Great Christmas Lights Map - Start the Season off right!

We are excited to see the 2008 Bay Area CA Christmas Lights map on Mapicurious.com. Great details and shots for each one of these electric tributes. Thanks to user Regenegade for creating this map.

You have to check it out:

2008 Bay Area CA Christmas Lights

This information will be searchable on the mobile and Dash Mapicuriosities applications later today.

If you have a map idea, it is easy to register and create Christmas lights maps or any other map - and download them to your GPS.

Thanks,

Maps

Mapicurious becomes social with Google Friend Connect

We make maps for people at Mapicurious.com.

These people can view the map on Mapicurious, can download the points to their own GPS, view the points on their Dash GPS, access the points on your mobile phone, view the map in Google Earth, explore zoomable panoramas from Gigapan....and now interact with other Mapicurious users with Google Friend Connect.

Hope you enjoy the experience.

Thanks,

Maps

Want to get a GPS for the Holidays? Mapicurious Recommends...

We are starting to answer some questions about what GPS to purchase this Holiday season. Our disclosure here is that we have received zero devices for free, zero money from any manufacturer, and we have personally used every device type listed.

1. Garmin - These are the best devices for US drivers all around. Easy to use, very intuitive, and a breeze for senior drivers. Updates are free. Traffic is available but will not be as good as Dash below.

2. Dash - Recently the Dash company announced that they no longer will produce the hardware, but license the software. Buy this for real time traffic flows and two way location based applications (Yes - some of these are Mapicurious produced!). You should be able to pick up the old hardware at Fry's and Amazon until sold out.

3. Magellan - Recently the quality of these have decreased, and customer service is impossible if you do run into problems. Some first time GPS users are satisfied with Magellans on US roads.

4. TomTom - If you are a US driver avoid these devices. Road announcements are poor, directions are poorly timed, and menus too confusing. We are willing to sell you a used top-end one if you must have one from this manufacturer.

How to use this list:

1. If it is not on this list, keep your money in your pocket.

2. If you are at a store (let's say Best Buy or RadioShack - sorry Circuit City - you closed all of your stores around us.) and looking at a $199 device from each of the above manufacturers, choose in the order of this list.

3. Please send us your feedback or issues with any of the manufacturers.

Thanks,

Maps

Step 2: Add your Lat Lng to Your Register Receipts

The other day I found a receipt from a trip to Tokyo, Japan. If you have ever been to Tokyo before (especially if you do not speak the language) you know how confusing it can be to find locations.

Well this merchant placed their location's coordinates right on the receipt, where we would normally find the telephone number. What a great idea!

Here's why:

1. As a customer, I can program these coordinates into my mobile phone or GPS device and always have your exact location handy without the trouble of geocoding.

2. As a business traveler, I can reconstruct where I spent my expense account dollars. Which might reveal what I purchased when my memory is fuzzy.

3. As a tourist, I can easily map what I visited.

4. Even as a foreigner who cannot speak or read Japanese, I could tell you where I bought this really cool electronic gadget.

So on any available line on your receipt, program your cash register to output your latitude and longitude along with the important information from Step 1.

Thanks,

Maps

Step 1: Prepare your locations' listing data

At the very least a listing should include common locative information. Here is your checklist:

1. The latitude and longitude of your store's front door location. Why the front door? Many times your address might be 1500 Main Street Suite 221, and the shopping center is a small city, the parking lot is huge, and your storefront is a needle-in-the-haystack.

It is one thing to be on the property, and another to be inside your location.

Locative technologies are supposed to save you time, and knowing how to get within 10 feet of your front door is key. Your next customer could be using his/her cell phone to pinpoint your location.

2. Local phone number - If you forget the address (assuming you already supplied the latitude and longitude) a phone number is all you need. Remember - most of your customers carry a cell phone.

3. Your street address - You can try this on any PND - type in your store address, and let the PND navigate you to your store. You might be surprised to find out the address alone could be off a significant distance.

An address can be converted to coordinates by "geocoding", however this is an estimate of your location only. Double check the address by plotting your address with Google Earth.

4. Your website URL - Hopefully you have some ways to engage your customers here, but since Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs) are more connected (think cell phones) this is critical information about your business that might not be able to list on the GPS.

Supply a mobile optimized site, not your multimedia heavy regular dotcom site.

