Apple to Google Maps: ‘Get lost’ Thanks heavens it’s only for photo-tagging: Apple has tossed yet another gauntlet onto the ground in its ongoing spat with Google, dropping Google Maps out of iPhoto for iOS and opting for OpenStreetMap instead. The move was the subject of speculation for a few days before being announced on the OpenStreetMap Foundation blog …
Pffff.... Google has been known to get their maps wrong too. Currently they've mislabelled the village of "Welwyn" as "Welwyn Garden City" - Welwyn Garden City is actually the town directly north of Hatfield. They acknowledged the mistake in an e-mail but said that it's not easily fixable - I'm sure it IS easily fixable in OSM.
Same here, had a road nearby that wasn't suitable so suited even for horses let alone cars, but Google insisted on routing the poor users through it. One could see who used Google Maps and who used better maps like TomTom by the state of their parked cars.
Submitted a bug which stood in their queue for 2 years.
Fortunately the council came and resurfaced the whole thing. It's quite telling when a Council roadworks fixes things faster than Google :-)
In these parts, Google has renamed some streets and moved part of the main highway onto a small insignificant dirt road that is usually a dead end, depending on the time of year. Sometimes I look out my window and I see a shiny city car coming at great speed on the highway and continuing onto the dirt road without making the left turn that most locals would do. That's when I wonder if Google is their friend - since that would be the most likely explanation.
Come on, you do all realise that Google don't actually do any mapping? That they buy the maps? You do, right?
The road at the side of my house was incorrectly labelled, so, I went to the Teleatlas website, Teleatlas being the company that supplies Googles maps in these parts, and logged the error. Took a while, but, the road is now named properly.
How many of you have actually logged the fault with the mapping suppliers and not with Google?
As for blaming Google for people driving down dirt tracks etc. That's not Google's fault, that's the idiot driver who is at fault.
Yes, we know that Google buy the maps, however they invite people to tell them about errors on the actual website, so they clearly can do something about it on their own system In fact, I've submitted a few errors or changes and they have done it within 24 hours.
But they don't in some cases and the mislabelling of Welwyn Garden City is one of them.
There's little point in complaining to the map makers they buy it from because the map makers can't do anything about it on the third-party site directly, only indirectly when the third party updates the maps by taking it from them again (which is once in a blue moon).
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It is easily fixable on the main OSM. Goto edit, login/register, make your change, commit, wait between 2 mins and 24hrs for the tiles to be re-rendered and tada!
Interestingly though, Apple won't know much about my area, only the main roads had been mapped in 2010. So presumably anything tagged here will be shown as 'in a field'.
Apple still has a contract with Google maps until the end of April I think - can't find the link
Also the licence with OSM changes in April. Proper confirmation would be good
Hopefully apple will support OSM upstream, but they have bought a mapping company recently (last year?). No linky for that either
So, Google is charging for their APIs?
Give away a product for free, using revenue from Advertising to pay for the costs of Google Maps.
The free product wipes out the competition because they can't afford to compete.
Now when there's no or little competition, they start to charge?
Hmmm. Can you smell the anti-trust lawyers starting to circle?
@orsonX
When you wipe out the competition by providing a product or service at a loss because unlike the competition you can subsidize you product/service through the sales of another product/service, that anti-competitive nature is illegal. Just ask Microsoft who was labeled a monopoly....
Wow it is pretty bad.
Maybe you could contribute some updates? Here's a nice video on how to start:
web based tool to submit modifications to OSM
Alternatively use some smartphone app like MotionX to log your tracks and then upload them.
OpenStreetMap is pretty good in places with lots of active users, and USELESS elsewhere. I used to file bugs in it in my neighbourhood (with www.openstreetbugs.org - makes it painless and fun), but then realized that it's a too small drop in the bucket. My neighbourhood in OSM is now as good as the official city maps (even has a common bug in other maps fixed: they have a fictional road that was planned at one time but never really built, which confuses satnav users), but go 20km north and you cannot rely on OSM at all. The official mappers at least make an effort to have a consistent level of detail all over the country.
Fictional road? May really be fictional - BBC did a series of maps a few years ago presented by Nicholas Crane taking a historical map each year and seeing how it related to the area today. One program came upto date with the London A-Z map which he used to find a specific location where he would be some of the A-Z mappers ... he got to where the road was on the A-Z map and met the mappers but the road wasn't there. The A-Z people then explained that the road he was looking for was one of the small number of "deliberate mistakes" they add to their maps so that they can determine if other map makers are simply copying their maps.
Go away
You do realie that Google own Motorola? Motorola is an owner of some H264 patents and isn't part of MPEG-LA. So now we have Google part owning a patent they want to kill.
Here's a shot across your bows -
Google paid 12.5 million for Moto a company that lost 80 million in the last quarter. How do they make any money out of that? They don't.
