Idea #1: Mapnified World!

I have had this idea for the longest time. Here's the question that led me to this idea: "Where would you go to find out what's the location of Cory Hall (a building in UC Berkeley) on campus?". I think most people (and I've asked this question to over 50 people) would say that they'd go to the campus map on the school website. That, to me, is an indication that as useful as Google Map or one of those "universal" map might be, there's always niches that they can never address efficiently simply because the underlying map they provide is centrally-controlled.

So here's the idea: what if I give users the same kind of functionality (ie. zoom in/out, dragging map, putting markers etc) except that I allow them to do it on their own map. Now, this immediately opens the door for many other applications (only limited by the imagination of the users).

Some of the possible use i could think of:

1. “Middle Earth” map for Lord of the Ring fans
2. Maps for video game (eg, RPG games…any more?)
3. Historical map (eg. D-Day Normany Map for veterans to post their heroic acts that very day)
4. Shopping mall
5. Campuses
6. Tourist attractions (eg. Disneyland map)
7. Astronomy map (eg. Milky way map where scholars can update the name and location of new stars found everyday)

In addition, (if you look through my prototype), I'm also proposing a hierarchy of maps. You can think of it as having multiple layers at the same location. This in essence will overcome the 2D limitation of a regular map.

Well, while I was originally all excited about this user-generated content idea for maps, I realize there's a significant drawback. These days, user-generated content (be it text, pictures, videos, blogs etc) is all the rage; and this explosion of media content from the users is facilitated by the combination of increasing reduction in the cost of production as well as distribution of these media. Contrast that with maps; distribution is almost zero-cost, but the entry barrier on the production still remains really high. In other words, it's not easy at all for ordinary men like you and me to create a good, accurate and hence useful maps. This led me to the "insight" that it is the "collection" of the underlying maps that holds most value in the value chain. Google Map is not revolutionary because of all those funky AJAXified functions that you can use, rather it is the fact that they're pretty much the first one who manage to come up with a world map that can be detail to the street level (in the U.S. at least) and make it easily navigatable on a browser. Indeed, "Data is the new Intel Inside" and I believe there's tremendous value in a central repository of the world's floor plans.

So here's a summary of the value proposition:
1. More granular local search
2. Overcome 2D limitation
3. Central repository of every floor plan of every building in the world!
4. Integration with mobile application

What do you think?