In August of 2007 I took audit of my personal and professional affairs; a life of digital successes, creativity, entrepreneurial energy – and headed South to discover life in academia. Somewhere along the way I fell in love with photography and validated my love for all things digital.

I feel as though I’ve explored the periphery long enough, and that it’s time to reconnect with the origin – hence this new blog, on a very weathered domain. 2012 has been a time of new energy for me, a rekindling of my passion for things Web and otherwise. I find I’m renewed, restored, and ready to write  a new chapter – so with that thought I hope you’ll embark with me as we embrace the forever fluid nature of this medium, meet new people, share new stories and reach out to some of the foundational players I’m longing to restore connections with.

-Michael

I love Google’s mapping product. I use it most everyday to find residential & business locations, estimate travel times, figure out mileage for expense reports and for making custom maps to share with friends (my favourite is a map where I pin the best spots for location-based photography around the province, but that’s another story).

Initially a free service (Maps is now fee-based for high volume API users), Google Maps and its associated bells and whistles are included with most modern smartphones to tie into their GPS functions to let users quickly way-find while on the go. Users of Maps earlier than version 6 include most hotels, restaurants, and other business locations as exterior views – but with the latest addition for Google Maps for the Android platform, users can now find their way around the interiors of these locations as easily as they could previously navigate streets.

The initial roll-out for Google’s Indoor Mapping product relies on floor plans submitted by businesses, with accuracy checked by an (Android only) walking tool. This crowd-sourcing of floor plan data has some business / venue owners concerned about privacy – but it should be noted that floor plans submitted must be from the original copyright owners.

Already in place for large retail stores (IKEA and Home Depot are early adopters), hotels (MGM Grand in Las Vegas is laid out nicely – I’ll put that to the test at a conference next week), airports and shopping malls. Indoor mapping looks like a great way to enhance the user experience for shopping, conferences, and general way finding in large spaces.

I’d love to be able to leverage this type of data for the University where I work. Our campus is spread into multiple buildings where students often have to move from A to B as they attend classes, events, etc. Imagine having the ability for future students to navigate through the unfamiliar territory on a self-guided tour in the Summer months, or cross reference their course schedule on the first day of classes with location. It’d be great to give a common tool for all visitors to our facilities easy and open access to the information needed to move freely within the campus – and it’s with that thought that stops me short. The barriers to entry are low from a business / institution side (simply uploading existing floor plans, use Google’s tool to overlay to existing data, optionally walk-through the venue with an Android app to increase accuracy – and blammo! You’re in.) however the proprietary nature of the Android platform (Google Indoor Maps is only available in Google Maps v.6 – an Android enhancement) keeps me from singing praises.

Our measurement, informal survey and analysis of our school’s network traffic show a heavy preference for Apple products (on campus traffic of iPhone, iPod, iPad devices is about 80% of the total mix). So without the device support or data shown on the web-only version of Google Maps – its of little use for our students. I wonder if this will continue to be an Android exclusive feature? I can see it as being a core feature for the Android platform (Have you used the Google Drive app for Android tablets vs. Google Docs web on an iPad? Wow, night and day). However without the reach to Apple’s market dominance it’s a “neat trick”.

Apple has been hinting at dumping Google as their map provider for apps in recent months (Foursquare and Wikipedia did the same), and has shown tangible proof of this with the adoption of OpenStreetMap technology in the new iPad product launch (iOS iPhoto uses Open Street Map – perhaps as a response to the new fee structure imposed for developers).

So with such a great addition to a mapping product, how did we manage it? Do we cross our fingers and hope users adopt more Android-flavoured devices (Not happening anytime soon)? Do we look to replicate these features in competing technologies (the team working as OpenStreetMap are already planning indoor mapping standards for their uses – but they aren’t online with even anything final to date), or try to build something ourselves – without the benefit of a larger scale infrastructure (Cha-Ching!)?

How do we address the privacy and security concerns around this type of data being openly accessible? What about copyright and maintenance requirements from the floor plan submitters?

Stay-tuned, I think we’re onto something great here, hopefully by the end of the year we’ll see something solid we can build upon – having the data open and accessible to the web version of Google Maps would be a great start.