Slack off on your daily Spanish lesson and a cellphone alert will auto-generate at the same time you used the app the day before. Duo appears on your screen as an emoji, nagging you to keep up with your drills.
Millions obey Duo’s commands. Created seven years ago by MacArthur “genius” computer geek Luis von Ahn, 40, Duolingo has hooked everyone from Bill Gates, Khloe Kardashian and Jack Dorsey to Syrian refugees in Turkey.
“The moment I felt proudest was when I realized, Wow, the richest man in the world is using the same system as the lowest people on the economic scale,” says Von Ahn. “That is for me really special and pretty big.”
Duolingo has lots of room to grow bigger still. More than 2 billion people worldwide are studying a foreign language, and increasingly they are doing it online. Digital language-learning generates $6 billion in revenue, and that number is projected to rise to $8.7 billion by 2025. But it’s a highly fragmented market with dozens of players scattered around the globe, and it’s begging for a dominant one.
Von Ahn certainly knows how to execute on a grand scale. When he was a 21-year-old grad student he gave the world CAPTCHA—better known to billions of internet users as those annoying squiggly letters that you have to transcribe to prove that you are not a bot. Later he sold two inventions to Google, netting more than $20 million.
He splurged on a Lamborghini and a Tesla Model S but otherwise leads a modest life, remaining in the six-bedroom house he bought with his ex-wife in Pittsburgh’s Point Breeze neighborhood, close to Duolingo’s offices. “I could have gone to Guatemala to live in a villa, but I didn’t want to,” he says. Instead, he has thrown himself into building the world’s most downloaded education app.
Duolingo already offers more languages than its competitors do, 36 at last count. They include little-spoken tongues like Hawaiian, Navajo and Gaelic and the fictional language High Valyrian from the HBO blockbuster Game of Thrones (1.2 million users are studying it). À la Wikipedia, Duolingo enlists volunteers to help create its more obscure courses.
Seven years after its launch, it has nearly 30 million active monthly users, according to its own figures. Venture capitalists have pumped in $108 million, ballooning Duolingo’s valuation to $700 million in 2017, $150 million more than the market capitalization of Rosetta Stone, its 27-year-old publicly traded rival.
Along with teaching more languages (Rosetta Stone offers 25), Duolingo attracts users because its basic ad-supported version is free, compared with the $120 a year Rosetta Stone charges its 500,000 subscribers. Another competitor, Berlin-based Babbel, says its revenue of more than $115 million comes from the $85-a-year subscription fee it charges its million-plus subscribers.
Only 1.75% of Duolingo’s users pay for its ad-free version ($84 a year), but because its base is so huge, revenue hit $36 million last year. Von Ahn says that will climb to $86 million in 2019 and $160 million in 2020 as more users sign on and pay for the premium app, which will attract them with new features. Employee head count will rise from 170 to 200 by year’s end.
Duolingo’s headquarters, in a converted furniture store in East Liberty, a gentrifying neighborhood not far from Google’s Pittsburgh office, is set to expand to a second floor. The company isn’t profitable, but Von Ahn says it will be cash-flow positive this year. He is planning an IPO by 2021.
He likes to say that the money he forfeits giving away the app is equivalent to the cost of his rivals’ bloated marketing budgets. He also boasts that users are less likely to quit Duolingo than they are to bail out of competing language apps. “Our retention is comparable to games,” he says.
The comparison is apt. Duolingo grabs users with gamification tricks like points, treasure chests and “streaks” for continuous use. The app’s three-minute lessons are designed with a simple interface. In a typical exercise, the sentence “I eat bread” appears above seven bubbled words. Drag the words onto a line, hit “check” and “You are correct” appears at the bottom of the screen with a satisfying chime. Fans tweet about funny sentences generated by the software, like “I am selling my mother-in-law for a euro.”
Duolingo has gotten bad press from writers who try the app and don’t learn much. But Von Ahn promises only to get users to a level between advanced beginner and early intermediate. “A significant portion of our users use it because it’s fun and it’s not a complete waste of time,” he says….Read more
With a massive number of cryptocurrencies exploding in the market, crypto wallet application adoption is also rising at a faster pace. With the technological revolution, hackers have also fine-tuned their hacking methods and have now grown up smarter to hack your crypto wallets.
