Lifeboat Foundation News Blog: Mapping

Archive for the ‘mapping’ category: Page 56

Jul 3, 2015

Who Owns the Digital Map of the World? — Laura Bliss | CityLab

Posted by Seb in categories: geography, mapping

“Last week, Mapbox, a map development company based in Washington, D.C., announced that it has raised some $52.55 million in Series B funding, a sum CEO Eric Gunderson called the biggest ever for a mapping company. Mapbox doesn’t exactly make maps, though. It builds towers of software that organize sets of geo-spatial data for other kinds of businesses—real estate, transportation, agriculture, government, smartphone apps.” Read more

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Jul 1, 2015

Pax Google — By Paul Ford | The New Republic

Posted by Odette Bohr Dienel in category: mapping

Google, as a search engine, had built a fine business by “indexing” all of these documents and making them searchable. The company was built on a principle of centralization: If you take the chaotic Web and bestow order upon it, merge it into a single consolidated index, make it make sense, you can make users very, very happy. And upon that index, and that shared happiness, and the willingness of some users to click on targeted advertising, Google could construct a tremendous enterprise. An empire, if you will. Except empires are not traditionally constructed from indexing documents. But maps are.

Tags: Cartography, Geography, Google