Category: Industry

A Video About the Map Center

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A short video about the Map Center, the Rhode Island-based map store that, you will recall, Andrew Middleton took over two years ago. The video came about, Andrew says, when a customer came back and insisted on filming it. (“Is this the highest form of flattery? Most people just leave a review!”) What I appreciate most about it is being able to see what’s on his shelves and walls, especially since I can’t visit it in person right now.

Previously: Paper Maps: New Business, Lost Loves; A Map of Map Institutions; TPR on the Map Center.

World of Maps Owners Retiring, Seeking New Owners

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A photo of the World of Maps storefront in a snowy day in Ottawa on 27 November 2017.
World of Maps on 27 Nov 2017.

Ottawa map and book store World of Maps is for sale, per their Facebook page: “After 30 years of running this interesting and profitable map & book business Petra and Brad want to sell and retire. There are plenty of adventures and trips still to take after we find the next owner(s) who we can help take it over.”

Previously: World of Maps Turns 25.

Google Maps at 20

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Google Maps launched 20 years ago today. Here’s what I posted at the time:

First impressions. This is frigging amazing, with smooth scrolling and zooming: you’re not constantly reloading pages like in MapQuest. Huge mapping surface. And drop shadows. […] I’m impressed by the detail. They’ve got my area, which is kind of a rural backwater: they’ve got the roads all named, but strangely not the towns. Oh well, data’s rarely perfect—especially when it’s just a beta launch. And for a beta this is awfully impressive.

A flurry of additional announcements followed in quick sucession: the launch of Google Earth, the Maps API that enabled people to build their own maps on top of Google’s interface. The mid-2000s were a busy time for online maps, let me tell you. I had so much to keep up with.

The development and origins of Google Maps, and Google Earth, are the subject of the latest and timely installment of James Killick’s “12 Map Happenings that Rocked Our World.” It seems that the Maps side of things was largely about providing Google search results through a map interface, and when you look at Google’s post commemorating the 20th anniversary, which highlights 20 features of Google Maps, it’s clear how expansive that idea has become.

James also makes reference to a book I somehow completely missed when it came out: Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality, an insider history by Google project manager Bill Kilday. (Harper Business, 2018). Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

TPR on the Map Center

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Public’s Radio talks with Andrew Middleton, who you will remember took over the Map Center in Pawtucket, RI in 2023. The focus of the piece is on how Andrew came to own the store and why he doesn’t see Google and Apple as competitors. “I see them as selling information. I do not sell information. I sell a good story.”

Previously: Paper Maps: New Business, Lost Loves; A Map of Map Institutions.

A Map of Map Institutions

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Andrew Middleton, the owner of the Map Center in Pawtucket, RI (previously), has put together a map of map stores and non-commercial map institutions (archives, libraries, etc.). Comment on Bluesky to suggest other places.

Earlier this month, Andrew posted about the state of the map store, wherein he lays out what makes up his business and where he’d like to go from here. (Mind you, that was before this post and this post went all sorts of viral.)

Remembering MapQuest

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The tenth installment of James Killick’s “12 Map Happenings that Rocked our World” series focuses on a company James actually worked at: MapQuest, which grew very, very rapidly between its launch in 1996 (James outlines its antecedents) to its IPO and acquisition by AOL a few years later. And then:

The new management seemed to have very little interest in anything to do with MapQuest, particularly as it related to product road map and strategy. And with the layoffs and hiring freeze there weren’t enough resources to do anything substantial even if there was a good plan.

I tried to make matters clear and pleaded with the powers that be: MapQuest was a site built on map data but it didn’t make maps. In fact 98% of the map data was licensed from third parties. I knew MapQuest had to build a moat around the product otherwise someone else could swoop in, license the same data and build a better product.

And you won’t win any prizes for guessing who did.

Previously: Remember MapQuest?

The History of Etak Navigator

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

It used a vector display and cassette tapes for data storage. It was too early for GPS; instead it invented a process called “augmented dead reckoning” that snapped the car’s position back to the known road grid whenever you made a turn. It was the Etak Navigator, and it launched back in 1985. James Killick explores its history in the ninth installment of his series, “12 Map Happenings that Rocked our World,” with some surprises in how it influenced later GPS-based navigation systems (among other things, Etak eventually ended up in the hands of Tele Atlas). See also this 2015 article in Fast Company.

Previously: Guidestar and GM’s Early Attempts at In-Car Navigation.

