TASMAP Electronic Downloads - some progress

[north-north-west]

I dont get it, how have they stuffed it up? 2 dollars a map! thats pretty cheap, you dont seem to want to acknowledge the cost of making maps.

Yes, but they aren't making maps, they're just selling access to existing data.
$250 just for Tasmania is not justifiable, especially when you consider how much OziExplorer or similar groups charge for country-wide topo data. My GPS came with an SD card that has detailed topo maps for the whole country. They're a little out of date and have a few oddities, but more than good enough for walking.

[walkinTas]

...expect to pay a premium.

I'm glad we could agree on that.

...with selective quoting...

Yes! ...but so long as you promise not to make a habit of it.

[Son of a Beach]

Half a million sales doesn't equate to half a million people. I've probably got 20 or so 25k maps in my top drawer. Maybe more.

[frenchy_84]

I dont get it, how have they stuffed it up? 2 dollars a map! thats pretty cheap, you dont seem to want to acknowledge the cost of making maps.

Yes, but they aren't making maps, they're just selling access to existing data.
$250 just for Tasmania is not justifiable, especially when you consider how much OziExplorer or similar groups charge for country-wide topo data. My GPS came with an SD card that has detailed topo maps for the whole country. They're a little out of date and have a few oddities, but more than good enough for walking.

If Tasmap arent making maps than who is? While they dont have to make new ones anymore they still employ people to update their data. Any other maps/ spatial data in the market place have either been purchased from Tasmap is some agreement, or generated from staellite images or interpelated from larger scale data and so the quality is reduced.

And besides that arguement isnt valid anyway. Do software companies start giving away software once they have finished developing it? Becuase after all once they have written the code all they are doing is selling access to it. I just dont understand peoples adversion to paying (not alot of money in the sceme of things) for a something that is an aid to a recreational pursuit. for *&^%$# sake, the RRP of a coulple of layers of plastic sewn together to make a jacket can reach $600 or more, yet a data set to the whole state costs only 250 yet is to much.

[stepbystep]

I dont get it, how have they stuffed it up? 2 dollars a map! thats pretty cheap, you dont seem to want to acknowledge the cost of making maps.

Yes, but they aren't making maps, they're just selling access to existing data.
$250 just for Tasmania is not justifiable, especially when you consider how much OziExplorer or similar groups charge for country-wide topo data. My GPS came with an SD card that has detailed topo maps for the whole country. They're a little out of date and have a few oddities, but more than good enough for walking.

If Tasmap arent making maps than who is? While they dont have to make new ones anymore they still employ people to update their data. Any other maps/ spatial data in the market place have either been purchased from Tasmap is some agreement, or generated from staellite images or interpelated from larger scale data and so the quality is reduced.

And besides that arguement isnt valid anyway. Do software companies start giving away software once they have finished developing it? Becuase after all once they have written the code all they are doing is selling access to it. I just dont understand peoples adversion to paying (not alot of money in the sceme of things) for a something that is an aid to a recreational pursuit. for *&^%$# sake, the RRP of a coulple of layers of plastic sewn together to make a jacket can reach $600 or more, yet a data set to the whole state costs only 250 yet is to much.

Amen to that!

[walkinTas]

It's marvellous how we can appear to disagree when we are all essentially agreeing. Most seem to agree the price is closer to the premium (borrowing SBS's word) end of the market than it is to the bargain end. Some firmly believe the product demands a higher price because it is a quality product. The rest of us are simply saying the higher price will make the product less competitive and it will limit the marketability of the product. There is more and more lower priced product coming on the market and the quality of that product continues to improve. I'm willing to give Tasmaps the benefit of any doubt and presume they weighed this up when they set the price. So ....time will tell all.

I will more likely than not buy a set of maps even if I think the price is a bit steep. ...but I have got Tassie covered, so might wait a while to see if demand has any effect on the price. ...might start by buying one to check out the quality. ...just got to find a way to persuade the boss that I need them all.

[Azza]

So compared to the going rate of $9 or $12 or whatever dollars to buy a printed copy of an individual 1:25k maps you guys are grizzling about $2 per map?