Generally, Cryptocurrency Wallet Development Company offers multi-layer security to the crypto applications developed by them. But, still can be prone to hacking attempts.
Hackers are Making a Way into Your Crypto Wallet!
The initial 7 months of 2022 witnessed $1.9 billion worth of crypto coins being stolen which accounts for 60% more compared to last year. When a user downloads a trojan application on the device, it steals $600,000 worth of Bitcoins from your Crypto Wallet Application. This Android trojan is called Sharkbot which initiates money transactions from your crypto wallets bypassing the security systems. This is just one type of trojan, there are multiple trojans the hackers can attack your Crypto Wallet Application with.
Also, hackers normally try to exploit the interfaces that connect the crypto wallet applications to the backend service that supports them.
Security Hacks You Need to Ponder on for Defending your Crypto Wallets!
Cold Wallet to be Your Savior!
The best way to prevent cryptocurrency loss is to store your coins in a cold wallet or hardware wallet. These wallets store your funds offline, thus preventing hackers from accessing your cryptocurrencies online or through traditional methods.
A cold crypto wallet is much like a USB device, holding a private key that is used to access your cryptocurrencies. Storing your private key online will result in hackers easily accessing it and your account will be compromised. This will lead you to lose all your crypto investment. So, it is advisable to store your private key offline.Exchange platform that Keeps Hackers Away!
Before you choose an exchange platform, make sure you carry out your research thoroughly on the security of the crypto exchange platform. Check online if the crypto exchange platform you are choosing has been compromised in the past or if any wallet on the exchange platform has been hacked. If the crypto exchange platform has been hacked, it depicts poor security protocols, where your crypto wallet or investment in it might be at risk.
Check if the crypto exchange platform is using multi-factor authentication or TLS/ SSL encryption to secure your wallet. In the last, verify if they have any safety measures in place like the transaction limits and notifications on every transfer or even the option to freeze the account and mitigate the damages.If you are looking for a crypto exchange development, here it is! RWaltz Software, Your trusted partner to launch your crypto exchange platform.
Multi-Factor Authentication to Authenticate Your Access!
Multi-Factor Authentication offers a layered defense mechanism by authenticating your wallet with independent credentials like passwords, security tokens, and/ or biometrics. To set up multi-factor authentication, you can select either SMS or a 2FA application push notification.
Be Aware of Phishing Attacks!
Phishing attackers generally target users by posing as legitimate entities to gain access to your sensitive information. Avoid falling prey to these phishing attacks by making sure you log into the correct crypto exchange platform. Don’t click on the link received over emails, chats, or even text messages.
Save the exchange link or add it to your favorites. Lastly, always verify the details twice before you make crypto transactions.
Don’t forget to Change Your Passwords Regularly!
It is a cyber law, that how much ever tricky password you set, one day it will be compromised. So, the best way to prevent this theft is to set a complex password, store it safely and change it regularly. Make sure you don’t reuse the password or set any personal information as a key.
Instead of saving passwords on google, use password managers. Lastly, make sure your password is updated every six months.
BitcoinVB – Highly Secure Wallet Application by the Industry Leaders!
BitcoinVB is a highly secure wallet application developed by RWaltz for ensuring the secure storing and management of bitcoins. Click here, to explore the portfolio! If you are looking for a similar wallet application, then RWaltz can be the right choice for you. We are a reliable cryptocurrency wallet development company that offers custom digital wallet app development.
Let’s Wrap Up!
Hopefully, the above article has enlightened your knowledge of digital wallet app security. If you have any queries, feel free to connect with our experts. Hurry up! Schedule a meeting now!
You can create custom iOS and Android mobile apps for your business using zapable in minutes and it’s fully customizable. It’s easy to create mobile apps with Zapable as it has a drag and drop builder and doesn’t require any special skills.