Globes in the Modern Era

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

“In the age of Google Earth, watches that triangulate and cars with built-in GPS, there’s something about a globe—a spherical representation of the world in miniature—that somehow endures.” The Associated Press has a fairly light feature on the relevance and popularity of globes today; the bespoke globes of Bellerby and Co. (whence) are prominently featured, of course (Replogle not so much, oddly), but they’re intermixed with some historical trivia. Not in-depth in the slightest, but something a few newspapers would have found interesting enough to run.

Paper Maps: New Business, Lost Loves

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

GIS analyst and cartographer Andrew Middleton moved across the country to become the new owner of the Map Center, a Rhode Island map store, after the previous owner announced that he was looking for someone to give the store away to. In an interview with GeoHipster’s Randal Hale, Andrew outlines what he sees as the state of the market for paper maps: the antique map business is pretty healthy; what he’s interested in is contemporary cartography.

The bigger and more mysterious question for me is: Can I build a store off of something that focuses on contemporary cartography and do it in a physical location? Some people more talented than I have been able to pull it off selling their own work online. Only a couple of people in the U.S. are doing it in a physical space with overhead. With rent. I like knowing that there are places like the Map Center still around and I want to be a part of keeping Rhode Island quirky and worth exploring. But it’s not 1995 any more. I sell gas station 8-folds and prints of USGS topo maps and guide books and trail maps but it’s hard to sell information that someone on the internet is giving away for free. The value add of a paper map is providing that information in a portable, digestible and familiar way that includes context and that does have value. Lots of folks buy paper maps for outdoor activities, trip planning and conceptualizing space in large areas or putting on their walls to remind them off a place they love or a place they want to explore.

He’s looking for maps to sell: see the Map Center’s call for cartographers. As for the kind of customer Andrew is looking for, it would probably look a lot like Mary Ann Sternberg, who in a piece for Next Avenue writes about her history with and love of paper maps.

The Lost Art of Map Reading

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

“The physical map has the same appeal, probably, as the vinyl record. It’s tactile, it’s there, it’s present—it’s not ephemeral.”

A nice piece from CBC News on the so-called lost art of map reading and paper maps, touching many of the usual points, featuring (among others) the co-owners of my local map store, Ottawa’s World of Maps.

The Return of Paper Maps, Again

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Every so often we see a story about how paper maps are making a comeback. Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that sales of paper maps have been going up in recent years—a story that NBC’s Today show picked up yesterday. One of the appeals of paper maps, these stories note, is that they provide context—the “bigger picture,” as the WSJ article puts it. Something that can be lost when focusing on getting to the destination.

I’m not remotely surprised that paper maps refuse to go away, that they keep showing signs of renewed life. I have a thought or two about this, and about the perennial question of paper maps in the digital age. There’s a reason this question keeps coming up—which these stories do get at. It’s that every new technology that supplants the old does so imperfectly and incompletely.

Continue reading “The Return of Paper Maps, Again” →

The Rationale Behind Overture

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A couple of links regarding the Overture Map Foundation announcement (previously) afford some context and background. James Killick chalks up the decision to launch Overture to a combination of needs to control costs and maintain control while ensuring interoperability: “the reasons for the birth of OMF seem to be valid and defensible.” Meanwhile, the Geomob Podcast interviews geospatial veteran Marc Prioleau, in which (among other things) Marc observes that the companies behind Overture (including Meta, where he’s currently at) and OpenStreetMap are not on the same page: OSM’s focus does not serve the companies’ needs, and changing that focus would harm the OSM community. (Since “why not just use OpenStreetMap?” is a recurring question.)

Update, 3 Feb 2023: Tom Tom is running with Killick’s take.

The Overture Map Foundation

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Announced earlier this month, the Overture Map Foundation is an initiative founded by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta (i.e. Facebook), Microsoft and TomTom to build an ecosystem of interoperable open map data—an ecosystem, note, that does not at the moment include Apple, Esri or Google, so presumably this is a way for smaller owners of map data (at least for TomTom values of smaller) to form Voltron punch above their weight by making it easier to combine and share resources. From the press release:

Multiple datasets reference the same real-world entities using their own conventions and vocabulary, which can make them difficult to combine. Map data is vulnerable to errors and inconsistencies. Open map data can also lack the structure needed to easily build commercial map products and services on top.

Making it easier to combine data—one of Overture’s aims is to create “a common, structured, and documented data schema”—sounds an awful lot like a way to address James Killick’s complaint about the geospatial industry’s lack of common data standards (previously). It also sounds like TomTom’s map platform, announced last month, is part of something bigger.

Given the talk about open map data, it’s not surprising that the OpenStreetMap team has some thoughts about the announcement, and about how Overture and OSM might work together in the future.