Get some perspective...

[frenchy_84]

60 cents a map if you buy the whole set...

[doogs]

Geez and to think the Scots have a bad name for being penny pinchers.. $2 is very very cheap in my opinion, same price as a kilo of carrots!! Or you can buy every map in Tasmania for around half the price of a PLB!!!

[walkinTas]

Dear, dear, dear me. All the perspective in the world won't help if you can't see it... Competitive pricing, "going-rate", "Competitor-based" pricing, whatever you call it, is a MARKETING strategy. The objective is to maximise the income, by maximising the customer base at an acceptable price. It has nothing to do with the price of carrots, or the price of PLBs or even the price of printed maps. Since the number of sales are unlimited by the product (i.e. they can go on making digital copies forever), then the objective should be to maximise the customer-base (IMHO) - and that has everything to do with the price. I can't say it any simpler than I think the pricing structure will limit the market ($2 or $250). ...anyways, just an opinion and nothing more! ...or is it just a perspective?

[Azza]

There is no money to be made here... $2 or $250..
It won't go anywhere near covering the costs of developing services and once people download the maps they'll just pirate them anyway.
Revenue for ListMaps comes from subscription services for property conveying, council planning etc.
They can only merely hope to supplement the costs of providing the service.

Their focus is not you guys, who want $2 maps for walking.

[ollster]

Don't our taxes pay for this stuff anyway? Isn't charging a nominal fee for consumer-level access to the data just a minor subsidisation of a government process?

[Azza]

Well it maybe possible to download the maps straight off the server - it is freely available information...

[Ent]

Interesting discussion but with a few logic flaws.

Tasmap are selling a product with a high fixed cost and negligible variable cost in the electronic form. By that, it should cost them very little to sell additional maps. Now, they are required to produce the maps and we Tasmanians pay for this. By that, if I chose not to buy the maps then Tasmap will still have to produce them so I will pay more in taxes. Remember it is Government not small business. Tasmap are mandated to produce maps for use by the state.

Ok lets look at the pricing model. It will encourage the sale of single maps. This means a tourist will likely buy the minimum number of maps. Often only one or two. So at $250 you are unlikely to sell many complete sets. So at $2.00 a map this is very cheap for them.

Ok lets look at high map users. We know that Tasmap update on a cycle so it makes no sense buying maps before you need them unless encouraged to by a hefty discount. If people are honest they rarely have more than twenty maps so unless you are going to cover 125 maps to walk in you are much better placed to buy single maps. There is no incentive for me to pay $250 for the set when I am better placed to buy say ten maps a year at twenty dollars and always have the latest map.

Forget all the guff that is what I and dare I suggest most other people will do. Sure complete sets will gradually appear as pirate copies as at $250 many will be encourage to do this.

At say $99 I would buy the complete set and then likely buy another set in five years time to keep up to date. But not now. Net result is Tasmap will get less of my money.

Now if Tasmap was commercial then a possible pricing model could be.

$5.00 a single map
$10.00 four map bundle for common walks, OLT, WA, etc
$99.00 the state

Date I suggest this would bring in more revenue.

I am reminded that for every $1 of public transport fare paid $0.97 was expended in collection cost back on in the 1990's for Melbourne. For social and environmental reason a good case could have been made for free public transport. Places like NZ appear to have made a similar call with their mapping data.

Cheers

[walkinTas]

Yes, I know! I really should be doing something else.

If I could beg your indulgence one last time.....


So you see, if 100,000 people buy a map for $10, or 5 maps for $2, or 10 maps for $1 or 20 maps for $0.25, it adds up to $1mil. The question is which is more likely. 20 maps @ 25¢ or 5 maps for $2. So the smart marketer sets the price according to the current market value to encourage the customer to buy this product and not another.

And look at those full set sales. Just 100,000 at $100/.00 and you make $10mil, or you could hope for 40,000 at $250. But if half your sales are corporate then you only need 50,000. Less if you had subscriptions as well! Has anyone thought about a subscription system?

