



4 “Google has said surprisingly little about how it’s making AOIs...” Google’s secretiveness in how it’s making AOIs has been somewhat to its detriment, as bloggers and journalists have drawn their own (sometimes unflattering) conclusions. ↩︎





5 AOIs also say a lot about Google’s confidence in the accuracy of its place data and its ability to keep AOIs up-to-date. (I.e., Google feels its place data is accurate enough to build new features off of it.) ↩︎





6 This whole “byproduct” thing reminds me of Kingsford Charcoal’s origin story. From Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson:

Henry Ford learned of a process for turning wood scraps from the production of Model T’s into charcoal briquets. He built a charcoal plant and Ford Charcoal was created (later renamed Kingsford Charcoal). Today, Kingsford is still the leading manufacturer of charcoal in America.

It’s cool to see how cleverly Google is using its own byproducts. ↩︎





7 There’s a small number of buildings, such as Apple’s Cupertino campuses, that Apple is making itself. But these buildings are handmade by artists rather than by algorithms. ↩︎





8 Given how many Apple employees live in and around San Francisco, you’d expect that San Francisco would be one of the first places where Apple would be extracting place data from imagery. (I.e., San Francisco would seem to be the perfect test ground, given its high density of businesses and year-round good weather, minus Karl.) ↩︎





9 It’s interesting to ponder what this means for Google’s competitors. It’s no longer enough to simply collect data. Now to compete with Google, you also have to process that data and make new features out of it. Hence, the “moat”.

It’s also interesting to ponder what this means for OpenStreetMap. ↩︎





10 Another advantage of Google collecting its own data is that it owns everything it collects. And because of this, it can do things with its data that Apple might be restricted from doing (because Apple seems to license most of its data from third-parties).

(Often in map licensing agreements, if you stop licensing the data, you lose the right to anything that was derived from it.) ↩︎





11 Assuming Google’s efforts don’t slow (and they show no sign of slowing), is it even possible for Apple to catch up to Google?

Google’s lead in data is reminiscent of Apple’s lead in smartphones in 2007. ↩︎