Eaten By Google

Nanaimo is a former coal-mining town located on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Despite its small size and population of just 78,000 it has more information mapped onto Google Earth and Google maps than San Francisco.

Nanaimo is so well represented because the cities planning department has been actively feeding Google with a wealth of information on its buildings, property lines, utilities and streets for the past five years. A staggering amount of data is now online and freely available at earth.nanaimo.ca. Every business in the town is mapped along with the lot size for every property in the city. Even the cities cemeteries will soon be mapped, making it possible to find out who is buried in each plot. Nanaimo’s chief technology officer Per Kristensen hopes that embracing Google will fuel tourism (a particular concern in the run up to British Columbia’s 2010 winter Olympics) and allow for economic development of the towns businesses.

(Via Time Magazine)

Branding And The Edge Economy

I’m writing this post to draw attention to an excellent series of articles by Umair Haque. Haques writing charts the history of brand strategy the describes how brands have traditionally served as a tool to articulate brand promises through the constrained aperture of the magazine advert and 30 second TV spot. However now that media technologies and the internet have enabled easy access to information of brand services the role of branding is changing shape.

Consumers are progressively defecting to new modes of communication. Technology has enabled them to communicate with each other they enlist discussion and debate with on another to debate and validate brands and their promises.

These shifting dynamics call for fundamentally different approach to brand strategy of which Google is the most salient example. Through foregoing the immediate revenues which plastering their home page in advertising would generate they instead chose to invest in their uses and provide them with a practical platform. Their brand strategy is defined by talking less and listening more. This approach has enabled Google to become the worlds most recognised in less than a decade and with an advertising expenditure of almost exactly zero.

(Read more at Umair Haque’s weblog)