The Forgotten Mapmaker

Alexis Madrigal:

As I described last month, Google has spent literally tens of thousands of person-hours creating its maps. I argued that no other company could beat Google at this game, which turned out to be my most controversial assertion. People pointed out that while Google’s driven 5 million miles in Street View cars, UPS drives 3.3 billion miles a year. Whoever had access to these other datasets might be in the mapping (cough) driver’s seat.

Well, it turns out that Nokia is the company that receives the GPS data from both FedEx and UPS, the company’s senior VP of Location Content, Cliff Fox, told me.

I don’t think it’ll happen, but how odd would it be for Apple to acquire Nokia not for their phone expertise, but for their mapping expertise?

★ Wednesday, 3 October 2012