A custom design can be created for the mobile app as it offers rich features and a simple user interface. One of the best features of Zapable is that you can integrate it with social networks, and e-commerce networks, as well as create coupon codes and loyalty cards.
Additionally, you can integrate push notifications into the software to publish your mobile app for your business. With Zapable, you can create an app that speaks to your customers however you want.
In 2020, Zapable software was introduced to the market. They created this amazing app with Andrew Fox. Over 5,000 active users love this app and find it extremely useful. With this software, more and more applications are created every day, and now these developers have created more than 16,000 applications. To better understand and know about Zapable, you can follow the following Zapable review.
Zapable Features
Zapable software is packed with features that help users create mobile applications according to their preferences. You can easily create an app for your business, no matter what niche you are in, with the rich features of Zapable.
A widget system provides easy control of the app’s layout, so you can choose various things to appear in the app, such as icons, elements, images, etc.
Adding a new element, like an icon or something, is as simple as dragging and dropping it. In fact, you’ll immediately see a fully customizable look and feel for your app when you use drag and drop.
For any business and niche market, Zapable offers a variety of features to help you build a successful mobile app. Zapable allows you to create your own application according to your own specifications. Honestly, Zapable caters to different markets in different ways, and you are completely in charge of building your app.
Creating a mobile app is an easy way to sell your products or services if you have them to sell or are an affiliate marketer.
Shopify – If you want to sell products through Shopify, you can simply enter your store URL here to import the data.
Amazon – If someone buys the product, you can earn affiliate commissions. You can create an Amazon store that covers any topic.
iTunes – If you want to share and buy podcasts, audiobooks, or movies, create your own iTunes store.
Custom Catalog – With this feature, you can create your own store and sell your own products/services as well as sell other people’s products.
Engage customers with digital loyalty cards and coupon codes With Zapable, you can create digital loyalty cards and coupon codes that are personalized for restaurants, cafes, physical stores, banks, etc.
Perfect for Many Businesses: Whenever you are in the business of theater, physical stores, and many more, this would be perfect for your business.
Coupon Codes – You can set a coupon code within the app for a limited time, such as getting 20% off for a limited time.
Fully customize your promotion – With Zapable, you can determine how long discounts are available and how many products will qualify for the offer.
Full social media integration
You can use social media platforms to promote your business products and services if you plan to do business digitally and want to reach more people. With Zapable, browsing social media pages is a breeze.
Facebook – By linking your Facebook page to your Zapable app, you can connect with your customers, review messages, and reach more targeted audiences.
Twitter – With your Twitter feed, you can display the newest and most recent tweets to your users.
Instagram – Display your Instagram posts within Zapable and you will be able to see how many people engaged with your posts.
Flickr- Stream your photos from the Zapable app using our seamless integration.
Create a perfect directory for real estate, tourist apps, and more
There are quite a few features built into Zapable, and it suits different types of businesses individually. Your clients can also book appointments and receive push notifications through our mobile app.
The Listing Page – With this software, you can create an online listing page where you can add information such as images, videos, descriptions, and more.
Location Finder – Even with a location finder, you can add multiple locations, making it easy to find your ads based on their proximity.
Social interaction – A simple link to social networks will do the trick.
Integrate with email service providers to increase email subscribers
Your business needs Zapable software if you want to increase your email subscribers. Apart from building mobile apps, it also offers popular email marketing integrations. A Zapable mobile app can integrate with a variety of email providers, including Aweber, InfusionSoft, GetResponse, and MailChimp.
To use the Zapable App Builder, a laptop or mobile device must be installed. Zapable helps business owners build mobile apps on Android or iOS without understanding any coding or decoding. As a result of this software, the business owner can also develop an application for the benefit of his business.
It will increase user engagement. Your audience can interact with Zapable in countless ways. Surveys, loyalty cards, and discount coupons are just a few. By integrating Branding and Management with your site, you can interact directly with your visitors. Zapable offers tutorials on how to master each feature of the online tool. In this way, you can design an application that uses all the features. Also, you can maximize the effects of each feature by using them optimally.
