I was searching for a location this morning on Google Maps and I came across the "popular times" chart that many of you are probably familiar with. It shows you how busy the location you're looking at tends to be throughout the day. But this time around, I noticed a pulsing "live" dot and it got me wondering: How live is live?

Google collects this data from of our phones.

It is aggregated and anonymized Location History data from anyone who has opted in on their Google Account. If you're using Google Maps and have your location services set to "always", you can actually see a timeline of the places you've visited -- even if you haven't explicitly navigated to them (see above).

So the short answer is that the live data is really live. If there's a spike in the busyness of a particular venue -- one that doesn't match historical busyness patterns -- the Google network can pick it up.

I'm fascinated by this kind of city data because I see it as part of the future of city building. Why not use more data to inform the way in which we plan and build our cities. Retail data, traffic data, migratory patterns, population densities -- all of this and more is now available to us.

More than half of Amazon’s US deliveries are now completed using its own fleet. So at some point, the company will no longer need to rely on FedEx and/or UPS. It’s also on track to quickly surpass them in terms of packages delivered per year, if it hasn’t already.

But this also means that Amazon has had (and has been developing) its own maps platform to help support its delivery vehicles. Up until recently it was an entirely internal and proprietary tool. But this month, the company started to open it up in preview form (via an API).

What this mean is that if you have a web or mobile application that needs a map or some other kind of location-based feature, you now have the option of using Amazon instead of Google or Apple or some other company.

What’s interesting about this move is that it’s exactly what Amazon did with AWS (its dominant cloud infrastructure business). AWS is a meaningful part of Amazon’s overall business — in fact, it’s responsible for over 10% of the company’s total revenue, and an even bigger part of its operating income.

So this quiet little announcement could be something.

I was searching for a location this morning on Google Maps and I came across the "popular times" chart that many of you are probably familiar with. It shows you how busy the location you're looking at tends to be throughout the day. But this time around, I noticed a pulsing "live" dot and it got me wondering: How live is live?

Google collects this data from of our phones.

It is aggregated and anonymized Location History data from anyone who has opted in on their Google Account. If you're using Google Maps and have your location services set to "always", you can actually see a timeline of the places you've visited -- even if you haven't explicitly navigated to them (see above).

So the short answer is that the live data is really live. If there's a spike in the busyness of a particular venue -- one that doesn't match historical busyness patterns -- the Google network can pick it up.

I'm fascinated by this kind of city data because I see it as part of the future of city building. Why not use more data to inform the way in which we plan and build our cities. Retail data, traffic data, migratory patterns, population densities -- all of this and more is now available to us.

More than half of Amazon’s US deliveries are now completed using its own fleet. So at some point, the company will no longer need to rely on FedEx and/or UPS. It’s also on track to quickly surpass them in terms of packages delivered per year, if it hasn’t already.

But this also means that Amazon has had (and has been developing) its own maps platform to help support its delivery vehicles. Up until recently it was an entirely internal and proprietary tool. But this month, the company started to open it up in preview form (via an API).

What this mean is that if you have a web or mobile application that needs a map or some other kind of location-based feature, you now have the option of using Amazon instead of Google or Apple or some other company.

What’s interesting about this move is that it’s exactly what Amazon did with AWS (its dominant cloud infrastructure business). AWS is a meaningful part of Amazon’s overall business — in fact, it’s responsible for over 10% of the company’s total revenue, and an even bigger part of its operating income.

So this quiet little announcement could be something.