But there's another frontier of mobile mapping that matters, and the exploration has just begun. Indoor mapping of big buildings - like airports, convention centers, museums and stores - is the El Dorado of mobile location. Google has begun its expedition inside buildings, and businesses can sign up and offer their floor plans. But there's another option: Use a platform like Meridian and build your own inside map. Which is better for business?

Google launched interior maps in November. It's currently only available on Google Maps for Android. When it launched, it came with a bunch of partners, and it offered any business owner the ability to submit a floor plan for inclusion. After that, the business owner doesn't have to do a thing except submit updated plans if things change. Google handles the rest.

Business owners have enough to think about, so letting a service provider handle all this mapping stuff could be a convenient choice. Google has a vested interest in presenting the most attractive local business listings it can. But are they always the most accurate? In October, Google decided to take responsibility for updating business listings into its own hands, asking owners about changes only after the fact.

If you need fine-grained control over how your business appears online, you might want a more custom solution.

Meridian: Roll Your Own Map

When a location releases an app built with Meridian, it's a grand affair. It announces partners one at a time, such as the launch of the Oregon Convention Center app yesterday. Unlike Google, Meridian is in start-up mode, but it raised $1 million last year on the premise that the best location-based business apps are built by the businesses themselves.

Meridian has offered consumers interior mapping longer than Google has, but only for a few participating locations. That's not a shortcoming, though; Meridian is a platform. For consumers, it's an app that lets them navigate inside favorite museums, stadiums and stores (currently mostly in Meridian's hometown of Portland, Ore.). But for businesses, it's a way to build and control a 3D interior map of their own location and offer a custom-branded app for it.

It has its own Web-based editing tools, so owners can move around contents of the map like store displays or museum exhibits. You can include audio tours or featured products that display prominently for the user. It will even push pertinent information to the customer's device.

How Should Businesses Handle Maps?

If you own or work for a business with a building you want mapped for smartphones, think about priorities. Is it better for you to ship off location data to a service provider who will handle it for you, or would you rather have constant control over the experience? Do you just need to be on the map, or would you like to build the app?

Whichever option makes the most sense for you, it's exciting to have such choices. The power of the mobile Web to enhance the world for users and raise the profile of local businesses is only just starting to kick in.

Which location-based services do you use, whether for work or for fun?

45º views act as a transition between the standard top-down view and Google's new Google MapsGL, a full-3D Maps experience powered by WebGL in the browser. That part won't work on certain low-end graphics cards, but for those who can run it, Google Maps gets pretty magical. Google has good reason to push the envelope on 3D maps. Its competitors are working on magical maps of their own.

In addition to the full-3D WebGL views, desktop Google Maps also got a flyover feature for travel routes last year. When you put in travel directions, the map viewer gets a "Play" button that switches to a Google Earth 3D view and flies you from point A to point B. It's not the most useful feature in the world, but it's a nice way to check out the terrain on your route.

Google is even taking 3D mapping indoors. It's sending people with backpack-mounted Street View cameras inside local businesses, so Google can put a panoramic interior view into Google Places results. Google is also building mobile 2D maps inside buildings, including malls, airports, hotels and convention centers. When all these maps combine, Google can take you from a desktop or mobile search, down the street, into the mall, to the store, inside the store, and eventually, it wants to be the way you pay, too.

Sounds like Google has this whole business locked up, right? Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Google has competitors to worry about. There's Microsoft, whose Bing Maps got interior mapping first, but it's still a distant second in terms of market share. Amazon may not have the maps, but it has unparalleled reach into shopping. And Apple has Siri, a mobile assistant that already routes around Google when able, and it has made some intriguing mapping acquisitions.

The missing piece in Google's end-to-end mobile shopping chain is the shopping part, and no Web company does shopping like Amazon. Amazon has released an augmented reality iPhone app that lets customers scan products in a store and buy them (or cheaper alternatives) on Amazon. That's a pretty serious diss to local businesses, but it makes Amazon customers happy. Also, if they're buying through Amazon Flow, they aren't paying with Google Wallet. Amazon also bought a voice recognition company last year, sparking comparisons to Apple's Siri.

For Apple's part, Siri is the piece that threatens Google. Currently, Siri searches the Web using Google when it can't find the answer itself. Apple's iOS Maps app also uses Google for now. But certain features of the Siri beta are telling. When you use Siri to search for a local business, it uses Yelp, not Google. What can we expect from later versions of Siri and iOS? Here's a hint: In November 2011, Apple bought C3 Technologies, a 3D street view and interior mapping company.

What apps, maps and Web services do you use to find your way around?