5. Description - Break down your location into discreet bites of information:
- 1 sentence for what you do (sell new and used sports equipment cheap)
- 1 for particulars on your location (far left of Park Lane Shopping Center)
- best days and time to shop (open M-F 9a-5p, closed the entire month of December, etc)

This should be enough for a good listing. Did we forget anything?

Is your business under-represented?

Do you own a personal navigation device or PND (Think Garmin, Magellan, Mio, TomTom, or your gps mobile phone)?

Conduct a point of interest search and notice Starbucks, Subways, and McDonalds are easy to find. How about your own business, where is it listed?

Where it ranks on the list may determine whether a PND guided user finds Subway over your location.


Typically GPS hardware/software manufacturers license these business based POIs from NAVTEQ, TeleAtlas, or the like. These providers are always looking for unique, local results - and it is much easier to collect POIs 1000 at a time. Some of you may have working SEO programs to help web searchers find you, but what about strategies to help people find you in the real world using PNDs?

If you have 1000+ locations I doubt you are reading this blog. Companies like NAVTEQ, TeleAtlas, and MapQuest have probably already reached out to you. So as a smaller operator how do you make your business stand out in the searchable list on a PND?

We at Mapicurious want to give you ideas for marketing your business via personal navigation device in a multi-part series.

For starters let us introduce a definition:

Personal Navigation Device (PND) - Software and hardware to receive a location and guide the user between two points in the physical world. You know these as Garmins, Magellans, Dashes, Mios, and Navigons. You should know that Nokias, iPhones, and Blackberrys fall into this category as well.

It is very possible that the customer in your store now has one of these.

Second, let's prepare a few answers to critical questions making your business stand out?

1. How many times have you felt your location is a disadvantage compared to your customers?

2. Do customers mention they had difficulty finding a location of yours?

3. How much is it worth if a customer finds your location on their PND with an attractive amount of information, and bypass your competitors to visit?

4. Ask your friends and customers, what brand of PND they have.

We'll use these answers in the next installment.

Thanks,

Maps

Atlanta Gas Crisis Line Spotter

Exclusively on the Dash GPS - Drive around and submit places you see a line for gas. A line means that station has the valuable resource.

View the results on the map.

A Dash user simply adds the application via their account at my.dash.net, clicks the application button when near a gas station, adds the station name (you can even add price), and submits to Mapicurious.

Looking for other ideas to alleviate the panic of looking for gas. My sipper is OK for the moment.

Thanks,

Maps

Testing Vimeo HD video with Mapicurious

Here is the first video to Vimeo. Next stop - a map on the site.



Inspiration Point from Mapicurious on Vimeo.

Can anyone recommend good Haunted Houses?

I want to do a tour of Haunted Houses with Mapicurious? We are looking for locations to scout. Any readers with tips would be great.

Thanks,

Maps

Helping Pakistan Find the Terrorists/Taliban?

A funny thing happened when I stepped away from the computer this evening:

Watching an interview by NBC's Anne Curry with Pakistan's President Ali Asif Zardari on the Nightly News, he proposed a simple solution to stymie the terrorists in Pakistan: “Give us the intelligence, and we will do the job."

As NBC showed nice Google Earth imagery over Pakistan, I thought about Tim O'Reilly's suggestion last week at the Web 2.0 Expo "...to ask yourself, are we working on the right things?"

So with all the crowd sourcing, the updated disaster imagery of hurricane and fire impact areas, and the mantra of "Do no evil" of Google - Why can't we crowd source the study of imagery of the Pakistan hills?

With enough eyeballs on decent satellite imagery, we could spot every frickin movement of cows, camels, clouds, and cohorts.

Then we could give Pakistan all the intelligence it supposedly needs to capture the bad guys.

Could we accomplish this without endangering the good guys?

Just thinking...

A little disclosure - I did recently see Morgan Spurlock's Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?

How do you get your business on a GPS?

Hopefully you have harder questions for us at Mapicurious, but we assist businesses getting their locations onto various GPS devices.

Contact us at maps at mapicurious dot com for more info. Use the subject "Get my business on a GPS".

Thanks,

Maps

My locations are not showing on my map!

To improve performance of the site, many things are kept in memory to speed retrieval.

This presents a small issue for the Map Makers who are actively entering data on Mapicurious, but make it faster for users of the map.

If you are seeing this on your map, just be patient and refresh your browser.

