My wife and I just bought a new home on Pine Street in lovely Boulder, CO. It is a recently remodeled 1921 Craftsman in an old historic district called Mapleton Hill. It may be on one of the nicest residential streets in Boulder, but it has one glaring problem: the major online mapping services don’t know where it is! In fact, eight entire blocks of Pine Street in Boulder, Colorado do not map correctly on Google Maps, MapQuest or Yahoo Maps. (I’ve shown them accurately here using intersections, rather than street addresses, in order to illustrate the blocks in question.) I know that Boulder is very protective of their historic districts, but keeping eight blocks off the internet is ridiculous!

OK, so the problem does not lie with the city of Boulder. It is actually a problem with the back-end data provider to all of these services: NAVTEQ. Now, to be fair, the major map sites bear some responsibility because they default to taking the user right to the location they deem most relevant, based on relevancy scores returned when they query the NAVTEQ data. Microsoft’s MapPoint actually lets me choose between two possible addresses, while Zillow.com gets it right the first time, presumably because it is using additional real-estate transaction data to determine that my address is probably the most-relevant one for the query. But the fundamental problem lies with the underlying data provided by NAVTEQ.

About 14 miles away up a windy mountain road (about a 37 minute drive) there is another Pine Street, presumably still within Boulder County, though not in Boulder proper. Mapping any address from 400 Pine Street to 1299 Pine Street will bring the user to this remote (and sparsely populated) road. Starting at 1300 Pine Street, the mapping services will take the user to the “correct” place. Certainly the discontinuity between 1299 Pine Street and 1300 Pine Street is a bit odd, as is the fact that the mapping sites actually show that there are one thousand valid addresses on a remote stretch of road in the foothills. Though I haven’t been there myself, I seriously doubt that there are a series of monster apartment buildings up there. To summarize, eight blocks of Pine Street in downtown Boulder, starting at the 400 block and ending with the 1200 block, all map to this doppelgänger Pine Street outside of town, but starting with the 1300 block, the mapping sites take the user to the place the average user might reasonably expect.

There might be a handful of people who live on this other Pine Street, but there’s eight blocks worth of residents who live in Boulder whose homes cannot be properly mapped with the dominant mapping services online. While fixing the problem might negatively impact the few who live on this alternate Pine Street, far more people would benefit if this problem were to be corrected in favor of the eight in-town blocks of Pine Street.

And before you think that I am complaining about an insignificant problem free of anything but cyber consequences, consider the fact that the previous owners’ moving truck arrived at the wrong location because of faulty geo-data and wound up appearing two hours late. Or that Comcast never showed up to install high speed internet during their generous four-hour appointment window last week because their truck rolled to the wrong place. And I’m sure I’ve got many botched furniture deliveries and missed meetings with tradespeople in my future because of this issue. Hopefully the fire department and the police aren’t relying on NAVTEQ’s data.

The helpful folks at deCarta (a Mobius portfolio company which powers Google Maps, among others) explained that the problem is with the backend data from NAVTEQ. They do provide a form for victims of bad data to submit corrections, but the NAVTEQ site makes no guarantees it will correct the problem, and even if they do, it can take six to nine months, though the folks at deCarta tell me eighteen months is a more realistic timeframe. I’m hoping that complaining publicly to the world at large about this problem will spur NAVTEQ into action sooner rather than later.

Technorati Tags: Geocoding, Geotagging, Mapping, Maps

My wife and I went with our friends Craig and Kristin to see An Inconvenient Truth last night. In our case, Al Gore was preaching to the choir, since we needed no convincing that global warming is a very real and very urgent issue. Yet the movie still had a big impact on me. It is extremely well done and will spur people into action. Go see the movie, you’ll be inspired to act. Children will thank you. And while the problem is huge, it is not intractable, as Gore points out. There is no one thing that will solve the problem. Instead, lots of little things need to happen.

What can you do? Plant a tree — a single tree will absorb a ton of carbon dioxide over its lifetime. Drive less. When you drive, keep your tires inflated and improve your gas mileage. A gallon gas saved keeps twenty pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Have an energy audit done on your home and reduce your energy consumption. Energy conservation is the low-hanging fruit when it comes to making a dent in emissions, and it will save you money.

Write to your local congressman, and urge them to support clean energy and conservation measures. If you’ve lost faith in the political process, then vote with your dollars as a consumer, which in today’s world may be the most powerful vote you can cast.

If you must own a car, go buy a hybrid. I am a happy owner of a Toyota Prius and a Lexus 400h. If you are able, install a PV system at your house. Today, I just ordered a 3kW SunPower system that will be installed on our garage roof by the fine folks at Namaste Solar in August. This system won’t zero-out our electric bill (we don’t have enough roof-space for that) but it will reduce it by about 30% and will keep over 8,000 pounds of carbon dioxide out of our atmosphere every year.

If you are looking for a smaller-ticket item, replace your light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs and keep 150 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the air for each incandescent bulb you replace. Donate, so that someone else may see the movie for free. Use a carbon calculator to determine how much carbon dioxide emissions you are responsible for, and then purchase offsets that will fund clean energy projects and enable you to have a carbon-neutral or carbon-negative impact on the world. Purchasing offsets is not akin to buying indulgences to assuage one’s guilt, it puts real money towards real clean energy infrastructure projects.

Cooking the Earth in our own exhaust would quite literally be the ultimate (and final) Tragedy of the Commons. Go do something about it. Go see the film. Then go throw your time at the problem, throw your money at the problem, throw your influence at the problem, but do something about it. It is the RIght Thing to do.

(Thanks to Joi Ito for the link to sharethetruth, and to Acterra for their carbon dioxide statistics and suggestions on ways to help stop global warming)

I’ve decided to start a series of posts that I’ll call Feature Request. I’m going to gripe about things that bug me with existing devices, services, sites, life, etc. and also wonder aloud why certain features (or entire products) don’t exist. If anyone can point me to a product that solves my problem or knows about someone working on a solution to this problem, please let me know. This was partially inspired by Joshua Schachter’s rant about bad alarm clock UI. (Credit goes to Om for direction my attention to this.)

If you were to observe my daily activities, you might conclude that I am a professional emailer, phone caller and meeting attendee. Many meetings I attend virtually via conference call. Untold hours of productivity have been sapped by the idiotic machinations involved in setting up a conference call on a Polycom. Dial the number, wait for the annoying audio instructions, enter the conference ID incorrectly, hang up, dial again, enter the code properly. Are you the moderator? Enter the moderator password incorrectly. Lather, rinse, repeat. Oops, accidentally hung up the call reaching for the volume button on the Polycom. Lather, rinse, repeat. Shoot me.

I want to walk into a conference room, sit down, press a single button (heck, I’d settle for three or four) on the Polycom and be connected to my conference without having to listen to any voice-menus or enter any codes. One-button conferencing. (Obviously I also want the same functionality on my cell phone, office phone, directly from my laptop, etc). Who can give me this?

There are clearly many pieces that need to be put together to make this work. Maybe VOIP/Skype-enabled conferencing services and VOIP/Skype-aware Polycom phones? Skype can give me a four-user conference call, but I want the ability to have an unlimited number (within reason) of people come to the same “place” with no advance planning, but the current reservation-less conference call services are just too cumbersome and force everyone into lowest-common-denomintor touch-tone interfaces.

Technorati Tags: Feature Request