Trail profiles give time and distance measurements, weather forecasts and routes overlaid on topographic maps. AllTrails initially used Google Maps data but found it to be too inaccurate for safe planning of wilderness trips. After Google began to charge for access to the Google Maps SDK, AllTrails began to explore other partnerships. Today's announcement with National Geographic is the beginning of an integration that will move AllTrails away from Google.

After Google announced they would charge for developer access to Maps, AllTrails founder/CEO Russell Cook says that "a handful of projects were kicked off to improve the open source alternatives but there wasn't nearly as much activity as I expected."

After Google revealed the pricing in Q4 of 2011, Cook says "things kicked into high gear." The pricing was "significantly higher than I think anyone anticipated," Cook says. "Most publishers are lucky to consistently monetize their site traffic at $1 CPM, let alone be able to build profitable business models while paying Google $4 CPM for mapping."

"Deep down I think the developer community knew that at some point the Google APIs they were using would stop being free," Cook says, "but I don't think they ever expected the price gouging. My personal opinion is that Google has every right to charge for the services they are providing but their recent actions have been very short sighted."

Even before Google announced it would charge for access, AllTrails was reevaluating its mapping tools. "We found Google Maps to at times be wildly inaccurate," Cook says, "which is something our audience can't afford when out in the wilderness." By licensing mapping content from National Geographic, AllTrails has begun to move away from Google.

National Geographic's TOPO! allows AllTrails to overlay detailed topographic maps of terrain. Currently, AllTrails still uses Google Maps for its core services, but Cook looks forward to "some of the very exciting projects the Bing team will be releasing this year."

AllTrails is available on the Web at alltrails.com. Its smartphone app is also available on the iTunes App Store and Android Market.

Access to these data will help governments, NGOs, researchers and individuals plan without waiting for the changes to be approved and added to the official maps. World Bank partner organizations, such as government and U.N. agencies, can contact World Bank offices to request access to the data. Kenya, South Sudan, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Zambia, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Moldova, Mozambique, Nepal and Haiti will pilot the project.

This partnership could improve response time and effectiveness in crises in underserved areas of the world. It's just a shame that Google has decided to compete with Ushahidi and other open-source efforts to solve this problem. Access to Google Map Maker data is privileged, and Google has chosen the mother of all elite gatekeepers, the World Bank, to facilitate this program.

The World Bank has supported much-needed online mapping efforts, such as the April 2011 project in South Sudan that enabled Google to put the new country on the map. It has also financially backed apps supporting economic development in a worldwide contest for software developers. In partnership with academic institutions, the World Bank has also backed a Web-based knowledge platform for urban development.

These are all great efforts, but they establish a familiar pattern for the World Bank. In Web technology, just as in global economic development, the World Bank has positioned itself as an unavoidable, privileged gatekeeper, and this time Google helped.

No More Open Source

We've reached out to Ushahidi for comment on the news, and we'll update with the response. While Ushahidi's non-profit, open-source efforts carry on, Google is closing off access to its mapping platform upon which great works of software were once built. Having realized the enormous value of Google Maps as a resource, Google decided to start charging for API access last year.

That's Google's commercial prerogative, but its proprietary efforts are now in competition with the open-source community. Today's partnership with the World Bank is a clearer example than the murky history of access to the Google Maps API. Google Map Maker is a moderated Google program, and Google has selected the World Bank as an arbiter of its data.

Last December, Google overhauled Map Maker's editing tools to make it easier for any Google Maps user to add new data.

What do you think? Is the World Bank a good choice for Google as a partner? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Those changes, along with a newly-awarded patent for a feature that allows Bing Maps to route pedestrians away from unsafe neighborhoods, suggest Mcirosoft is driving to surpass Google Maps, which has dominated the space since surpassing MapQuest in site traffic and queries in 2008.

The changes that have been launched build off of a Microsoft Research presentation at the 10th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms last May. Those tweaks could be significant because they can incorporate new metrics in a few seconds: fast enough, the paper's abstract noted, "to support real-time traffic updates and personalized optimization functions."

The newly enhanced mapping service also allows users to select up to three routes in a single directions request. That's similar to a feature Google Maps has offered for quite some time, but the recently-upgraded Bing pinpoints potential traffic problems and suggests quicker alternatives.

For example, a trip from Somerville, Mass., where I am typing this post, to South Boston - on the exact opposite side of downtown Boston and peak rush hour traffic - will take 17 to 19 minutes, depending what route I choose, according to Google Maps. Bing, on the other hand, also tells me the 6.6-mile trip will take about 15 minutes. But when I click on a link that lets me view the route based on traffic, Bing serves up real-time traffic conditions, showing construction delays and details and tells me in all likelihood the trip will probably take closer to 22 minutes.

