Google maps gone wrong?

Google Maps is now exclusively using TeleAtlas as it's mapping data provider, dropping all previous information supplied from NavTeq.

This appears to have resulted in a noticeable increase in errors according to reports from The Map Room and The Earth is Square.

The Google mobile phone has arrived

The G1 phone has today been officially unveiled in the United States and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were present at the launch.


Essentially a 3G phone that has been optimised for Google services like mail and maps it is available on the T-Mobile network and requires signing up for a two-year contract.

The phone will reportedly be free to UK buyers on a £40 monthly data plan and should be available from early November.

In a significant competitive move against Apple's iPhone, Amazon has confirmed that it has created a music retail application for the G1 that will let users search, buy, download and play music from the Amazon store - a catalogue of 6m songs from all four major labels.

Whilst first glance might suggest the G1 is a just less pretty version of the iPhone don't forget this is Google and they tend to get things right quite often.

It is the first mobile device to use the Android operating system which is effectively open source, meaning any developer can build apps for the phone and a Facebook style model is used to promote the most popular / highly rated apps.

The device also includes a QWERTY keyboard which is presumably intended to encourage blackberry and heavy mail users to switch to this device.

For Google's sake, let's hope the UK launch won't see a repeat of the problems that plagued the UK iPhone launch.

Mikel Maron and Andrew Turner at Web 2.0 Expo

Mikel Maron and Andrew Turner went to the Web 2.0 Expo in New York and talked about Where 2.0 (and Burning Man). Their presentations are below (View notes from Kris Jordan).

Trends And Technologies In Where2.0 - Web2 Expo New York

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: lbs location)

Burning Man Earth at Web 2.0 Expo

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: burningman bme)

I really should make more of my Nokia N95...

So I'm sat at departure gate 15 of Glasgow airport, the dark clouds are so low they are literally sitting on the runway, rain is pouring from the sky, I'm drinking lucozade and my insides are full of painkillers that are having almost no effect on the onset of flu, oh, and the plane that we are supposed to be boarding in ten minutes hasn't actually arrived on it's inbound journey yet.

My Nokia N95 only has two bars of battery left but I'm in desperate need of anything it can offer in the way of passing the next few minutes... or maybe hours.

A quick browse of my available phone applications doesn't really offer much in the way of promise.

In no particular order, the apps I have, and generally use are:

Qik Capture - great for shooting short video clips and uploading to the web but a quick scan of the immediate vicinity doesn't provide anything of particular interest in the filming category.

Camera - The Nokia is blessed with a slow but effective 5MP camera which does get a fair bit of use, but again, any photos taken from my current sitting place could only be titled 'Grey'.

Ladbrokes Mobile - Essential tool for wasting money on the outcome of all sporting events without the need to boot up the PC and visit the Ladbrokes website. I doubt very much that they will be offering odds on my departure time from Glasgow though.

Sports Tracker - A GPS/Stopwatch/Information service for tracking your speed and distance whilst taking part in any sporting event that involves moving over a distance. I'm currently stationary, very stationary.

Zonetag - Useful when used in conjunction with the camera, allowing me to attach location metadata to my images, but of little use otherwise.

Sky Anytime - I could, if I wanted, set my Sky Plus box to record something on TV tonight, or simply view the channel listings. Not particularly entertaining though, and I am hoping to make it home at some point - and when I do it is very unlikely there will be anything on TV I actually want to watch anyway. (This app is priceless however if you are out on a Saturday night and have forgotten to record Match of the Day.)

I'm a firm believer that Nokia make great mobile phones. I think the N95 is fantastic - and it's a disservice to even label it as something as trivial as a mobile phone given it's range of capabilities.

I also believe that Apple make good looking hardware that is appealing to the eye and, eventually after a few upgraded models are released, generally quite good to use.

But the iPhone is not massively innovative, groundbreaking or revolutionary in what it is able to do.

So, why have I spent the last few days being fairly impressed with the interesting, entertaining, and extremely useful applications that have demonstrated to me by friends trying to convince me that the above statement is false?

Surely the N95 is capable of, dare I say it probably even has, many applications that provide the same degree of entertainment and usefulness as the iPhone?

I need to go searching in the Internet jungle to find these exciting beasts, these strange unknown creatures.

I need to hunt them down, capture them and add them to my marvellous N95 so that next time I am stuck at Glasgow airport waiting for a delayed plane, suffering from flu, with nothing but grey rain out of the window I have something better to do than write a long, waffling blog post that offers questions but no solutions.

...the plane has still not arrived.

The effect of GPS on geo-intelligence

Some interesting reaction to an ABC News article titled Will GPS Make Us Dumb?.

Geocarta points out that "One problem with Ms. Shasha's argument is that she presupposes that everyone actually had a sense of direction in the first place. Lots of people, my wife included, don't."

The Map Room has similar issues with the initial report, quite rightly pointing out that "spell-checking doesn’t make you less literate; it removes the requirement for you to be more literate. Ditto here: GPS isn’t making us dumb; it’s making it easier for us to stay dumb."