Essay 1
There Are No New Stories in the Map Industry
Every 2026 map-industry headline is a rerun of scripts Tele Atlas played out forty years ago.
Read essay →TopChinaCar Series
Map Wars
Eight connected essays tracing the global digital-map industry from field collection and in-car navigation to platform power and infrastructure for AI agents.
Essay 2
The First Company to Drive Every Street in America
From a 1984 wrong turn to Nokia's $8.1B at the top: Navteq's forty-year parabola contains every commercial law the map industry ever learned.
Read essay →Essay 3
Forty Years of Two Mapmakers: The Technology Converged. One Question Remains.
Field-survey sect versus probe sect: after forty years the two mapmakers' technology converged, leaving only a choice of commercial philosophy.
Read essay →Essay 4
HERE Won't Go Bankrupt. It Will Disappear.
Company and assets parting ways is not a new script. HERE as an independent pole vanishes — in four possible forms.
Read essay →Essay 5
One Is Waiting for a Buyer. One Is Waiting for Orders.
Neither HERE nor TomTom will die — but their survival odds differ by an order of magnitude, for reasons no income statement records.
Read essay →Essay 6
The Anti-Google Map Alliance Now Says It's AI Infrastructure
Three and a half years on, Overture dropped 'anti-Google' and made AI the subject — buying what the old story couldn't.
Read essay →Essay 7
Giving Places an ID: The Foundation AI Agents Are Missing
AI has no stable way to refer to a place. GERS wants to be the DNS of the physical world — the grounding layer agents are missing.
Read essay →Essay 8
The King Who Never Sold a Map
Everyone sells maps as a product; Google raises the map as an organ of Search. Forty years of map wars are a war between two valuation functions — and the space beyond Google's.
Read essay →