To be fair, the Google Maps results incorporate traffic data as well, but the Bing upgrade makes those traffic problems more obvious by displaying them directly on the map.

A screenshot from a Bing Map route request showing real-time traffic conditions in downtown Boston during rush hour on Jan. 5, 2012.

This is a key move for Google's mobile business, which up until now could only take you to the front door of the place for which you were searching. Google Maps on the desktop recently got 3D photo tours of small locations, an extension of Street View, but this is a bigger step. When Google Maps goes inside, Google can take you all the way from searching for something to holding it in your hand, advertising and data-gathering all the way.

This is currently only available on the native Android version of Google Maps, but that's where it makes the most sense. At your desk, a photo tour is all you need. This location-based technology is a mobile innovation for once you're actually there. Google Maps is now an end-to-end service, and that means Google has your eyeballs every step of the way.

Maps & Mobile Platforms

Location services are the heart of any mobile platform, and mapping is the most fundamental interface for them. Naturally, Android users (with the latest versions of everything) will get this powerful new service straight from Google. What about other mobile platforms?

The iPhone uses Google for mapping, too, at least for now. Based on the way Apple and Google are butting heads on mobile and location tools, that partnership can't be long for this world. When iPhone 4S users ask Siri about local businesses, she skips Google and goes to Yelp, even though Google is likely to be the place a user would go first if given the choice. Apple is clearly trying to squeeze Google out of this picture. It recently bought a 3D mapping company of its own. This stand-off is why Google Maps and Siri were head to head in our Top 10 Consumer Web Products of 2011.

Interestingly, Bing Maps got interior mapping on its mobile Web version this August, but it didn't make much of a splash.

Mapping The Inside World

Interiors are the last frontier of location services, and Google is looking to annex it. It's the next big thing for Google's business.

This is interesting news for startups working on this problem. Meridian, a Portland, Ore.-based company, just took $1 million in funding to make interior mapping into a platform. It provides its partner businesses with an interface to turn a 3D map of their building into an interactive, standalone application. That's a competing vision for how mapping the inside world should work.

How will Apple's mobile location interface be different? What will Bing Maps do? It's go-time for location services right now, and Google has a very strong hand.

Read more about Google Maps 6.0 for Android on the Google LatLong blog.

How do you use your mobile devices to navigate the inside world?

But what about when there's a mistake? Let's say that an address or landmark is wrong on Google Maps and someone, somewhere uses Google Map Maker to fix it. How long does it take to show up in Google Maps? And how long does it take to populate out into all the embedded Google Maps around the world that are powered by the Google Maps API, the most popular API in the world? According to the company this week, it now takes as little as fifteen minutes. Even a market leader like Google Maps has to stay on its toes because there's a whole lot of competition trying to win the hearts of developers who use maps in apps.

Impressive. They say that the web is like a living ecosystem. So too it seems are the web's leading maps of the offline world - from beginning to end, from the user mapping app through all the API powered maps around the web.

Right: An 800 year old map of the Belgian village of Aalbeke. Note, this one is not in real time so that giant man-eating fish may not be in the same place in the water anymore.

There's enough competition in the map data space, even though Google is clearly dominant in the developer community, that near real-time edits just make sense. Developers choose every time they embed a map from options that include Google, Bing, Mapquest, OpenStreetMap and new entrants like ESRI's lightweight new Canvas Maps and the forthcoming super-cool looking startup CartoDB.

Maps have got to stay fast these days to compete.

As we reported this summer, most of the major Web mapping services have lagged on this update. Google is the first to make the change.

A Long Time Coming

While Google fixed the name of Martyr's Square in Tripoli nearly overnight this August after Libyan rebels recaptured it, it took Google over two months to recognize South Sudan's independence. Better late than never, though. And admittedly, it's much harder to draw a national border than to change the name of a city square.

Interestingly, Bing was the first service to respond to our inquiries about South Sudan this summer, but its map has not yet changed. "Our next imagery update is slated to happen in the coming months," a Microsoft spokesperson told us. "However, we are currently working on a solution to ensure users are able to locate South Sudan on Bing Maps in the interim. This temporary fix will roll out [in September]."

Google's response was much more vague, saying Google is "committed to providing our users with the richest, most up-to-date maps possible, and as part of that effort we continuously explore ways to integrate new information into Google Maps." The Google spokesperson had no specific comments about Sudan. Nevertheless, Google was the first map service to recognize South Sudan.

Yahoo has still not responded with comment.