I see why you are a coward and a fucking dumb one at that. Google spent $12.5 BILLION on Motorola, not $12.5 million. You should be quite accustomed to zeros since you are one.
Google spent $124.6 million on VP2 to buy their codecs. If Google wants to push the use of WebM, dropping H.264 would be the first step. Either Apple supports or they don't.
Google bought Motorola for the patents. They are going to use them to take care of that fee that the manufacturers are paying Microsoft for each Android device. Then they can also for the H.264 side of things as well. Now Apple and Microsoft want to squash WebM and push H.264, well Apple and Microsoft will need to pay licensing fees for every H.264 device they sell. Google has over $43 billion in cash. Motorola gives them some ammo against Apple and Microsoft.
Thanks for the personal attack - over a typo, I think you're being a little over sensitive
I really hope that the delusions of yours work out because the patents google. got are worthless. Microsoft and Apple can easily assert he patents they control under MPEG-LA and stop Moto in it's tracks. It won't happen of course, they'll license
Zero is the amount you understand
It is just that time of the month for you. Don't pay attention to the Anonymous Coward behind the curtain, it is just a fucking imbecile.
1) Even if they were successful in grouping the patents, it still requires Apple and Microsoft in paying royalties to use said patents to Google.
2) Motorola was also going after Apple for use of 3G patents that are being infringed upon by all 3G/4G iOS devices. Care to guess what Motorola is trying to get; $10 per device.
3) Motorola was also trying to force Microsoft in paying $22.50 to use patents relating to video and wireless connections.
How much was Microsoft charging the Android hardware manufacturers? Ahh, $10. You don't think that Google can't get that taken care of now? If no, then Microsoft will be paying a lot more to Google than the Android hardware manufacturers are paying to Microsoft. Microsoft and Apple are the ones that have a lot to lose. Jobs started a war and there is no love lost between Google and Apple.
They will make money out of it... eventually.
How probably the same way they're doing wth their maps API.
1) first give it free untill all competition is gone
2) .. then charge for it.
3) ...if your (former) clients then decide to use one o/t leftovers, sue their asses off.
In this case they will eventually (ab)use Motorola as leverage if and when their current OEM-partners decide to jump ship and go for Windows Phone. Especially uselfull with the current market-penetration of Android devices.
It's a one shot between the eyes of HTC (the biggest OEM-manufacturer of Android devices) then they take over THAT company, ditch all non-Android portfolio and upto the next.
Youtube's just better known would be my guess.
I like Vimeo the way it is - without all the garbage and txt spk comments that clutter up Youtube. People who search for a better solution than Youtube find Vimeo and they also tend to be the sorts of people who take more care over what they upload.
Vimeo's like a good restaurant at the moment, which not everybody in town knows is there. Don't tell them or it will fill up with noisy kids and they'll ruin it.
If Google were to dump H.264 and go WebM/Flash on YouTube they'd instantly cut off most Android devices. Flash is deprecated and in any case works really poorly on ARMv6 models — such as most budget phones of the last few years. Hardware decoding is also generally H.264 only.
So the Apple angle hardly comes into it.
@Benjamin 4: What you mention has usually NOTHING to with the technical possibility of being able to run the program.
In the case of Flash not running on iOS this is due to a personal dispute between Steve Jobs and some CEO of Adobe (usually triggered by greed). The same with Nokia, the reason why they went to Microsoft and not to Google is because Nokia demanded a 'special deal' to use Android (read: get all the google API's for free while current partners have to pay for the google-stuff) and Google said No. They'd probably didn't wanna favor Nokia above other long-time partners like HTC or Samsung and that's the reason why Nokia isn't going with Android. They're technically apt to build linux-based devices as they prove with the N9.
In essence the world runs on greed and that's why technology is working against us these days instead of for us.
The people saying there's no performance problem with Flash on budget Android devices (and I accept that the discussion is essentially my anecdote versus yours so there's no reason for a third party to believe any of us over the others) are missing the other significant part of my point against Flash — it's deprecated. As in, by Adobe. It will no longer be developed. One day soon it simply won't work.
I would therefore maintain that it simply isn't an option, regardless.
As for the allegations that Flash isn't on the iPhone because of greed, I strongly disagree. Flash didn't make it to Android until 2010 — three years after the iPhone's launch. That suggests it genuinely wasn't ready in 2007. I think it's more likely that Apple's initial decision was a technical one and that the subsequent fighting between the companies, from which I don't think Apple comes out looking all that good, caused it to entrench its position.
But WebM is being added so that it can be decoded in hardware. Soon newer Arm processors will be in the budget minded Android handsets anyway, so even if it it could be done in hardware, the hardware will be able to handle it anyway. So by the time that Flash does go away, the transition to WebM is already there.
Jobs didn't want Flash because it would make him lose control. You can't control what "apps" people are getting from the app store when Flash allows them to be hosted on-line anywhere.
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