Thanks,

Maps

Demo of Mapicurious on the Dash GPS

Get Mapicurious LBS on your Dash GPS

Mapicurious has released the Mapicuriosities search service on the Dash GPS.

Find a large selection of content entered on Mapicurious.com directly from your Dash GPS. Great for explorers who need to know what is around you.

If you have trouble finding or using the service, send us an email.

Thanks,

Maps

Real Housewives of Atlanta Map

Just to answer fans of the show -

"Yes, we will have a map about the show."

Thanks,

Maps

Need a Map? We need only USD $100 and some information....

Many people have great map ideas but no time to create them. Hopefully a Mapicurious staffer can lend a hand.

Give us as little as a theme....
- I want a map of ski slopes in Vermont
- I want to know where the soccer fields are in Seattle

And we will create your map. Your data will then be ready to viewed in Google Earth, your GPS, your cell phone, your Dash GPS.

How else to use your map:
1. Highlight your business
2. Map your favorite eateries
3. Map a movie or book you have read
4. Plot vacation plans
5. Create a record of your recent vacation to share with friends

Starting July 1, 2008 we offer map making on your behalf for a fee:

1. Give us an overall theme and title for your map.

2. Give us up to 25 locations with any amount of detail: Name, Street, City, State, Zip, Country, picture, movie, and/or your comments

3. Send us USD $100 via PayPal.

4. We will produce a map hosted on Mapicurious.com, our partner services, and you will have your information in portable form (KML).

We have a lot of talented Mapicurious staffers to make impressive maps - take advantage while you can.

Businesses - Have a list of addresses to be coded and plotted on a map? Check with us on details, and we will convert to usable map data for a nominal fee.

Thanks,

Maps

Mapicurious mentioned in Moultrie, Georgia

Read about UGA's Archway Project, and see how they use Mapicurious to document and highlight points of interest in the Moultrie area.

Link to Article

Thanks,

Maps

Mapicuriosities on your cell phone!

A little news from the ranch:

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080603005802&newsLang=en

Mapicurious has a goal to deliver your geographic data to you in the real world. Why just post it on a web site?

Mapicuriosities is our cell phone application that runs on the free WHERE platform. Visit WHERE.com and download their application onto your GPS enabled cell phone. Works on Motorola, LG, Samsung, BlackBerry, Nokia, and other handsets.

The application lets you see what Mapicurious.com has on the site based on your current location. You can even add points from this application directly to any one of your maps!

Send us feedback. Our Map Makers/Managers know that we are very helpful getting you started with mapping.

Thanks,

Maps

GeoRel - Could we make this a new standard?

Has anyone ever thought to re-purpose the rel attribute in HTML and RSS to contain Geo data?

On face value, rel = relationship and placing lat lng inside the rel attribute relates the content spatially.

Now browsers and RSS readers can simply show links based on their distance order from the reader. Using this with a location service (FireEagle, etc), the browser/reader could assess relevance and relationship geographically.

The main advantages are easy and lightweight representation of geospatial relationships in the semantic web. Should be both machine and human readable.

It could support existing formats - Simple GeoRSS, Latitude and Longitude, KML (provide link to KML file)

Here are some link examples below based on Mapicurious data. Look at properties for each link to see the "rel" tag in use.

1. Basic Lat Lng (lat lng separated by space and pairs by comma for paths and polygons)

California Football Players 2006
Chick-Fil-A in Southern California
Hof's Hut - Southern California Tradition

2. L:

California Football Players 2006
Hof's Hut - Southern California Tradition

3. Geohash

California Football Players 2006
Chick-Fil-A in Southern California
Hof's Hut - Southern California Tradition

4. Georeference:

California Football Players 2006
Chick-Fil-A in Southern California
Hof's Hut - Southern California Tradition



Simple Use Cases:

Mapping web site - Overlay links directly on a map based on GeoRel data. Show geographically relevant links to map content to user, based on user's location (including distance calculations).

News site - Arrange links based on geospatial relevance.

RSS Reader - Filter links to content based on location from reader.

Mapicurious on Your Blackberry?

That's correct! Through our friends at Where.com, you can access Mapicurious to search for points around you and add points directly to your map.

Follow the steps outline on our Blackberry page.

Thanks,

Maps

Mapicurious on Qik

Qik.com allows you to stream video live to the web from the cell phone. Look for field reports on the Mapicurious Qik channel.