Today's announcement praises community mapping efforts in South Sudan as drivers of the change. Earlier this week, Google expanded moderator powers for community editors of Google Maps, shifting some of the editorial burden onto the public.

If you were responsible for Google Maps, how would you handle the challenge of keeping the whole world's map up to date? Let's brainstorm in the comments.

The app allows participants to post status updates, and it displays their locations on a map, though they can tap 'leave' at any time and stop sharing their location. When the event expires, everything gets automatically cleaned up, and location sharing stops. It's kind of like Glympse but with group messaging features. We're In is currently only available for Windows Phone users in the U.S., but the post says the team is "working on bringing this app to more devices."

Google could integrate its calendars, maps and Huddle group messaging into a service like this. Facebook could combine events, Facebook Places, and its new Messenger app, which already has the location-sharing features. But neither of those Web giants could close the loop before Microsoft stepped in today.

As far as the platform, while Windows Phone 7 does not currently have much market share, an upcoming new OS version and new hardware from Nokia has the potential to stand out starkly from Android and iOS.

What do you think? Does We're In sound useful?

The data come from Weather.com, although Google's blog post mistakenly says it's all from the U.S. Naval Research Lab, which also provides some of the data for Google Earth's "Clouds" layer (look at the bottom left of the screenshots). The Weather Channel used to offer a Google Maps mapplet, but that's unnecessary now. Google Maps has no radar view or interactive components, so The Weather Channel still has something unique to offer on its own site, but whenever Google gets into a new vertical, be it weather, shopping or email, competitors should proceed with caution.

It's not nice to call Web services dead before they actually go offline, but Weather Underground's WunderMap service is in a pickle now. WunderMap does offer richer content, including radar overlays, webcams, dedicated services for hurricanes, fires and tornadoes, and more. But it could have a traffic problem. WunderMap is currently search result number one for "google maps weather," followed by the WunderMap widget for the iGoogle home page and then by an old feature suggestion in the Google Maps help forum requesting weather. Presumably, this will be changing shortly (organically, of course), although WU director of marketing Toby Skinner chimes in to contend that search results like this only account for 0.1% of its traffic. Even so, it remains to be seen how Google will rearrange things around this new product.

As far as iGoogle widgets (if people still use those) and other widget weather apps go, there's still something to be said for having local weather placed prominently as part of one's normal routine. This layer hasn't gone mobile yet, but assuming it will, that could shake up the market for mobile weather apps. Still, there's no question that Google Maps is convenient. It's one of those technologies that would blow the minds of the humans of the past. With the addition of weather, planning a day trip or a long journey using nothing but Google Maps just got easier.

What do you use to check the weather? Let us know in the comments.

"These riots were not about poverty," England's Prime Minister David Cameron said yesterday. But thanks to publicly available data, free services like Google Maps and Web collaboration, statements like that are now more fact-checkable than ever. Or at least the discourse can get more complicated easier than before.

London's data-loving Guardian newspaper did just that this morning, mapping out the data about riot locations and the home addresses of people arrested in the riots. Those data were then put against socioeconomic information regarding particular neighborhoods. The conclusion? At least in some parts of the UK, it seems pretty clear that riot participants came from impoverished areas and acted in less poor places.

• The majority of areas where suspects live are deprived - and 66% of them got poorer between 2007 and 2010, when the last survey was published
• 41% of suspects live in the 10% most deprived places in England

I think this is a fascinating way to look at a major news event! Above, a map of Manchester, where the correlation between riot arrestee adresses and poverty was particularly strong. You know the drill, though: correlation can not be equated with causation. White dots are the areas of conflict, red dots where those arrested live.

This is honestly the kind of thing I can imagine using and I can imagine other people using it too. "I often cannot find my way out of Baby Gap," confirms ReadWriteWeb's Dan Rowinski. Mall navigation is a serious problem genuine inconvenience that mobile technology ought to solve.

Malls of the Future

Someday indoor maps will probably be ubiquitous. A base level of place data that will be built on even further; mall messaging, store-created mobile experiences and other technologies are likely. For now it looks like a very handy innovation as is.

What will mobile retail look like further down the road? Some interesting perspective is available from marketing agency White Horse Design's recent research report titled "The Future of In-Aisle Mobile: A Framework for Consumer-Centered Innovation."

"Mobile's role in the overall in-aisle customer experience is at a very early period in its evolution... some retailers are beginning to recognize the importance of the mobile context as an opportunity to deliver richer digital experiences directly to the consumer in the right place (in-aisle) and at the right time (in a browsing/buying frame of
mind)...