A developer can publish their app directly to the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. A built-in iOS editor is also available within Zapable. Post various types of content, such as images, audio, blogs, news, reviews, and videos, that people can interact with. Also, all of this can be published within the app itself.
Vendors or affiliates may sell products. You can integrate your Amazon Affiliate product store into your mobile app built by Zapable if you are an Amazon influencer or affiliate. Protect your app by limiting access. Anyone who wants to can download the app and access it. Also, ask them to sign up for your channel, newsletter, etc. before downloading your app. A call to action should be added. You can let your customers use the app to shop, book appointments, reserve tables, contact you, and find you.
New Social Media Stories provides content publishers with a mobile-focused format for delivering news and information as visually rich, tap-through stories. In the last couple of years, “Stories” has become wildly popular on Snapchat and Instagram, so much so that Facebook declared it’ll focus more on Stories than the news feed.
Even as Stories rose in popularity to become the most sought-after format, it had remained locked in the walled gardens of social media apps. But now the format has become available for the open Web, thanks to Social Media Stories. EngageYard is a complete WYSIWYG editor for Social Media Stories that enables non-programmers to create Social Media Stories without writing a single line of code.
EngageYard was created in order to scale the format quickly than ever before. The EngageYard team does not anticipate that publishers will write code or work with specialized developers to create Social Media Stories. Additionally, ideas like “monetization” and “engagement” with Stories may be unfamiliar to businesses. EngageYard can therefore help them. MakeStories goal is to assist businesses by cutting down on the time needed to create Social Media Stories.
Publishers, marketers, and designers can create, share, and monetize visual, compelling Social Media Stories more quickly with the aid of EngageYard. not using coding. EngageYard is everything you’ll ever need for your Web Stories—not it’s simply an editor. Utilize the Social Media Stories and Instagram stories that you spent time generating to provide a compelling online experience for your visitors.
With a committed team behind it, EngageYard is a pioneer in the web stories industry! I can focus on the content strategy and narrative rather than the coding and technology behind the stories thanks to its design-first approach and user-friendly interface. The team is committed to creating the best web story-building tool available and is constantly looking for feedback from creatives like me.
It is a visual storytelling SaaS software for the open web, that expanded the new Social Media Stories Technology – which provides content publishers with a mobile-focused format for delivering news and information as visually rich, tap-through stories.
EngageYard takes everything that’s great about Social Media Stories and makes them better, more engaging, and easier to create with a few clicks of your mouse. Social Media Stories provides content publishers with a mobile-focused format for delivering news and information as visually rich, tap-through stories.
EngageYard is built with AMP Web Stories validation technology which makes it…
Load faster
Mobile First Friendly
Visually Appealing
Highly Engaging
Search Engine Friendly – Since the technology is built by Google
Monetizable
Key Features:
EngageYard Is Packed With All The Features You Need To Get Massive Results With Social Media Stories
Create Campaigns With A Few Clicks
Simply login to the cloud based software, follow the simple prompts, and create a winning campaign in just seconds.
Add Unlimited Steps & Screens To Any Campaign
You have the flexibility to create any kind of campaign you want – simple or complex.
Quizzes For Massive Engagement
Add quizzes to your stories for massive engagement that keeps your viewers “plugged-in” and excited.
Proven ‘Done For You’ Campaign Templates
Proven ‘Done For You’ Campaign Templates
Stunning ‘Done For You’ Videos
Add stunning attention-grabbing videos to your stories that are proven to get attention, boost engagement, and get you the results you need.
Engaging ‘Done For You’ GIFs
GIF are fun, engaging, make people laugh, and ultimately go viral – and now, with the click of your mouse, you can add them to your stories with a few clicks.
Add Opt-In Forms
Build massive lists with super premium leads in any niche by adding opt-in forms to any story.
Supercharge Sales With Interactive Calls To Action
Ensure your success by adding a CTA to your stories so people take action and you get paid.
1000G Storage Included
There are no limits to the amount of storage space you use while building out your campaigns.
Easily Add Text Overlays
Add attention-grabbing text overlays to your stories to speak to your audience in any way you want – without any coding.
