14 DAY TRIAL // The web has made the world a much smaller place and geography plays a much smaller part in how someone uses a product, a service or just interacts with the ones around them. The laws of economics still hold though and, while anyone in the world can use Gmail, for example, providing it's not blocked by the local government, Google is going to make a lot more money from a user in the US than from one in Chile.
But Google can offer Gmail to anyone because it actually costs the company very, very little to support a user and, on the whole, the product is profitable. The same isn't true for Google Maps, for example. While providing the product and the service isn't much of a problem, acquiring all the mapping data is expensive and it may not even be a viable option in countries where the data is too old or too incomplete to be relevant.
Luckily, the search giant has access to one of the biggest information sources on Earth, the actual people. With the Map Maker program, regular users can create maps of their country or region and fill in the non-existing data with accurate and recent information. The program has been hugely successful in all the countries where it has been introduced, their number is growing every day, but it doesn't hurt to provide users with a little incentive once in a while.
So, Google held the Global Mapping Competition, which ran for the first time from December 15, 2009 to January 31, 2010. The scope of the competition was simple, the user who added the most universities, schools, hospitals, and medical clinics, with an emphasis on accurate data, would win. Now, more than two weeks after the competition ended, we have a winner, Wayne Dell Manuel of the Philippines.
"Already one of the top 10 all-time mappers, Wayne made hundreds of moderations and added more than 1500 qualifying map features (i.e. schools, universities, hospitals and medical clinics) during the course of the competition. Google Map Maker is available in more than 175 countries and allows users to become ‘citizen cartographers’ by adding and editing map features," Jennifer Mazzon, Maps Community Organizer at Google, writes.
"For his remarkable mapping efforts, Wayne has won a $50,000 UNICEF donation to benefit projects empowering young people through technology in the Philippines. Wayne will get a VIP tour of the local projects in the Philippines that are benefiting from the $50,000 donation, and he will also attend the upcoming Supper Mapper 2010 conference at Google's office in Zurich, Switzerland," she added. While this competition is over, Google has another mapping competition still running with Model Your Town.