NYC Pairs with Google to Setup an Official Mirror World, aka Information Center Platform
January 22 2009 / by Alvis Brigis
Category: Information Year: 2009 Rating: 5 Hot
Pairing with Google for its online mapping technology, New York City has (at last!) launched a state-of-the-art information center and comprehensive website to help visitors and others obtain the data they need about the city. The new platform serves up important information by category (i.e. hotels, dining, shopping, nightlife, arts, entertainment) and through Google maps seamlessly embedded into the site. (Here's NYC Mayor Bloomberg's version of the announcement)
Really a Mirror World: The result is a not only a successful city navigation platform, but also a big first step toward an official municipal mirror world through which people can interact online.
Predictions: Though it presently offers up only select slices of the NYC mirror world that exists as google maps, I expect that to change over the next few years as 1) the site integrates Google Earth, Street View and other apps, 2) the sites adopts community-related technologies and becomes an essential hub for advertising products, services, events, 3) the resolution of Google's NYC geo and info graphs increases, and 4) NYC and its citizens realize the power of a centralized, publicly owned mirror portal and demand its rapid development.
It simply makes sense that municipalities themselves should seize control of their own increasingly rich geo-info-social hubs and use them to drive value creation across a variety of domains.
The Race to Quantify Cities and Be the Prime Directory: Accordingly, I find it very likely that upon the successful Googlization of NYC many other cities will increasingly demand similar Google Worlds to boost their own commerce, public services and brand. And it's possible that Google could derive a significant amount of revenue by helping to deply these services, though they may also be glad to suffer the cost in exchange for the deluge of 1) geo-related information that would subsequently pour in as cities convert to Google as their official Directory, and 2) the additional advertising that would pour through such an official platform. -- Realizing this, my bet is that Google is gearing up to conquer the world city-by-city.
Physical Mirror World Components: But even more compelling is the potential revenue that Google could generate through the deployment of Google Kiosks and Billboards, which the company patented in 2007, and resulting access to untapped advertising phase space. Network those with the company's G2 and next-gen Smart-Phones (which come with built-in GPS, cameras and can handle bottom-up apps of all sorts) and you've got the ultimate geo-info platform capable of serving supra-personally-relevant ads, capturing and building in valuable new content and automatically increasing its informational resolution. Such a scenario seems to be the future that Google is preparing to enable, serve to the public and leverage for additional network effects (social, informational, technological).
Make no mistake about it, Google sees Mirror World mesh as the future of towns, cities, countries, the world, and is looking to provide their critical scaffolding. Along the way it will draw more brains, serve ads in new ways and catalyze enormous value creation. Having failed to launch the seeds of such a geo-entangled platform in San Francisco several years ago (due to resistance from telcos), Google seems to have bettered its approach and offerings and looks poised to make huge inroads into the Mirror World business via NYC.
The next step in the Googlization of the world has begun. They've taken New York.