Convert Higher With Countdown Timers
Add countdown timers to your campaigns to maximize conversion and put more money in your pocket.
Custom Branding With No Technical Skills
Modify the look, feel, colors, and text of any story without any technical skills or design experience needed.
Add Social Media Thumbnails
Get more attention by adding social media thumbnails to your campaigns.
Collect 2,000 Premium Leads Per Month
Build massive leads loaded with premium leads without any hard work required.
Share Your Campaigns On Social Media For With A Single Click
Get FREE viral traffic by sharing your story campaigns to social media with a single click.
Easily Embed Your Campaign
Embed your campaigns anywhere you want for even more attention, traffic, and better results.
Import 2,000 Email Lists
Import 2,000 email lists to massively grow your brand.
Add Sub Users For Easy Outsourcing
Save time by adding sub users and outsourcing your campaigns to others.
Integrates With Aweber, Getresponse, Convertkit, Benchmark, Activecampaign, Mailchimp, Moosend, Sendlane
1-click integration with all major email marketing applications
Create 50 Chatbots Per Month
Add unlimited chatbots to take things into the modern era and better engage your audience quickly and easily.
EngageYard Is Loaded With Features Designed To Save You Time, Get You FREE Viral Traffic, And Make You Money
Makes Social Media Stories Even Better
EngageYard takes everything that’s great about Social Media Stories and makes them better, more engaging, and easier to create with a few clicks of your mouse.
Stories Are Search Engine Friendly And Rank Fast
Because Social Media Stories are an initiative of Google, all the stories you create with EngageYard are search engine friendly, which means you can easily get FREE traffic because your stories will rank quickly in the search engines.
Connect Your Domain – Hosting DFY
EngageYard users can connect their custom websites, blogs or subdomains and create custom stories with their own domain. They can also add their custom favicon. All stories are hosted and secured for Free
No Time Limit On Stories
Unlike Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp, and Snapchat stories that go away in 24 hours, the stories you create with EngageYard STICK and stay live as long as you want them to so you get more shares, more free traffic.
Easily Embed Stories On Any Website
The stories you create are designed to get you results, so they can be embedded or shared across websites and apps all over the web.
100% Newbie-Friendly Software
No technical skills or design experience is needed because creating web stories with EngageYard is as easy as a click of your mouse.
Professional – Fast and Easy Editor
The EngageYard Story Editor offers the perfect set of easy to use features to get started into this vertical world with professional stories in minutes. Drag & drop makes creating your stories a bliss and even beginners can quickly publish compelling stories.
Hyper-Fast Loading Speeds
Because loading speed is everything these days, your newly created stories load quickly so your audience stays engaged and entertained
No Website Required
Although you can embed your newly created stories on any website, you don’t need to have a website to get big results with EngageYard… Create stories and then generate a shareable URL… we’ll host your stories for you!
Premium Templates
Our Story Editor comes with a variety of pre-built templates so you can achieve stunning results in seconds. You can also create your own.
Add GDPR Consent
Give visitors the option to accept your cookie and GDPR policy. Determine if the user should be asked to interact with the control and capture the user’s consent decision
Rich Media Library
Library of millions of visually rich and immersible images, gifs, videos, icons, illustrators, vectors and you can also upload from your resource and computer.
Connect To Live Camera
Easily connect to your computer camera or device to create live stories.
1-Click Social Sharing
And because web Stories are all about sharing and going viral, you can add sharing buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp. Pinterest, Tumblr, Linked… even email and SMS…
Add Call To Actions (CTAs)
You can also add a custom call to action (CTA) to any of your stories… Link to anything you want and when the viewer clicks your CTA it will redirect them instantly… (This is a great way to build your list or make affiliate sales)
Offline-to-Online Experience
By scanning a QR code built into the app, you are sent to the Social Media Stories and receive additional information about the product in the format of a story. You can then start an immersive product experience from your phone or any device.
