Recalculating: the past and present of mapping apps 🛣

* Originally published on 4 April 2024 *

Maps.

From scrolls to AAA paper ones 🗺in the early 00s, there’s a distance 💨 But from there to multi-dimensional 3D views (hello Immersive View) it’s an order of magnitude 🔍

Today I dive into our digital copilots🚘digital maps had been around since ‘03 but no one noticed. In ‘04, Danish engineers Lars Rasmussen & Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen came to Google with an idea to replace static maps for searchable, zoomable maps sans refresh - a true competitive advantage 🤯

Google bought their company Where2 and geospatial visualization firm Keyhole, adding satellite imagery 🛰 and superior interface to their proprietary engine 🚂 For context, no one had seen their own house in satellite imagery, let alone in color 🎨

Quickly this became all.the.rage⚡

It happened fast: Google Maps for desktop launched in Feb ‘05 followed by Google Earth Community . Then they launched the API🔌public transport routes and driving directions. In ‘07, Street View became available in select US cities as well as real-time traffic updates 🚸 harnessing anonymized user data.

By ‘09 turn-by-turn navigation⤵⤴ made its game-changing debu. tBut how? Magic behind is pure product ingenuity peppered w/ controversy 🌶the dreaded infinite scroll in social media, estimated to waste 200k human lifetimes every day, was invented by Aza Raskin trying to crack the usability challenge in maps 🤔

1/ Layered approach: Google Maps uses a combination of aerial imagery, street views, GIS data, traffic updates, and user input to create a comprehensive, up-to-date map for route planning across modes of transportation. Process is photogrammetry and it taps your GPS location 📍 to extrapolate the distance in the images onto the real world 🛣

2/ Ground truth: StreetView’s 14M km coverage required iteration on 250kg equipment 🎥 forklift onto a car in early days to reach today’s 7kg phone-controlled camera. Double whammy as footage captures road signs, house numbers and other data not visible from the sky 🪂

3/ Business underpinning? One worth $11Bn (2023) attractive enough for the App Store to ditch Google Maps in 2012 in favor of Apple Maps - which only now gets an edges in some respects. Ad revenue and POIs are the game: w/ 1bn users exploring far and near, there’s a use case for offering hours, ratings and prices of Points of Interest like restaurants 🍳 bars 🍹 hotels 🛌🏻 and more (+200M businesses). Competition includes Bing Maps ( Microsoft ), automotive-grade HERE Technologies ( Nokia ) and even open source alternative OpenStreetMap . But Google has deep pockets and testament to that is the $1.3Bn acquisition of Waze (2013) 💰

Google Maps is the backbone of many location-based experience apps. That’s great positioning for Google to market tailored business solutions 🧥 hence Amazon , Microsoft and Meta joining forces in Overture Maps Foundation , an outright attempt to dethrone Google in the location data business and the emerging car infotainment space 📺

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