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Illustration: Yam Lee
 
''And then I turned right, right into a swamp!" Most of us have at least one mapping fiasco story and Brian McClendon, vice president of Google's mapping division, has heard them all. People can't resist sharing them, even though the misadventure is rarely as wacky as the storyteller thinks. When I tell him my tale of directional woe, he sighs. "We should have gotten your query right," he replies in a weary, apologetic tone.
About six weeks before I coaxed this kernel of atonement out of Google Maps, internet outrage over some glaring errors in Apple's new Maps app had prompted its chief executive Tim Cook to apologise to the world. After pleading that he was "extremely sorry," he vowed Apple would "keep working nonstop" until Maps lives up to the high standards customers expect of the company.
Mapping is a thankless endeavour. It is time- and labour-intensive to traverse, capture, analyse and present every nook and cranny of the globe. It's also expensive. New roads, buildings and entire cities are constantly popping up, challenging the best efforts of every mapping firm. And customers are demanding: you might overlook mediocrity in other digital experiences - blurry Skype video chats, incoherent conversations with Siri - but when it comes to getting to the right place at the right time, failure isn't an option.
"Our problem is that people compare us to the real world," McClendon says. "They know the real world. When we fail, it's embarrassing. So we have this challenge where - unlike in web search - we don't need to just give you better answers. We need to get the right answer."
Given all the headaches, then, why has mapping become the crux of some of the most contentious fights in tech, including Apple's escalating feud with Google? Mobile software competitors - Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nokia and a host of others - all share the same hunch that maps will be at the heart of our digital future. Digital representations of the real world don't just drive our use of smartphones and tablets; they're also key to promising technologies such as driverless cars and every Uber-fied location-enabled startup.
"We think there have been three big shifts in what people were asking online," says Hans Peter Brondmo, Nokia's head of new product innovation. "The first was 'what' - Google won that battle. The second question was 'who,' and Facebook won that. The next big question is 'where,' and that's what we're fighting to become, the Where company."
The fight means that the world is now better mapped than at any time in its history. Nokia's cartographic wizards assert that its maps cover more countries, receive inputs from more sources (80,000 data feeds) and are updated more quickly (up to 2.4 million times a day) than those of any other service. In 2008, Google launched Ground Truth, a massive project that uses a fleet of aircraft, cars and data collected from public and private agencies to create a proprietary location database of 40 countries around the world. There have been product innovations such as photo-realistic 3-D maps, 360-degree panoramic views, street views, and transit and turn-by-turn directions.
So far, though, these companies all seem to be doing this work on faith, hoping that someday it will pay off financially. Google, for example, won't say how it generates revenue from mapping. Instead, it explains its interest in maps as part of the larger mission to organise the world's information.
"One fifth of our queries ask for some kind of local component - in that way, maps have always been a part of search," says Manik Gupta, senior product manager in charge of Ground Truth.
Maps also factor into Google's highest-profile current and future projects. In the wake of Apple's debacle, Google Maps has become a key selling point for choosing an Android phone over an iPhone. It's also built into Google Now, Android's Siri-like artificial-intelligence assistant. Then there's the robotic-car project, the Google Glass sci-fi spectacles and opportunities in local advertising - all of which can be enhanced by improving Maps. Google may never be able to isolate the revenue coming from Maps the way it can from, say, display advertising. But its products would probably not be as good without them.
Nokia, on the other hand, can point to actual sales: it licenses its data to sites such as Amazon, Bing and Yahoo as well as to most of the world's car manufacturers. Nokia says its cartography can be found in 80 per cent of dashboard navigation systems, and those deals helped it rack up US$1.4 billion in map sales in 2011.
That sum would be impressive if not for the fact that Nokia's mapping division has lost money every year since 2007, when the company got into the business by acquiring Navteq for US$8.1 billion. In 2011, that US$1.4 billion in revenue was negated entirely by a one-time US$1.4 billion charge following a revaluation of the "projected financial performance" of the division. Spending on research and development drove the 2011 operating loss up to US$2 billion.
Still, Nokia is keen to have maps pay off for the company. It, too, has seized on Apple's failed launch by releasing an iOS app, branded Here Maps, to woo iPhone users disaffected by Apple Maps.
"We would love for iOS users to be more aware of Nokia," says Brondmo. "Maybe they'll look at our great maps app and next time around decide to take a harder look at our Lumia phone." Using maps to drive hardware sales would certainly help Nokia recoup its losses.
If Google's and Nokia's mapping fortunes sound uncertain, it only gets worse for the rest of the industry. Mapping, like web search, is a positive-feedback business - the better you are, the better you get, with more users creating more data, which in turn improves maps and attracts even more users. And that means almost every other rival mapping initiative is doomed to failure. Microsoft, which licenses much of its road data from Nokia, has mainly sought to improve its maps' user interface, especially its imagery. Bing recently completed a two-year effort to capture aerial images of the United States and Western Europe at a superhigh resolution. That's nice, but given the small market share of Bing and Windows Phone when compared to those of Google Search and Android, it is likely to be in vain.
Then there's Apple, whose motivations for getting into mapping are unclear. The company, which declined to discuss its mapping plans publicly, ostensibly decided to build its own maps in order to control the iPhone user experience. But the move has created the opposite of its intended effect. Now Apple's iPhones and iPads are a battleground between it, Google, Microsoft and Nokia.
While Apple certainly has the resources to build the world's best maps, it has yet to marshal them like its rivals.
"If you look at what Google and Nokia have had to invest, Apple is not even scratching the surface," says Nokia's Brondmo. But time, more than money, may be Apple's enemy. "Could Apple decide to build the level of worldwide global coverage that we have?" Brondmo wonders. "I expect they could. But it would take them years, maybe even decades, to catch up."
All these companies will keep pouring money into cartography because of its inherent, unknowable promise. Inevitably, though perhaps not any time soon, any successful effort to wring big money from mobile devices seems likely to depend on knowing exactly where users are and where they want to go. Mapping requires, and creates, huge troves of user data. The bet is that the data will lead to insights into user behaviour that can then be turned into new products. Or, failing that, to methods for predicting customer actions in order to serve up better ads.
"We think there's a lot of potential," says Matthew Quinlan, Microsoft's maps chief, echoing his peers' sentiments. "Future potential."
In other words, the money in maps lies in uncharted territory.
Fast Company
 