There is no money to be made here... ...once people download the maps they'll just pirate.

Yeah, who wants quality maps anyway... Digitally signing individual sales, watermarking maps to identify the purchaser, etc. Heaps of well established ways to tackle this at very little cost. Just ask Magellan!

[Mafeking09]

Great news! Any tips on which GPS to use? I need a Mac Compatible one. I've heard Garmin E Trex are OK.

[tastrax]

Etrex 20 or 30 has the capability to load custom maps in KMZ format so they might be models that you consider. I would also download Garmin Basecamp (free) and see if that runs on your mac (via bootcamp?? - I am not a MAC user).

[Ent]

Hi

Is there not a limit on the resolution and size limit on the Raster file size with the Garmins? Also not sure if the screen resolution is up to the task? Case of too smaller area that is readable meaning getting lost in the trees.

Personally for my aging eyes the iPhone 4s is nicely adequate while a 7" Nexus Asus is a thing of beauty and and iPad just great for home use.

Tried Tasmap on a Holux and it was very average compared to an iPhone. A walker I spoke to at Kiora had a raster Garmin and found the screen resolution made it near useless.

However, a Garmin offers much better weather protection than the above mentioned options.

Cheers

[frenchy_84]

Twonav Sportiva can handle raster data, there is a thread on here somewhere about it

[Azza]

Yes, I know! I really should be doing something else.

If I could beg your indulgence one last time.....

maps.png

So you see, if 100,000 people buy a map for $10, or 5 maps for $2, or 10 maps for $1 or 20 maps for $0.25, it adds up to $1mil. The question is which is more likely. 20 maps @ 25¢ or 5 maps for $2. So the smart marketer sets the price according to the current market value to encourage the customer to buy this product and not another.

And look at those full set sales. Just 100,000 at $100/.00 and you make $10mil, or you could hope for 40,000 at $250. But if half your sales are corporate then you only need 50,000. Less if you had subscriptions as well! Has anyone thought about a subscription system?

There is no money to be made here... ...once people download the maps they'll just pirate.

Yeah, who wants quality maps anyway... Digitally signing individual sales, watermarking maps to identify the purchaser, etc. Heaps of well established ways to tackle this at very little cost. Just ask Magellan!

I get where you are coming from...

There are 200,000 house holds in Tasmania or something like that?
Of whom approximate 60% of the population on average participate in some sporting activities.
So how many would own a GPS other than their smartphone and be interested in paying to download spatial maps for outdoor pursuits?
I suspect the true numbers aren't going to staggeringly high.
So there would be something there and combined with tourists... they'd probably make some money.

But I made my comments regarding the seeming lack of interest by the Tasmania Government based on their requirements for the SIF project.
http://www.dpipwe.tas.gov.au/inter.nsf/ ... SJ5YF?open
They have not specifically scoped the ability to pay, encrypt and download the maps online in the SIF project.
The focus is elsewhere.... when you can charge $30 a pop extract title information and access planning information, land tax etc there is an on going revenue stream.

A $2 download once might generates some revenue but once people have gotten their maps and they are out there in the community they will only come back again if they are updated. I can't say I'd go back again about pay if its only a minor revision. So you would making your money from the tourist market..
Probably better just to package up a Overland Track set of maps and flog them at a special tourist price.

On the other topic the Garmin KMZ support is rubbish as well...

Just for interested I have converted the entire tasmap 25k Geotiff series and loaded them onto the 62s...
Waste of time as the 62s can only support 1000 tiles or so, barely enough for 1 map at a decent resolution.

[Son of a Beach]

I get where you are coming from...

There are 200,000 house holds in Tasmania or something like that?
Of whom approximate 60% of the population on average participate in some sporting activities.
So how many would own a GPS other than their smartphone and be interested in paying to download spatial maps for outdoor pursuits?

Don't rule out smart phone users.

I don't have any other GPS and will be buying and installing at least some of the Tasmap 25k maps on my iPhone as soon as they're available. I'm sure other smart phone brands and OSs can use them too.

