Demo of iPhone Earth
Want to see what the earth would look like in your iPhone? Watch the video below, which was shot by Frank Taylor of the Google Earth Blog. It shows a demo of the “coolest thing” he saw at the recent Where 2.0 conference from a Boulder-Colorado startup called Earthscape..
Context & Ripple Effects
Weeks after Apple's own iPhone graphic mapping the new world of mobile apps framed the device as a platform, a Boulder startup called Earthscape showed what geospatial software could look like on it. Filmed by Frank Taylor of the Google Earth Blog at the Where 2.0 conference, the demo put an interactive globe in a pocket — a preview of how quickly third-party developers would race to shrink desktop-era earth browsers onto the iPhone.
First-order effects
- Earthscape gets immediate visibility among the Where 2.0 / geo-developer crowd, positioning itself as an early mover in iPhone-native mapping before Apple's App Store ecosystem fully matures.
- The demo sets audience expectations that the iPhone can handle rich, interactive 3D globe rendering — raising the bar for what early iPhone apps are judged against.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent earth-browser players like Google face pressure to bring their own globe experiences to mobile rather than cede the pocket to startups; Google Earth's eventual redesign bringing guided tours and 3D views to Chrome and Android shows where that pressure led.
- Apple itself is pushed toward owning the map layer on its device — a path that culminated when iOS 6 dropped Google Maps for an in-house Maps app with 3D mode.
Third-order effects
- If pocket-sized globes become table stakes, geospatial data shifts from a desktop niche to a default mobile capability, making location the substrate for a whole class of consumer apps and giving whoever controls the map platform durable leverage over developers.
The trend: This demo is an early data point in the migration of rich geospatial experiences from desktop earth-browsers to smartphones, a shift that eventually made maps a core, contested platform layer on mobile OSes.