On 2016-08-12 09:48, Oleksiy Muzalyev wrote:
On 11.08.2016 20:37, Michał Brzozowski wrote:
...
The activity areas aren't merely about the usage itself, but, well,
the activity - i.e. concentration of interesting places and number
of
people visiting them (or other similar popularity metric).
I saw recently a documentary about the phenomenon of a Pokemon game.
A retail shop owner said in this film that he pays money so that
digital creatures appear more often at the entrance of his shop. And
people (potential clients) are hanging around his shop because of it.
Pokemon Go. It is an online game where you see a map on your phone and
have to capture Pokemon (the digital creatures). There are Pokestops at
fixed locations where you can get items to help you catch Pokemon (once
every 5 minutes). You can attache a "lure" to the Pokestop so that a lot
of Pokemon will appear close to the Pokestop. So hanging around a
Pokestop with a lure will give you lots of Pokemon and lots of items.
One suche lure will cost € 0,60 if you have to buy it using in-app
purchases and the money probably goes to Nintendo.
So it is not an immediate "pay to get my shop on the map" but this can
be a big income booster. Especially for bars and restaurants.
It has also already been used by the police to the effect to make a
crowd in unsurveilled area's so burglars get disencouraged to go there.
In principle the activity areas could be monetized in similar way by
the commercial maps. For example, a new shopping center wants to be
shown on the map as a high activity area, and it is ready to pay for
it. Finally, it may end up as a sort of an additional tax for
retailers. If one does not pay, the area will be shown on the map as
abandoned, with no activity whatsoever.
Because of that, I am so happy that OSM is an open map. I do not assume
any workgroup within OSM will ever try to impose a ban of mapping
certain features because OSM is not receiving money from them.
In principle, this would be extortion (or some lesser case of it) and I
certainly see Google capable of that "you give me money or otherwise I
won't map your business".
Regards,
Maarten
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