 


	At a crossroads
A comparison of the the map-app contenders
APPLE
	On point:
	The maps are not as bad as the haters say - and will improve.
	Pointless:
	It's not clear how Maps fits into Apple's business model.
GOOGLE
	On point:
	The fan favourite, and Maps underpins Google's major initiatives.
	Pointless:
	As with Android, it wins market share but not revenue.
NOKIA
	On point:
	It has the industry's best product, licensed by many.
	Pointless:
	Greatness comes with a price: Nokia has lost billions to be No1.
MICROSOFT
	On point:
	Bing Maps are a slick front end on Nokia's great data.
	Pointless:
	As with Bing, the innovations so far have been for naught.
AMAZON
	On point:
	It's developing map prowess for Kindle Fire and a phone.
	Pointless:
	So late they're playing only to be able to say they also have maps.
WAZE
	On point:
	The crowdsourced app was the only one to gain users post-Apple.
	Pointless:
	No revenue model. Likely acquisition target for a major.
 


Searching for streets paved with gold

Illustration: Yam Lee

Magazines

PostMag

The big boys of tech all want you to follow their directions, writes Farhad Manjoo, but it remains unclear how any of them will make money from online mapping


The big boys of tech all want you to follow their directions, writes Farhad Manjoo, but it remains unclear how any of them will make money from online mapping.


Searching for streets paved with gold

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The big boys of tech all want you to follow their directions, writes Farhad Manjoo, but it remains unclear how any of them will make money from online mapping

The big boys of tech all want you to follow their directions, writes Farhad Manjoo, but it remains unclear how any of them will make money from online mapping