ZOMFG WHEN WILL THIS GUY JUST HYPERVENTILATE HIMSELF INTO SHUTTING UP look It's not that hard. Google bought Sketchup in like 2004. They sold it in 2012. In between, they allowed everyone the tools to build whatever they wanted and put it on Google Maps. They created a marketplace of objects that had geolocation. And they gave you magic internet points for creating 3D buildings on their maps in a race to see who could mechanical turk a 3d version of the world for them first. That's an entire ecosystem of geospacial data that millions of fans were slavishly, exactingly interpreting for them in 3D. Then Bing rolled out sidescan imagery and Apple rolled out 3D maps in order to beat Google to the punch because Google wasn't ready (note that Bing's 3d imagery wasn't useful for navigation and Apple's 3d maps were painfully, dangerously wrong). Now? Now Google has sidescan from four directions, billions of data points demonstrating how humans interpret a 2d image into a 3d object and streetview to train its maps on. Commercial districts? Bitch please. Google used to give that stuff to you in Google Earth Pro. The databases exist and aren't even Google's. Google knows exactly who owns that parcel; so do you if you look it up. Google is just faster and has deeper pockets. So google is synthesizing: - overhead aerial imagery - oblique aerial imagery - 3d radar imagery - hand-assembled solid construction based on human interaction (exemplars and data) - parcel data - ownership data But wait, there's more. Because this is Google, and because every time you use it to look up an address and go there with your phone, it also has - ground truth verification of GPS coordinates - travel paths - perimeter verification But wait. If you're using your phone to take pictures there it also has - imagery within - imagery without That's not a "moat" that's data synthesis. The only thing Apple doesn't have is the hand-pieced stuff that allows them to verify they got it right. And the ground truth. Here's the only important sentence in this entire article: They didn't have to. That's the truly important thing here. Google came through and got the exemplars they needed to make their maps reliable and accurate, and they did it by hand. Once they had an accurate and reliable map, they could just train their algorithms until the algorithms recreated ground truth accurately enough that they could synthesize without needing to collect. Because now it's just data and math. Now it's just a matter of taking the points they have, running them through a blender and confidently creating a synthetic universe to match the real one. Not mentioned in this article - Google's maps are years ahead, sure, but everything they've done after the street view stuff is just processing. Apple could totally do that. But Apple hasn't rolled a bunch of cars everywhere to verify ground truth. So Apple's synthesis will never be as valuable as Google's because they have no good way to verify it. Apple created Apple Maps because they didn't want to be squeezed out by Google. They didn't want to have to pay Google to get Apple customers where they were going. They didn't want to be in a position for Google to go "who run bartertown" and pull access to Google Maps from the iOS ecosystem. But they lost. It's been six years since Apple and Google got in a pissing match. Google has since updated their app several times, and Apple maps are still also-ran bad. Apple could try and catch up, but they aren't. Google used to have a head start. Now? Now they've just got better algorithms. Consider: this is the company that clobbered hand-compiled Yahoo Search by writing a better algorithm... that won the mapping war by driving around taking pictures. Google Street View was the antithesis of Google thinking. Slamming a dozen databases together and creating a Tron's-eye-view of the world? That's the Google we all know and love. Now that they've been in the world and checked it, they don't have to go there ever again... at least until their self-driving cars go through and LIDAR everything to half an inch.Street View vehicles once drove across the main routes nine years ago—but they never returned to capture the rest.
So why was Google quietly adding all of this detail to a town it had never bothered to Street View?
I lol'ed. Have you seen his "Cartography in the age of AV's" post? You can mash PageDown like it's the beat to Darude's Sandstorm and still get the gist. (Which is: "cartography isn't dead but will adapt".) I shared it because I had no idea they were conjuring up such detailed models using mostly CV and oblique imagery. It's processing, and it's Google, but still incredibly impressive when you consider all the ways that could go wrong. I mean, look at how difficult 3D was for Apple. Isn't the question whether they ever will have this? Like you said, Google has deeper pockets and clearly has more than enough skin in the game. At the same time, there are commercial entities like Cyclomedia that I've used who collect Street View photos and imagery (including oblique) every year at resolutions better than Google does. Their Street View is every three meters, every image 100 megapixels. I think getting the data is a logistics problem, which is right up Apple's alley. Really big image and geospatial data processing, on the other hand? I'm not sure if Apple has the chops to integrate all of that data. It's about as far away from their core business as Apple could get (save for the Apple car itself).ZOMFG WHEN WILL THIS GUY JUST HYPERVENTILATE HIMSELF INTO SHUTTING UP
The only thing Apple doesn't have is the hand-pieced stuff that allows them to verify they got it right. [...] Apple could try and catch up, but they aren't.
