Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia is buying Navteq for $8.1 billion. The company's mapping service powers Google Maps, among others — including the Google Maps application for Apple's iPhone, a competitor to Nokia's handsets. (That's an exceedingly roundabout attack on a rival, but it's so obscure it just may work.) Nokia also says it will provide many more phones with GPS capabilities in 2008. [GigaOM]
Oh, Canada. With the loonie matching the value of the dollar, a bunch of our northern neighbors are crowing. Yes, yes. Wake us when the Canadian football field shrinks to a normal size, too. Anyway, the Sydney Morning Herald says that Google is considering meeting Canadian legal concerns over its Street View map feature by blurring people's faces and vehicle license plates. In the U.S., Google will only blur your face if you ask. Canadian strip-club owner Robert Katzman ">complained to the Wall Street Journal that the stronger loonie has his clientele heading over the border to Detroit's bars. Maybe Google's cross-border Street View policies offer new incentive to stay home, you hosers.
Even when you're outdoors and offline, it's impossible to escape Internet-based privacy invasion, thanks to Google Maps' new Street View feature. Google's roving cameras, though meant simply to capture streetscapes for the convenience of direction-seekers, have lensed all kinds of tomfoolery. Although Google has always removed identifiable faces or license plates upon request, if you can substantiate your identity — a slight catch-22 for the chap apparently caught breaking and entering — the company now says it will remove any face, license plate, or other personal detail it's notified about, without requiring proof of identity. Still, Google won't be proactively deleting faces, as privacy advocates suggest. It's like YouTube's copyright-infringement policy: if no one notices, it's not a problem.
For months, we've known that Google has been busy photographing the streets of southern California. You know, so we can spy on people outside of Silicon Valley. But it's taken until now for a team of LA Times reporters to issue a warning to readers that their privacy may be endangered. Hopefully Google's camera trucks caught slow-moving celebrities before they fled the streets. The article, sadly, just rehashes the same privacy concerns aired in June shortly after Street View's launch. And it misses the most obvious impact this could have on the Hollywood economy.
TIM FAULKNER — It appears Microsoft, with their "coincidentally"-timed press release announcing 3-D imagery in Live Search, was hoping to steal some of Google's thunder earlier today since it was widely speculated that Google would be announcing new features today at Where 2.0, the location-focused conference. Word of Google's Street View and a beta of Mapplets, map widgets, has largely negated that preemptive press strike.
Pity the poor PR flack, pumping out press releases, subject to the hatred (and occasional alliteration) of Valley journalists and bloggers. Or just pity the people who hired him.
Satellite images? So last year. Mashup maps are the hot item again. Here are three map-ups of the center of the universe.