Thanks,

Maps

Mapicurious on Dash Navigation

Finally a GPS company allows information maintained on the Internet to be exchanged with their GPS device in real time. This inexpensive automobile GPS has Internet search features, traffic routing, and Mapicurious content streaming live from the Mapicurious.com site.

For more information, and to get yours: http://www.dash.net

Thanks,

Maps

Follow Mapicurious on Twitter

If you have not heard of Twitter and you own a cell phone, here is your chance.

Twitter is a web and short message service that allows registered users to broadcast a single text message to a large group of individuals. Users "follow" each other to be kept up-to-date on the news about that person.

CNN and the Presidential candidates all use this service to quickly alert their constituents.

Register at http://www.twitter.com and follow Mapicurious - http://www.twitter.com/mapicurious

Thanks,

Maps

Looking For Corporate Museums

Where are the corporate museums and factory tours. Sometimes you get some free stuff. Use the Add A Point to let Mapicurious.com know!

Thanks,

Maps

What for 2010?

I recently combed through a notepad (physical not Windows) where I collected important information in the early 1990s. I developed a habit of writing companies or topics of interest in the margin, and a quick note of why it was interesting. Eventually I might get around to "discovering" additional information, but otherwise it remained invisible until my recent discovery, unless I happened to run across the company's location in the physical world.

Along with the 1990s notepad, I found another from 2000 or 2001 with websites scribbled on the side. I checked those out back then, added them to my bookmarks, and am surprised to see ones I still use today. Back then if you didn't have a web presence, you didn't exist to a large group of people.

As technology has deepened our lives to such a point, there are numerous opportunities to cross over the web space in to the physical space.

Since I've been working with geospatial, I'm curious on what will happen for 2010?

For Mapicurious I think it safe to say - if you don't exist properly in either my auto's GPS, my handheld GPS, or my cellphone GPS - I probably will not find you.

That means this is the time to get your business georeferenced.

- Maps

Live Oscar Mapping

Mapicurious.com will be mapping the Oscars as they happen. Check the Newest & Popular Maps for all of the Oscar maps.

Thanks,

Maps

Looking for Covered Bridges in Georgia

Do you know of a location of a covered bridge?

Submit the location via the following link:
http://www.mapicurious.com/addapoint

Thanks,

Maps

Mapicurious Gear at CafePress.com

We've heard what you have been asking for...so we've created some Mapicurious logo wear for Map Makers to spread the word.

And for those of you that send me an email, I'll create special items just about your map so you can advertise your own work.

Go to the Mapicurious store

Thanks,

Maps

Fulton County Historical Markers

Henry County Historical Markers

Butts County Historical Markers

Congratulations! This county is in compliance with 100% of markers found.



Visit the Map

Georgia Historical Marker Cataloging

In 1973, the book Georgia Historical Markers by Bay Tree Grove was published as the definitive guide for finding markers in the State of Georgia. The State has obviously undergone some changes in 35 years, and through various improvements (widening the roads, etc) some markers have gone missing.

I'm not sure if there is a complete catalog, but we'll keep updating the Mapicurious site with our progress at mapping them all.

If you know of one, use the Fun Map to let us know the approximate location - or email us.

We'll post county per county...

Thanks,

Maps

Map Management for TV Show Producers

Do you have a television show that is set in the real world? Maybe a travel show or a reality show, or just a local community show?

Think about this:

Your sophisticated viewers might have a GPS available to them in their car. You highlight destinations within your show, however, you leave it up to the individual to do research and find the locations.

Why not have a map created with the locations, to enable viewers to easily download into their GPSes? Therefore a viewer can have an immersive experience relating to your TV Show.

Mapicurious can show you how a map of TV Show locations can boost viewership and stickiness metrics.

Like I said, something to think about.

Maps

Valentine's Day Maps

Hey community:

Where are you taking your special someone for Valentines Day?

Maybe you have an activity other than a restaurant - a special park bench, a balloon ride, or a romantic hotel in the mountains.

We would like to see that on a map. Or just tell us via the Mapicurious Fun Map.

Thanks,

Maps

Wide Maps at Mapicurious Announcement

When you build a map at Mapicurious, you now have the option to use the original Mapicurious look that fits an 800x600 screen or a larger, wider map for larger resolutions.

Thanks,

Maps