Most Complete AMP Story Creation Tool Ever Released
When you combine the included templates, the Drag and Drop editor and the Rich Media Library that includes MILLIONS of images, gifs, videos, icons, illustrations, and vectors, you’ll have everything you need to create stunning stories without any design or technical skills needed on your part.
Different Story Creation Format
Create stories from scratch fast, create unique stories from any website URL, blog posts in minutes… And create stories from RSS feeds, add redirect or clickable links to the full posts.
Honest EngageYard Review – My Opinion: Is it worth using?
Web stories score high on web performance as well as user engagement metrics and prove to be a futuristic content format that’s set to rule the web. As we know, Instagram, Whatsapp, Facebook, and Snapchat stories disappear after 24 hours and to retain these stories a user needs to repost them or save them to his or her profile.
In contrast to that, Social Media Stories do not disappear in 24 hours, in fact, the user has control over the longevity of the stories.
Let’s see Why Contemporary Readers Needs Visual Web Stories
Have shorter attention spans and declining reading habits, due to information overload
Can’t stay focused due to competing demands on their time
Often skim through long articles on websites rather than reading them carefully
Prefer short summaries over long-form content
Recall information longer when it’s visual than textual
Are increasingly visually-oriented and want crisp yet visually attractive content
More likely to trust the content that is in a well-designed visual presentation format rather than a text-heavy one
And Here’s Why You Need To Take A Close Look At EngageYard…
Cloud-Based, So You Don’t Have To Install Anything
We Handle All The Updates To Keep It Working At All Time
Quickly Create Engaging Stories That Get Big Results
‘Done For You’ Campaigns Are Included So You Can Get Results TODAY
Multiple Methods For Making Money
Cloud Based, So You Can Use It From Anywhere
Get Premium Leads & High Ticket Payments Within Minutes Of Firing Up This Powerful App
Quickly create web stories that people will love
Leverage’s Google’s AMP Story platform for easy top search engine rankings that get tons of FREE traffic
Easy-to-use app makes story creation as simple as a few clicks of your mouse
Includes multiple stunning templates that are PROVEN to get results
No website or hosting required when you use EngageYard
Built-in social sharing makes it easy to jumpstart free viral traffic
Everything is fully customizable and you can even add CTAs
Social Media Stories Are Searchable and Shareable: Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat stories are not searchable on the web and can be shared on their respective and sister sites only, while Social Media Stories are searchable and shareable across the web.
Huge SEO Opportunity – One unique thing I am excited about is the SEO opportunity for 2022 and beyond for you, all thanks to EngageYard for making this easy for all to start publishing web stories…
Google now have a dedicated carousel of Visual Stories in its search results – a space in Google SERPs. This is surely a major change for SEO. Making this content format a sure-fire way to boost traffic and rank higher in 2020 and beyond.
While Google Maps increasingly offers information on where bike lanes are, its routing algorithms don’t offer the same level of nuance that drivers enjoy. Google Maps has a suite of features to make driving easier. The app gives users options to avoid tolls and highways and even recommends low-emission routes where available.
Bikers using the app, though, have far fewer options, particularly when it comes to determining how safe a route is. Fixing that could get more people on bikes and e-bikes, two of the most accessible forms of no-carbon transit available today. Given that the transportation sector is the biggest contributor to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, encouraging the use of alternatives to driving — especially driving gas-powered cars — is more urgent than ever.
With its abundant data and mapping resources, Google Maps is well-poised to create a powerful tool that keeps people safe while navigating their city by bike. Doing so could encourage the use of one of the most reliable zero-emissions transportation technologies, a benefit that dovetails nicely with Google’s ambitious emissions reduction goals.
That’s not to say it’s a cut-and-dried task, though. The puzzle of how to set up a mapping algorithm for driving is relatively simple compared to doing so for biking. Estimating roughly how long it will take to drive somewhere requires little more than knowing speed limits and whether or not intersections have stop signs or stop lights. For biking, though, finding the “right” route is a lot more qualitative.
Often, safety trumps speed. A quiet residential road with speed bumps but without a bike lane can feel more comfortable for bikers — especially new bikers — than a busy thoroughfare with a painted-on bike lane where delivery trucks tend to idle.
