About a month ago, we talked a bit about Google map hacks. Now Barney Pell, who is with Mayfield and is rocket scientist-level smart (he was a research director at NASA for years), explains their significance:
First, I expect to see many more applications of maps + data on the internet. It won't be long before anything that has geographical information will be so tagged and will be usable within search and other applications. The Geographical Information System (GIS) revolution is going to be big.
Second, these examples show the value of outside developers building on tools developed by search engine companies. Unfortunately, it is hard to build real businesses around such applications because the search engine companies typically restrict API usage for noncommercial purposes. At some point, I expect them to find appropriate licensing mechanisms. It would be great to build a business around Google's massive index of web pages in which we could offer vertical search services and pay per query we send to the Google database, without restrictions about how we want to use the data.
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