa Mayer

If you've been wondering where Google is placing its marker for the future then Google's head of mobile and geolocation Marissa Mayer made it clear that the future is 'here'.

"The mobile phone acts as a cursor to connect the digital and physical,” Mayer said as she ran through some of Google’s location and mobile products and strategies. The new Maps uses vectors to render the map image because it takes up 1/100 of the size of the old tile system. They can be cached and can include 3D representations of buildings.

Next she showed the new Google Maps Navigation for Android which looks for routes around traffic jams. The idea being that the new update will lay the groundwork for predictive navigation apps in the future

She also shared data on a few of Google’s applications:

40% of all Google Maps usage is on mobile, and Google Maps for Mobile has 150 million users. The app’s turn-by-turn navigation feature processes 35 million miles per day. Also, the newly added route around traffic feature is saving users two years of time every day, which equates to a potential $250,000 in fuel savings per year.

Mayer looked ot the future mentioning augmented reality such as Layar "a digital layer on top of reality". But she says we can go further than that. "Contextual discovery is taking your location and a little context"

If you had a photo of a bird, how would you convey that bird to a search engine, other than typing something like "bird with a white head and black body"? In the future, you'll be able to use something like Google Goggles to just upload that snapshot as your query.

I pulled together some of the references and conversation from Twitter using Storify.

Poems and Maps

Our Mike launches his book 'God Is A Manc' tonight and I'm gutted that I can't be there. So, I've made a God Is A Manc Map for him using the words of his poem of the same name.

You can navigatethe poem and its locations via the map. I've added a tiny bit of info about the places mentioned, but I'm sure Mike could tell you a whole lot more should you ever bump into him.

He's a brilliant poet and genius writer who should be handed the keys of Manchester. I'm also very proud of him.

Navigate the whole map via the word here or visit Mike's blog here

View God Is A Manc Map in a larger map

By the way. Did I ever tell you God Is A Manc?.

#godisamanc

Manchester Geotagged

via www.flickr.com

Love this Flickr set of the world's most geotagged cities. The images features all the major cities, and some smaller ones, with the locations coming from the public Flickr and Picasa search APIs. Top stuff.

SXSW: Mapping the Future (and Past)

The simplicity of mashing date with maps has seen them popping up all over the place recently leading to "Google Map fatigue" amonst many of us.  This was a great session on how we can continue to be creative and innovate around map design. The panel looked at how we move beyond the simple pin-dropping style and demoed a compelling range of mapping innovations. Typically Michal Migurski from Stamen had all the best tricks up his sleeve.

One of the most interesting areas of discussion was around how we can deal with changes to location on maps over a period of time. Migurski showed off the London 2012 Olympic Map that he’s been working on. He dealt with the problem of mapping an area that will change dramatically due to construction by adding a timeline at the bottom. Dragging the timeline will show the stadium as it is being built with photos as and when they are added. Viewing the map in 2012 and and dragging the timeline back will show the stadium being 'unbuilt'.

There was also a really nice map on mysociety.org showing 20km round the BBC Television Centre. By adjusting the sliders you can see areas within varying travel times to work mashed with varying house prices then merged into zones in a way that you could never do with a load of pins. The dragging of the sliders and the merging of zones was a strangely pleasant experience when compared to many of the maps we see today.

I really liked the areyousafeatlanta.com iPhone app for it's simplicity. The app lets you see how safe you are at all times based on your location within the city. A quick tap displays a threat meter of your safety level along with hyperlocal crime data broken down by type. Great for getting up to the minute crime data (updated dynamically) visualised in a really simple but effective way. What I also like about this, which wasn't really mentioned is that it mashed location and data without actually displaying it on anything that resembles a map. I'm sure that you can but threat meter is cool alternative.

If you want more examples of maps discussed in this session you can find them all tagged sxsw+neocartology on delicious.