Nowadays map-based services are integral part of wide range of applications. The availability of maps on web and other related services opens unprecedented opportunities for businesses and end users. Users can take advantages of real-time maps, personalized map contents, shared geographical information, hyper-linking, frequent and cheaper updates of map based data. Present days smart mobile devices with mobile maps bring immense possibilities to exploit the unexplored usage and applications of maps.
Maps have changed the way we live and do business. According to a study, map based services are $270 billion industry and provide employment to more than 500,000 people. The list of applications of maps based services goes on and on but one can find the common usage of maps in logistic, transportation, travel and location based services.
A number of map-based service providers (Google, Bing, Yahoo and Mapquest) exist, which provide a range of maps related services and products. The APIs provided by the service providers ease the integration of different kind of maps in applications.
This article compares two web mapping services, the most common used Google Maps and a new but promising service Mapbox.
Google Maps
Google Maps a well known web mapping service by Google empowers several other services such as Google streets, Google Earth, Route Planner, Urban Business Locator and many more. A powerful Google Map APIs provides developers and 3rd party services to manipulate and integrate several types of maps and map images in their applications.
Google provides another related set of APIs based on Google Map’s data, such as:
Google Maps Image API: For street view and static map images.
Google Places API: For location-based services e.g. SCVNGR.
Google Earth API: For integrating 3-D digital globe in web applications.
Google API for businesses: Provides enterprise-ready features and supports for Google Maps.
Google Maps database comprises on high resolution satellite and aerial imaginary but resolution varies from area to area the most populated areas allow more zoom in (up to 23 zoom levels). For other areas like oceans Google Maps does not support high resolution images. Google Maps for mobiles, the most popular mobile application with installation on 54% of all smart-phones gives immense potential to businesses and people to take advantage of that huge usage.
One big advantage of using Google Maps is its integration with Google Search. The information in Google Maps also helps in improving the websites site rankings. Google continually provides more features and services related to Google maps. Recently Google added a feature for listing businesses on Google maps. It helps businesses to verify and add personalized information and increase the probability to be found in Google Search.
No doubt Google is market leader in web mapping domain with a big spectrum of services provided and has been used by large number of applications but since Google applied the 25K map loads per day limit several companies who relied heavily on web maps are looking for alternatives. One such alternative is Mapbox.
Mapbox
Mapbox was bootstrapped in 2010 with emphasis on open data and open source technologies. It begins building map images using NASA LANCE-MODIS public domain data. Since inception, Mapbox continue its march to the target of “Building Beautiful Maps”. The BIG goals demands big drift in common-approaches so is the case with Mapbox. They conceived a new approach in which they build a stack of all images of an area and then choose the least cloudy image. The approach has been applied to complete geo data from NASA and the result was beautiful i.e. cloud-less maps images.
Mapbox provides powerful API for seamless integration, built-in analytics, web-based map management and never-the-less mobile ready and street level maps. It also provides easy-to-use and intuitive maps editing tool TileMill for creating interactive maps both in web based and desktop versions.
Since Google start charging for accessing Maps API, Mapbox find good business opportunities and some very well-known companies shift to its services such as Foursquare, Pinterest, Le Monde, Evernote, Financial Times and many others.
Conclusion
This article presents the available options in map based services without any emphasis on one service provider or another. But given the quality, set of features and tools together with possibility of custom-maps, “Mapbox” stands tall besides Google Maps.