Awareness is growing that retailers have been excluded from the hidden conversations happening within their aisles: conversations with both external agents (both competitive and informational), as well as with consumers' own personal advisors, brought invisibly with them into the stores through text messages, micro-blogs, and location-based networks. These hidden conversations create an imperative to monitor, engage, and ultimately influence the in-aisle experience. Retailers can do so by leveraging the advantages inherent to the contexts they do control: physical place (macro and micro, wall, and shelf), and announced opportunity (shopping occasions)...

To the extent that retailers' failure to create a welcoming in-aisle mobile experience stems
from a false belief that in-aisle mobile usage is only for price checking (which just favors
discounters), our data contradicts that perception."

(Disclosure: I am a member of one of White Horse's advisory boards but haven't mentioned the report here until it was relevant. See also PSFK's recent Future of Retail report, which I was also consulted for.)

Late last week when Google Plus began opening up to more and more users, the leaders of the project said they were doing their best to include speakers of more than 40 different languages around the world. How geographically distributed were these first users? I thought I'd ask, on Google Plus itself, just where people were. Users posted their locations and a few short words of feedback on the service, from 2AM PST to 8AM PST July 1st when we hit the 500 comment limit on Plus.

Above, a map made with the help of data visualization guy friend of RWW Michael J. Rubillo. You can click on any of the places on the map and see peoples' reactions, when they posted one. It's just a snapshot, of course, but I think it does communicate two things: Plus is being tested all around the world and most people were feeling very positive about it, at least at the end of last week.

Above, Irish designer John McDermott displays GPS data exported from the bicycling community MapMyRide in a very different way. The change of perspective confers a new feeling to the data. This wasn't just a long bike ride, this was an epic trek that deserves to be commemorated.

McDermott, who heads design at Irish interactive agency AB Brown, has removed all other map data to focus on the route itself and puts the starting and ending point in the distant background to help communicate the great distance traveled. In the bottom corner are details like the date, duration, distance, speed and a graphic representation of the weather during the ride. It's a great example of how a strong design can evoke new communicative value from the data we produce though our everyday activities.

McDermott offers a number of different treatments of different routes on his Flickr account, which was highlighted today on the design blog NotCot. Map blogger Keir Clarke points to another bike mapping visualization today called Animaps.

From Data, Much is Possible

These are just a few examples of the new kinds of value that can be extracted from data when it can be extracted from the services used to create it and manipulated by other applications. In these cases, there are elements of storytelling, multimedia presentation and emotional communication that are all made possible by working with the data.

The data we create online isn't always as easy to access though as location data is from services like MapMyRide.

One of the people working to change that is Jeremie Miller, inventor of the widely used Instant Messaging protocol XMPP and now co-founder of personal data locker startup Singly. (Here's our in depth write-up of Singly and The Locker Project.)

"When you own your data, anyone can create a new way for you use it, visualize it, experience it and share it," Miller says.

"When someone else owns your data, then new tools can only be developed with the permission of that 3rd party and tied to that 3rd party's system. For those that want to create new experiences, they have to overcome either the permission barriers, or the technological barriers, or the submit-to-a-dictator barriers before doing something great for you with (what should be) your own data. That's a lot of impedance. For every one awesome new experience that can make it past all that and/or find data that is more free/accessible, there are 10, or 100 more, that didn't overcome the barriers."

Thank goodness for freely accessible personal location tracking data; look at the kinds of cool things it makes possible. Perhaps some day all our data, from social networking to health records, will be as accessible to us who should own it to innovate on top of. That would be epic.

The update for Honeycomb adds support for fully textured 3D buildings and an action bar on top of the app for easier search. It will also allow users to "fly to your location" and adds Google Maps layer-like functionality to integrate Google Places, Panoramio photos and Wikipedia notations.

The update is intended for Android tablets but is also available for any Android 2.1 (Éclair) devices and above. We tested it on a Samsung Galaxy S Captivate and found that the "fly to" function is quite amusing. The layers of Wikipedia entries, Panoramio and Places could make for an interesting tour guide wandering around a city. Imagine a very sophisticated version of the application "It Happened Here" that is integrated with Google Earth instead of Google Maps (the way it is now). It does not provide quite the deep historical context that It Happened Here does but Wikipedia entries often provide useful facts about a location's history.

On the smartphone, the layers show up in a different window away from the 3D picture you are looking at. On the tablet version the pictures, Wikipedia and Places pop up in the main window without losing the view of the location you are looking at.

It is a solid update to Google Earth. As Google attempts to flesh out the world of Honeycomb-specific applications, it needs to be able to take the lead and release its own build of applications. Google apps optimized by the company itself can make a big difference in whether consumers want to buy and Android tablet.