3D perspectives

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3D maps is out the door and lets you view 3D perspectives of land and cities using the mouse, keyboard, or an Xbox 360 Controller for Windows.

With the navigation control you can view cities and streets from different heights and angles. Latitude, longitude, and altitude appear in the lower-left status bar of the browser window. A scale bar in the lower-right corner of the map indicates the distance from your viewing point to the objects below you.

Most important piece of a store locator

The most important aspect of a locator is the ability to locate the closest store/dealer.  If the mapping tool you are using isn’t current and doesn’t place the store/dealer location on the map at the address level then some systems will default to the center of ZIP code.  This can provide false information to the user and misguide them, which typically isn’t what you want in a locator. If you think about it spatially the center of a ZIP Code could be miles from the actual street address of the store/dealer location so you could be telling a customer that the location is close to them when in reality it is much farther.  Or the opposite could be true and you could be telling the customer that you can’t service them when in reality you can. In this case the search radius didn’t capture the ZIP Code centroid so the results would not show a store/dealer that is very close to the customer.  For anyone contemplating a store locator, it is very important that your data be clean. If the locations aren’t in the right spot on the map then the ROI is devalued and the user experience is poor.  Having locations wrong on the map can also lead to increased costs because customers will call and complain or worse go to a competitor who can provide them a quality experience the first time out of the gate.  

how do the maps know?

Great article in Wired about MapQuest and the competitive mapping world.

How do the “maps” know the right directions, or which streets are one-way?

One answer is customer participation. Some companies do barter deals with locals – giving reduced rates to merchants who will edit its maps.

“We’ve had projects with pizza-delivery companies where we’ve printed out for them a big wall map of their 30-minute delivery area. The guys mark things that are wrong and send it back to us,” says former GDT president Mike Gerling, who now heads Tele Atlas’ North American division. Navteq, too, is enlisting individual users and plans to sort through the masses of comments and feedback it gets by giving priority status to the geekiest, most frequent customers.

The downside of customer participation is covered by an article in TechDirt titled if the map is wrong, you have nobody to blame but yourself. 

“Online mapping services have proven to be very popular, and the technology that can produce accurate driving directions on the fly is definitely impressive.

But there are still gaps in the technology, and if you every ge badly burned by inaccurate directions, it can really shake your confidence in a given service. And though the technology will improve, it will still make mistakes. Now Tele Atlas, one of the largest providers of map data, is asking users to help it identify mistakes. So if it tells you to go left at the junction, and you should’ve gone right, you can let it know. This is a good start, but who’s going to remember to go back to the site and let the company know about a mistake after the drive is over? The real breakthrough will occur when reporting an error can be done easily, perhaps through an on-board navigation device. No solution will ever be completely perfect, but blending technology and human awareness should, over time, make these services much better.”

Location: the bottom line in business

Here is a great article by GeoSpatial Weekly that talks about the impact of location intelligence on process improvement.  The survey polled 1,700 executives worldwide to gauge the role that technology can play in delivering business-relevant location intelligence. According to the results, which were released by MapInfo and BusinessWeek on Wednesday, 64 percent of business executives believe that location intelligence can improve business processes. And 21 percent plan to investigate how such intelligence can impact their organizations within the next year.Location intelligence combines software, data, services, and expertise to enable an organization to detect patterns, risks, and opportunities that customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and business intelligence (BI) overlook. Approximately 80 percent of data that an organization uses to make business decisions has a location-based component. Optimizing such information as ZIP codes, telephone numbers, and/or addresses can help companies answer critical questions about the location of customers and competitors and identify the places where their products and services are most valuable.

reaching the youth market

What is the impact of the youngest wireless users on the wireless market in general? Location based services (LBS) are a key piece of the puzzle. According to former FCC commissioner Michael Powell, young people are demanding non-stop connectivity and continual interaction with people and services, along with high expectations about being able to personalize those services. That especially means being able to recognize the “context” of the user – including the users location in relation to other things.That includes recognizing the specific context of the user, which includes location. Numerous experts noted the “pacifier” effect of wireless phones (or perhaps a better phrase is the “umbilical cord” effect). It seems like half of the 12 to 21 year-old population is doing something with their cell phones at any given time and every conceivable location – talking, messaging, playing or just staring at it expecting something to happen. Location will be an essential component for this (and future) generations of wireless consumers.

What is findability and why am I writing about it?

We all want to find things. Monty Python was trying to find the Holy Grail.  Wile E. Coyote  is always trying to find the Road Runner – and we all use the web to look for products, stores, distributors, repair centers, etc.  Search engines like Google, MSN Search, Yahoo, etc. are obviously great tools, but they don’t have the information that a company knows about it’s own stores or facilities. In this context, findability is the art and science of making it as easy as possible for a customer or potential customer to find one’s facilities – with the success or failure measured by the customer. From the company’s point of view, Findability also includes a measurement.component which can feed back into other systems, processes and people so various functions such as marketing, site selection, etc. can be improved.