Happy Friday everyone. These weeks just fly by when you are locked in your house looking out your front window for the Instacart delivery from the grocery store. I just wanted to remind everyone that I’ve got a weekly newsletter were I do some deep dives into things that are on my mind related to GIS, BIM, Smart Cities and technology.
Just sign up below and you’ll get a newsletter in your inbox each Wednesday (or maybe Thursday LOL).
SpatialTau Newsletter
SpatialTau is my weekly newsletter that goes out every Wednesday. The archive shows up in my blog a month after the newsletter is published. If you’d like to subscribe, please do so here.
So over the weekend Bloomberg dropped this news:
Nokia Oyj is exploring the sale of its maps business as the Finnish equipment maker focuses on boosting growth at its wireless-network unit and improving its debt rating, according to people familiar with the matter.
Nokia has reached out to potential buyers including Uber Technologies Inc., the mobile car-booking application, and private-equity firms, the people said. A group of German carmakers has also shown interest, the people said, and bids for the unit are expected as soon as this month.
A couple notes. First I find it very interesting that they list Uber as a potential buyer over Microsoft and others. Not that Microsoft wouldn’t be interested; just that Uber is the one they felt like they wanted to lead with. Probably has to do much with Uber buying deCarta but I think it shows how little people value this data anymore given that Apple and Google already have their own map databases, OpenStreetMap is out there and available for everyone to use and most people don’t really think about owning the map anymore.
Clearly my gut tells me that Microsoft will want to own the Bing Maps data but maybe they don’t really care. The value for Apple/Google/Microsoft as mobile platforms is in the POIs and routing, not the visualization. I’m sure that part Microsoft already has down solid (my 4Runner actually uses Bing Maps POI database for navigation, not that I actually use it myself). A couple years ago everyone would have said Microsoft has to buy this but clearly when they bought the mobile phone division of Nokia, they didn’t care to buy the maps business with it (when it would have been a rounding error on the final purchase price). I honestly doubt they’ll make a bid for it today.
Thus maybe that’s why Bloomberg went with Uber as the lead company in their story, because they are who would most be interested in the data. Uber itself probably has figured out if they can use OSM data or if they need to have a proprietary map database such as Navteq (or HERE as I guess it’s called now). GIS data just isn’t as valuable as it once was. ”Free” maps from Apple and Google along with free maps from OpenStreetMap have disrupted the GIS data business. Most people would rather just pay someone else to handle the mapping (such as Google or MapBox) and use the APIs. The need to buy Navteq or TomTom has greatly diminished and even Apple who prides itself on controling everything doesn’t seem to need to buy TomTom to control the data. Thus I think Microsoft will follow suit.
I’m honestly really interested to see if they can sell HERE/Navteq. I don’t see much interest but I’m sure if they really want to move it, they’ll find someone to buy it. If it is a company like Uber, it could mean the end to HERE/Navteq as a product. Time will tell!
SpatialTau is my weekly newsletter that goes out every Wednesday. Archive shows up in my blog a month after the newsletter is published. If you’d like to subscribe, please do so here.
Why a Newsletter?
Earlier this month I turned off Planet Geospatial. It had been in operation for almost 10 years but honestly it peaked about 4 years ago and has been in a very slow decline. Blogs, while still critically important to our communicating with others, have taken a back seat to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. Heck, even I have made my blog dormant and moved my posting to Tumblr.
But Tumblr has taught me one thing, a need for longer form writing. Tumblr, much like Twitter and Facebook is really meant for short quick thoughts that you want to get out fast. I originally thought I could move back to my old blog but the whole format seems limiting for me. Clearly what I really need is a format where I can write and get a bit deeper into my thoughts. Oddly enough the format I kept coming back to was a weekly newsletter. It’s a more relaxed format where I can take time to formulate my thoughts on a subject or subjects without that need to hit the publish button on a blog post.
So this is SpatialTau, my weekly Spatial IT newsletter. It goes out every Wednesday and will be more in line with my older blog posts where I had more time to write and share my thoughts. I hope you enjoy it and share them with friends and colleagues.
“What do you do?”
Remember this question? I used to get it all the time and it was so hard to explain. I’d go into maps, databases and then the Internet. People sort of nod and seem to agree they understand just so you’ll stop talking about intersecting polygons and buffering the result. Then when Google Earth exploded on the scene, I’d used to just always say, “You know, like Google Earth…” and the other person would get all excited and say they looked up their hometown and saw their elementary school and how awesome it was that Google could find it.
My fiancée’s mother asked me last week what I did. I started to go in with #opendata, #opengovernment (explaining hashtags along the way of course) and visualization. Unlike that Google Earth moment, lots of what we do is still very difficult for most people to really get their heads around. Sure they understand what it means to share data and make it open, but the process is still so difficult. I mean geospatial data is still locked up in that crazy File Geodatabase format which my fiancée’s mother would never begin to grasp. I was lucky enough to have some data I was working with in Google Drive so I showed her a spreadsheet view of it and she sort of got the idea. But going through the workflow of how I got it there is very foreign to everyone.
I’m not pretending to say that spatial is special again, just that I think we’ve let the technology get ahead of the story. Even sharing a great blog post by the Sunlight Foundation about government data still gets that look that we used to get explaining an intersection of polygons. What really gets me is when you back into what we do from an open government perspective, allowing them to grasp the point of data being free and open, they start getting excited. But the tools we use are still very niche, very technical and very difficult to share. Rather than sharing how we do something, we need to be sharing why we do something. It’s the why that get’s peoples attention. It’s the reason why we do what we do that interests people. Then you can gage how much “what” they can take and decide if sharing the OpenLayers vs Leaflet.js debate is worth it. It’s hard for technologists to “break things down” because the excitement they feel is the touch and feel of the how we accomplish things. But the why is really the sexy part of our jobs.
I really think we’re so lucky that Spatial IT has moved from the backrooms of GIS and into the front and center of the open data and open government movement. But we can’t lose sight that the world could care less about that great NPM module you wrote to massage spatial data. My soon to be mother-in-law gets the picture now and understands why what we do is so important. One person at a time.
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