The Daily Dose

om·ni·pres·ent

adjective \-zənt\

: present in all places at all times

This definition of omnipresent sums up many facets of society. Fast food chains? Everywhere. Reality TV shows? You know the answer. And what about Google? Yup, right again.

What started as a simple search engine back in 1998 is now an omnipresent force, spanning search, email, video, productivity, smartphones, laptops, glasses, navigation and more. And by more, we mean more. Just last month, Google acquired Nest for multiple billions, even though it really only has a (smart) thermostat and smoke detector to its name. But it’s all about the future, and the future is very much about smart homes and the Internet of everything.

Not long before Nest, Google acquired Boston Dynamics, a company that builds robots that can walk and run and have names like BigDog, Cheetah, WildCat and Atlas. Cheetah can apparently run faster than Usain Bolt. This initiative could well be bolstered by its subsequent acquisition of artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepMind, for what’s thought to be in the region of $500m.

Five years from now, Google may have data-points from every facet of your life – at home, on the bus, and in the car. However, this is all just scene-setting for what we’re really here to talk about – maps.

Navigation: There’s a (Google) map for that

Deeply entrenched in Google’s arsenal of innovation is Google Maps, a service you’ve no doubt encountered in your time online through Google’s own cross-platform mapping tools, or the slew of third-party apps that suckle from its navigational teat. Maps is a massively useful service, one that single-handedly underscores the value of 3G- and 4G-enabled smart devices, as it means no more expensive satnav systems for your car, and no more stopping strangers in the street to ask where the Horse & Hound pub is.

As with most of Google’s services, Maps brings endless value to the table, and it’s difficult to knock something that has ultimately changed the way people interact with the world around them. But is a future where Google knows where you are at all times a good thing?

We’re already seeing how Google+ is being used as its cross-product glue, providing a ‘unified’ experience. Want to post a comment on YouTube or write a review on Google Play? You gotta use Google+. Google Maps is one obvious omission here – you can use it on the Web without having to surrender any account details. Could that change in the future? Who knows. But anything’s possible.

Of course, you’re not physically tethered to Google Maps – you use it because it’s genuinely a great service. Decent alternatives include Microsoft’s Bing Maps and Nokia’s HERE mapping services, but ‘Google Maps is Google Maps’, right?

Then there’s OpenStreetMap, which you may have encountered before without really knowing it. For the unitiated, OpenStreetMap is a free, editable map of the world created by the online masses. Yes, it’s just like Wikipedia…but for maps.

OpenStreetMap is also a little bit like Google’s very own Map Maker tool, insofar as it taps the goodwill of the public to improve the geo-data associated with its maps, without a hint of financial reward. One key difference, of course, is that OSM is a not-for-profit that gives the data back to the community to reuse in other products and services. Google, on the other hand, is a multi-billion dollar corporation that sells much of this data back to third-parties.

The hows and whys of people’s decision to donate their spare time to a money-making enterprise is an argument for another day. But the fact that Google has adopted an OpenStreetMap-style approach to improving its own maps is telling – and it also bodes well for the future of OSM.

In recent times, OSM has hit the headlines on a number of occasions, often when a well-known tech-brand adopts the open-source mapping platform instead of Google. Foursquare ditched Google Maps back in 2012 for the OpenStreetMap-powered MapBox, Craigslist uses it for apartment searches, while the mighty Apple has turned to OpenStreetMap data too, even though it took a while for the attribution to be added.

One of the key reasons more companies have started using OpenStreetMap over Google Maps in recent times comes down to two simple things: price and quality.

Back in 2012, Google introduced usage limits for its API, which basically stipulated that once a third-party app exceeded 25,000 map loads for 90 consecutive days, the company/developer would have to pay $4 for every subsequent 1,000 map loads above the free allowance. This fee was subsequently lowered to $0.50, but only after some big-name departures, including the aforementioned Foursquare.

There are rather a lot of OSM-based services out there now, including Germany-based Skobbler, which serves up GPS navigation and other travel-themed apps for iOS and Android. Skobbler hit the headlines at the end of January, after it was acquired by personalized navigation company Telenav for $25 million. But perhaps one of the more fascinating facets of this deal was who was already leading Telenav’s efforts in the OpenStreetMap space – this was none other than Steve Coast, founder of the OpenStreetMap project itself, who had joined Telenav from Microsoft the previous September.

Coast was quick to point out Google’s own efforts in the people-powered mapping space, as he explained in a post-Skobbler acquisition blog post

“Have others tried their hand at crowd-sourcing map data as well? Absolutely. Waze and Google – or, just Google now – provide similar mechanisms to improve their maps, based mostly on OSM’s innovations. With one big catch. It is very much their map. Not yours. (Just ask the developers who pay a lot of money to use it.)

OpenStreetMap is different. All of the quality data contributed is openly available – just like Wikipedia. So, anyone can download, experiment and play with it freely. It’s not locked up beyond your reach.”

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There has been more than a few dissenting voices over the years, from those concerned about Google’s hold on all our data.

‘Owning’ location

Serge Wroclawski, the OpenStreetMapper and self-proclaimed ethical hacker behind the Emacsen blog, posted a very interesting and heartfelt article last month called Why the World Needs OpenStreetMap. While he raises a number of important points, one of the core underlying tenets of his argument centers on the issue of ‘owning’ location.

“In the 1800s, people were struggling with time – not how much of it they had, but what time it was,” he says. “Clocks existed, but every town had its own time – ‘Local Time’ – which was synchronized by town clocks or, more often than not, church bells. Railway time, then Greenwich Mean Time [GMT] eventually supplanted all local time, and most people today don’t think about time as anything but universal.”

Using this concept of the universality of time, Wroclawski prods at the modern-day quandary of location – vis-à-vis who owns it, and should one corporation lay claim to the notion of ‘place’.

It’s not just about Google Maps of course – there’s Nokia’s HERE Maps which was boosted by its $8 billion Navteq acquisition back in 2007, and TomTom too, underpinned by its 2008 Tele Atlas acquisition. But Google is a good example of how one company could grow to own the concept of ‘place’.

Wroclawski argues that such companies are striving to become “the definitive sources” of location, given that it’s such big business.

“With all these companies, why do we need a project like OpenStreetMap?,” he ponders. “The answer is simply that as a society, no one company should have a monopoly on place, just as no one company had a monopoly on time in the 1800s. Place is a shared resource, and when you give all that power to a single entity, you are giving them the power not only to tell you about your location, but to shape it.”

Ultimately, Wroclawski’s concerns about place-ownership center on things such as who decides what is displayed on a map (e.g. Google), and the mass collection of data. It all makes for an interesting read, one that builds a strong case for OpenStreetMap as a ‘thing’. A Wikipedia-style platform for maps – open, transparent and editable by anyone with a desire to do so.

With that in mind, we caught up with Steve Coast to get the lowdown on where OpenStreetMap has come from, where it’s at, and where things could go from here.