I never stop marveling on what Google has done for India. Wholesome credit goes to Google for single handedly propagating “Location awareness” in India. The result is that now a school child knows and uses Google maps for his/her school projects.
I do not know what prompted google into map making in India which it has never done any where in the world. It’s remarkable that it went on mapping India while facing empty threats from politicians for making available high res imagery online. It was surprising that erstwhile President Dr Abdul Kalam also objected to hosting imagery, may be his defense related background clouded his rationale…
Google gets their map data either from Navteq, Tele Atlas ,AND etc, and never though of venturing into the job of low end, field intensive mapmaking, and that too at a time when the two reigning mapping giants of the world ( Navteq & Tele Atlas) were not that enthusiastic on India . Google guys are not morons and have repeatedly demonstrated that they are ahead in innovation & business models, they surely have ideas to what they eventually want to do with this data which they have built painstakingly. I am sure ideas are incubating in google labs on applications and business models to commercialize this rich content
This is one disruptive process that they have introduced and which is evidently working fine is crowd sourcing. Over generalizing, its almost the same as Open Street map which populates and shares user generated content, however in google’s case the IPR stays with google. I am sure google might be employing “contractors” and paying them to collect location data, hence the rightful IPR owner. What is fascinating is that it has employed light weight GPS kits with lightweight application to collect information and simple way to processing the data quickly in comparison to bordering to a legacy way of information collection by mainstream mapping companies. Latest is that google is extending crowd sourcing to contribute 3D models and enhanced content.
Several entrepreneurs have cropped up doing a excellent reverse engineering, often to the point of developing customizing image grabbing tools and geo referenced tiling it neatly which results in quickly recreating the accurate vector data and associated attribute data. These datasets are widely available, I have seen (do not want to name here) production level facilities working on google maps. These kinds of IPR infringements are expected especially in India where there is not much sensitivity IPR related things
Google has tremendously effected the Tracking space, this happed by giving free Google MAP API’s where in anyone can access the rich map background and put a Tracking solution in place. Google smartness has a telling effect here, it will charge for its API, if the traffic crosses a specific threshold. I have seen enterprise level applications using free google map API’s which include some Govt bodies. Need to stop here….to sum up, It’s a great feeling that Google has empowered millions of Indians with providing access to accurate maps FREE and this surely has earned respect and gratitude!!!!!