While Google Maps and other mapping apps increasingly offer information on where bike lanes are, its routing algorithms don’t offer the same level of nuance that drivers enjoy. Routing options for bikers, whose goals range from commuting to exercising, are largely missing from the platform. As a consequence, bikers have tended to rely more on crowdsourcing, either via the rider-to-rider grapevine or a patchwork of tech-focused alternatives that vary by country and city.
But the lack of a single, comprehensive bike-routing app represents an opportunity for tech companies like Google and Apple, especially given that the pandemic-related boom in biking seems to have staying power. Both companies have rolled out new features to flesh out their bike mapping features in the last year and have plans to continue improving them, but there’s still a long way to go before the mapping apps serve as a reliable alternative to crowdsourcing.
The status quo of simplistic routing options on the most popular mapping apps, said Warren Wells, the policy and planning director of the Marin County Bicycle Coalition, represents a barrier to entry for new riders. He worries that first-time riders will rely on Google Maps in the same way they do for driving and follow a route blindly; even if they use Google’s bike lane layer, it is not clear which bike lanes are fully protected by a physical barrier and which are simply painted onto the shoulder of a busy road.
“For 100 years, we have engineered every street to work fine for driving, more or less,” said Wells. “We have put just so little effort into making every street easy to bike on.”
If a new biker ends up on one of these many high-capacity roads that happen to have an often unprotected bike lane, they are liable to arrive at their destination scared or jaded and never get on a bike again. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 1,000 bicyclists are killed and over 130,000 are injured in the U.S. each year.
Some biking groups have stepped in to fill the route-mapping void, creating their own apps for cyclists. In the Netherlands, for instance, the national cyclists union, Fietsersbond, created its own mapping software that gives users qualitative options for their journeys. While the interface is not nearly as advanced as Google’s — Wells compared it to the early 2000s version of MapQuest — the app offers bikers many more ways to explore routes, including options like “easy,” “car-free,” “shortest” or “nature” routes.
Google Maps usually offers bikers three options for a biking journey, but it is generally not clear what distinguishes one from another, especially for someone new to a city or new to a bike. In 2018, the Chicago Reader’s John Greenfield created a guide to the city’s lowest-stress bike routes, dubbed the Mellow Chicago Bike Map, which incorporated the opinions of riders in a biking community forum online. (It was later updated as biking interest swelled mid-pandemic.)
Jean Cochrane, a Chicago-based civic technologist and casual biker, stumbled upon the map and turned it into a website with routing capacity, primarily for her own use. However, it has become widely used by others looking to get around Chicago.
“I think that has really been its own huge sea change in the way that I experienced biking,” Cochrane said, “where I do bike much further distances in the city between neighborhoods in a way that I never really have before because I feel like I have a way of accessing other neighborhoods safely.”
The website distinguishes between off-street bike paths, mellow streets (which are largely residential and often have infrastructure like speed bumps or traffic circles to slow down cars), main streets (which usually have bike lanes) and other streets. The simple routing software that Cochrane incorporates into the site prioritizes bike paths and mellow streets in suggesting routes to users.
Demand is high for this kind of resource. Cochrane said people have reached out to her about creating a version of the same webpage for other U.S. cities, but absent the crowdsourcing that Greenfield did initially for Chicago’s “mellow” streets, redoing the project from scratch is a heavy lift. This is in part because determining which streets are “mellow” is harder than it might appear: Cochrane characterized it as a “data problem.”
At least in Chicago, installing infrastructure to slow traffic is a largely decentralized process, and public data is hard to find. The open-source project OpenStreetMap has some of that information, Cochrane said, but it’s incomplete and user-generated, and thus difficult for her to rely upon.
“I know exactly what I would build, if I could know where every speed bump is in the city of Chicago,” she said. “I would love to be able to restrict my directions to residential streets or to streets with traffic-calming infrastructure.”