Wow. I like how he treats Waze and Google as if they're two different things. It wasn't 3D that was difficult for Apple - their stuff always looked good. more than that it only looked good in places they could throw it all together and prove it looked good, which is different than being right. It's that whole "being right" thing they fucked up - Apple Maps used public databases and mixed them up in a proprietary way which is how it created situations like the "turn left onto the 101 freeway from this underpass two stories below it" that made us all give up on Apple Maps in the first place, which fucked us hard when Apple rolled out iOS 5, which didn't have Google Maps on it, so we literally had to download Waze in order to navigate, which Google made an end-run around by buying Waze. I mean, Apple didn't just fuck that up, they shit the bed. And they never un-shit the bed. They never actually went through and proofed their data. They did the Apple thing, which is hodgepodge open protocols and databases and mixed them up with their own proprietary bullshit. I guess they're using OpenStreetMaps, C3, Poly9 and some other shit to try and trail mix their way to success. That's why I maintain that the important sentence is: Here's the thing: Google Earth Pro, before they killed it, had awesome data in it. It had demographics. It had parcel data. It had traffic data. It had tax rolls. And it reflected the ground truth provided by the databases it drew from: in Whatcom County, WA, for example, the roads were off by about 15 feet west because the Whatcom County GIS data was exported to the national databases wrong. Snohomish County and King County disagreed about where property lines were and that was just the shit I noticed. Google had to go through and resolve all those conflicts and the way to do it, apparently, was to drive every road and proof everything. Once they'd done that, they killed Google Earth Pro. Google Earth desktop runs an entirely different database as Google Earth mobile and the Google Earth desktop database has been deprecated. The mobile one has a closed API. No touchy. Their data. Trimble paid less than $90m for Sketchup. I reckon that means they didn't get to grab Google's links between Sketchup's earth models and Google's GPS data. That means Google kept it. That means Apple couldn't buy Trimble to get a back door into Google's witness marks. Google didn't like the survey markers because they were off, so they went out and surveyed the world. Then they pulled up the markers so no one else could use them. I've realized something as a Google for Business user, as a Google Pixel user, as an Android Auto user, as a Google Fi customer, as a Google Earth Pro user, as a Hangouts user, as a victim of Google Plus. Google SUCKS at customer-facing stuff. And they don't fucking care. Try and get a response out of Google on a consumer product - welcome to the forums which are full of other frustrated users shouting at each other and a tone-deaf Google representative saying "hi there and fuck off! It doesn't work that way and never will! TTYL!" Try the same with a business product and the same rep will deal with you every time, and they've got a file on you, and they can look up every previous case. Google made Maps for business customers. Apple tried Apple Maps because they didn't like the price but that didn't pen out. Apple makes everything for consumers. B2B within the Apple ecosphere is a joke. And that's why Apple Maps will never catch up - Apple doesn't want to be a database company, they want to be a consumer company.Street View vehicles once drove across the main routes nine years ago—but they never returned to capture the rest.
Totally. The Google Maps API is about as B2B as I have interacted with Google, and it is a very nicely put together documentation. It doesn't have all the cool Earth Pro stuff, but it's more than enough if you ask me. They have business onboarding wizards. I mean, Google even allows you as a business to update your business information through an API.. Apple on the other hand has some things for iOS developers) and that's about it. My impression of Street View was that it was a bonkers idea that they did anyway, and once they had all the data they found a whole range of problems that could be solved with it. The power of 'geo' is that you can glue a bunch of geo-located data points together and figure out much more out of the glued whole than out of the sum of its parts. Did you see that Google has been adding "how busy is this place" to Maps? You can see down to the hour how busy your grocery store is when you look the business up in Maps. It seems like a fun side thing, but there are companies whose entire business is providing retail and real estate with accurate data on how many people a location will have walk by, because it's such a solid predictor of revenue that commercial real estate values are heavily determined by it (over here, at least). They figure those numbers out with costly, manual tallies and prediction models. Google hasn't explained how they do it, but my guess is that Google has accurately geolocated most, if not all wifi hotspots to physical locations by logging which hotspots people's Android phones pick up on and combining that with people who have their location services on. I'm speculating, but I wouldn't be surprised if that also started out with Streetview logging wifi. As soon as a few people have geolocated a wifi hotspot, they can then use logs from all other hundreds of Android phones to figure out how busy a place gets. It only takes a few users providing the initial ground truth, after which you can keep it updated with basic metadata logs. Just like in the article. I don't know if you also have that, but since this summer Google has been pushing location services hard, giving me a popup every. single. time I open any location-using app if I want to turn it on. It doesn't turn itself off anymore, too. I think they want more data on walkability, since Maps is not very good at that at times, but who knows what clever things they're up to.Google made Maps for business customers. Apple tried Apple Maps because they didn't like the price but that didn't pen out. Apple makes everything for consumers. B2B within the Apple ecosphere is a joke. And that's why Apple Maps will never catch up - Apple doesn't want to be a database company, they want to be a consumer company.
Google Maps traffic data is due to Google Maps tracking the MAC address and GPS coordinates of everyone using Google Maps. Google also knows the IP address of every business that talks to Google. If Google gives you an address, and you go to it, and you start showing that MAC address from that IP, google knows that business is that IP. They then know everyone else at that business. And yes. Google Street View was wardriving. But probably more because they could, than because they had to. I reckon they did it because they knew that whoever's databases they grabbed, they were inadequate for error-free navigation and the only way to reconcile them was to pound the pavement. Quora thinks Google spent $125-$700 a mile to do it. That means they spent between $700m and $2.8b on the US alone... the first time. They've spent about a billion dollars on self-driving cars. I'll bet if they hadn't spent that much the first time, they wouldn't have even tried self-driving cars.
It's not that hard. ... - overhead aerial imagery - oblique aerial imagery - 3d radar imagery - hand-assembled solid construction based on human interaction (exemplars and data) - parcel data - ownership data But wait, there's more. Because this is Google, and because every time you use it to look up an address and go there with your phone, it also has - ground truth verification of GPS coordinates - travel paths - perimeter verification But wait. If you're using your phone to take pictures there it also has - imagery within - imagery without As someone who works in software, synthesizing all of that into a global 3D map actually sounds really hard.look
So google is synthesizing:
Yeah, but it's the data they collected nine years ago. Google won this war when they decided to calibrate every other source they could get by putting boots on ground. That boots-on-ground period is over - they've got a real-world reference they can compare against that is now almost a decade old. Everything that came after that is just data manipulation and Apple could do it too - but it wouldn't matter because their data is uncalibrated so they can't iterate until they get it right the way Google can. There is no way for Apple to catch up because they gave up on the calibration step. Google is no further ahead than they were nine years ago because everything else is just the icing on top.