Mike Blumenthal

How much enhanced reality is too much? The new Email ‘n Walk iPhone application (via NY Times) is an iPhone app that overlays an image of what is in front of you while you are walking down the street reading your e-mail. Presumably this prevents you from walking into something or someone. Unfortunately it only shows what …

Google treats Maps as a free resource that it provides to the public. From their point of view, any problem that exists, if it can’t be handled at an engineering level really is not significant. For users, there is an understanding that Maps is fulfilling a critical information role in our society and there is …

A reader sent a query several weeks ago asking for a time line of developments for Google Maps. I sent him over to the Wikipedia article on Google Maps as a possible resource. I subsequently went there myself and realized that it had not been updated in  since the end of 2007 and that many …

Google Maps has been an exhilarting product allowing many to gain a better understanding of the world around them with constant innovation. Sergey Brin noted in his annual Google Founder’s letter that “after the launch of Google Map Maker in Pakistan, users mapped 25,000 kilometers of uncharted road in just two months”. That’s pretty cool …

Google doesn’t frequently advertise their services or products in traditional venues very often. Apparently there are plans to advertise Chrome on TV and they ran their billboards for Goog-411 in out of the way places in September of 2007. In late April, Google introduced profile results that included personal profiles as a OneBox in the main Google search …

It is not uncommon in Google Maps for one business location to have multiple business listings. They come from Google’s many data providers, readers who create new records before checking for existing records and from the Local Business Center itself. There has always been confusion about how to handle these duplicate records as the wrong …

I saw this posted in the Google Help Forum thread Google is Merging Map Records and wondered if she knew something that I didn’t: hmcx2 4/29/09 We tried the Google Technical Support people (Julie & Billy, the supervisor) at 888/882-7114. They sounded like they could fix the problem but only if we paid $35.00. Since …

At the beginning of last week, I started to notice posts in the Google Help forum and I received emails from a number of correspondents that their records had merged with nearby competitors. At first blush they appeared to have all of the symptoms of hijacked records however after lengthy, ongoing communication with Google it …

I have written extensively about the hijinks in the Locksmith industry and the impact that the massive amount of mapspam was having on the Maps Index quality. Google noted that they had fixed the vector in January and another in March. Google however, when they fix a technical iisue like Mapspam rarely if ever seems …

I just hung up the phone with an InfoUSA staffer who called to verify our business record. Never one to miss an opportunity, I think I may have asked him more questions than he was able to ask of me. As my daughter noted on a apron she gave me for my last birthday: “Cooking …