But, Cochrane said, if anyone is able to cobble together the data that’s relevant to bikers, it’s Google, which she described as a “data leviathan.” The company confirmed that it uses a combination of imagery and data from both government authorities and community contributions, and has partnerships with more than 10,000 local governments, transit agencies and other organizations globally. Google also has access to data on road type and quality, stairs, hills, and elevation.
“The value proposition of Google is that they have this omniscient understanding of all of the streets and businesses in so many different places in the U.S.,” Cochrane said.
In July, the company outlined plans to offer more bike route information. The routing sample included in the post illustrates a detailed breakdown of the type of road bikers encounter, from major thoroughfares to shared paths, and gives riders choices between routes with descriptors like “more bike lanes” and “less turns.” This functionality is slated to roll out “soon” in cities where Google Maps already offers biking directions, including New York, London and Tokyo; the company did not respond to questions from Protocol about a more precise timeline, though.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report emphasizes that walkable communities — including protected pedestrian and bike pathways — can help cities reduce their emissions by encouraging low- or no-emission transportation options. With a user base that is more than 1 billion strong, Google Maps is uniquely positioned to effect a virtuous cycle: If more people are comfortable navigating their city by bike, that’s more people with a stake in improving low- and no-carbon infrastructure for getting around.
Lisa Martine Jenkins is a senior reporter at Protocol covering climate. Lisa previously wrote for Morning Consult, Chemical Watch and the Associated Press. Lisa is currently based in Brooklyn, and is originally from the Bay Area. Find her on Twitter ( @l_m_j_) or reach out via email (ljenkins@protocol.com).
Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that’s the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions. This is the data that you’re drawing from when you ask Google to navigate you from point A to point B — and last week, Google showed me the internal map and demonstrated how it was built.
It’s the first time the company has let anyone watch how the project it calls GT, or “Ground Truth,” actually works. Google opened up at a key moment in its evolution. The company began as an online search company that made money almost exclusively from selling ads based on what you were querying for. But then the mobile world exploded. Where you’re searching from has become almost as important as what you’re searching for.
Google responded by creating an operating system, brand, and ecosystem in Android that has become the only significant rival to Apple’s iOS. And for good reason. If Google’s mission is to organize all the world’s information, the most important challenge — far larger than indexing the web — is to take the world’s physical information and make it accessible and useful.
“If you look at the offline world, the real world in which we live, that information is not entirely online,” Manik Gupta, the senior product manager for Google Maps, told me. “Increasingly as we go about our lives, we are trying to bridge that gap between what we see in the real world and [the online world], and Maps really plays that part.”
This is not just a theoretical concern. Mapping systems matter on phones precisely because they are the interface between the offline and online worlds. If you’re at all like me, you use mapping more than any other application except for the communications suite (phone, email, social networks, and text messaging).
Google is locked in a battle with the world’s largest company, Apple, about who will control the future of mobile phones. Whereas Apple’s strengths are in product design, supply chain management, and retail marketing, Google’s most obvious realm of competitive advantage is in information. Geo data — and the apps built to use it — are where Google can win just by being Google. That didn’t matter on previous generations of iPhones because they used Google Maps, but now Apple’s created its own service.
How the two operating systems incorporate geo data and present it to users could become a key battleground in the phone wars. But that would entail actually building a better map. The office where Google has been building the best representation of the world is not a remarkable place. It has all the free food, ping pong, and Google Maps-inspired Christoph Niemann cartoons that you’d expect, but it’s still a low-slung office building just off the 101 in Mountain View in the burbs.
I was slated to meet with Gupta and the engineering ringleader on his team, former NASA engineer Michael Weiss-Malik, who’d spent his 20 percent time working on Google Mars, and Nick Volmar, an “operator” who actually massages map data. “So you want to make a map,” Weiss-Malik tells me as we sit down in front of a massive monitor. “There are a couple of steps. You acquire data through partners.
You do a bunch of engineering on that data to get it into the right format and conflate it with other sources of data, and then you do a bunch of operations, which is what this tool is about, to hand massage the data. And out the other end pops something that is higher quality than the sum of its parts.” This is what they started out with, the TIGER data from the US Census Bureau (though the base layer could and does come from a variety of sources in different countries).