And unlike some other GPSs, the maps look excellent on the high resolution iPhone screen with quite a lot of map visible at once (640x960 pixels). And I can install the entire state's worth of 25k maps at once (along with 100k maps, 250k maps, etc all installed together).

PS. Looks like below on my iPhone (click on image to see the screenshot full size). Plenty of map area displayed there (image quality is fuzzy due to JPEG compression of screenshot).

(And when zoomed right out, the same map looks like the first image in this post.)

[Ent]

On the other topic the Garmin KMZ support is rubbish as well...

Just for interested I have converted the entire tasmap 25k Geotiff series and loaded them onto the 62s...
Waste of time as the 62s can only support 1000 tiles or so, barely enough for 1 map at a decent resolution.

Brilliant post and confirms what Tony found with his. Better than nothing but no real solution. Thanks for that.

SOB is right, a whole new generation have come to mapping from iPhone Apps so do not be surprised if every second walker on the OLT has their smart phone loaded with the maps covering that area. On the weekend we had Asus 7" tablet, iPhone and Garmin 62s. The iPhone in the Lifeproof case stood up well but the Nexus Asus in a Sealine case not so flash. OziExploper software was not flash either. The Garmin proved that there is no substitute for a "proper" waterproofed device in trying conditions and having a good plot or map (OSM in my case).

For me the answer is the iPhone running decent Tasmaps (not the pension age MemoryMap ones) and a dedicated GPS plus just because I tend to have the backup to the backup a Garmin Fenix watch GPS Overkill many times over but hey this is what a bushwalking techno tragic does For most a decent paper map with reliable compass and smart phone running off line maps should keep then on track but they will find Tasmap's tracks are rather rough so there can be no substitute to good traditional track following skills. And these skills come with experience and practice so people need to start off and develop them before launching into epic adventures and hoping that a GPS will save them.

Cheers

[Azza]

I don't discount the smartphone market in fact I work in the industry.

The interesting thing is because of open standards such as WMS and Open Source GIS Libraries you could very quickly building cross platform (Android, iPhone, iPad etc) HTML5 hybrid mapping applications that work both online and offline.
So for example - I can load up my HTML5 application and cache a series of maps off the server (e.g. the list) onto the phone and then later access them through offline storage. Effectively you can just highlight an area and hit download and it will cache all the tiles within the bounding box.

I can also bring in KML files with features / track routes and other goodies such as my Spot messenger feed.

I should do something useful with it all and create an app for the store.

[Miyata610]

........not the pension age MemoryMap ones...

This is their map update policy.....

http://memory-map.com.au/digital-maps/updates.html

They just released new versions of topo nsw and the oz marine charts. Maybe the new release from tasmaps will trigger an update.

I quite like the older tasmaps. Stuff seems to get deleted on newer editions rather than corrected.

[Ent]

........not the pension age MemoryMap ones...

This is their map update policy.....

http://memory-map.com.au/digital-maps/updates.html

They just released new versions of topo nsw and the oz marine charts. Maybe the new release from tasmaps will trigger an update.

I quite like the older tasmaps. Stuff seems to get deleted on newer editions rather than corrected.

And the reality is to ask them if the year 2007 sounds familiar for Tasmania as the last update they paid for This means Cathedral, etc are acient as much older than that but were updated in 2010-11 by Tasmap. The older versions may or may not have some features but the resolution and detail on the newer Tasmaps is noticably better as we found crossing from Lake Myrtle to the Mosses Creek Track. The scanning quality is very poor as well on the older maps.

Cheers

[Miyata610]

2007 sounds fine to me, although they may have updated in 2010 and still missed out on the updates you mention. It's a matter of timing surely. Yeah it's a shame some of tasmap's scanning wasn't too good, but they are all readable. As I said, it will be interesting to see if they upgrade again soon to coincide with the new pricing structure. I guess I'm one of the very few happy customers if you judge it based on forum traffic. Lol.

[Ent]

Hi

The Cathedral map is 1988. Bit better than 1788 but this means it is 24 years old and done with the technology of that era and the scanning show this. It is not a case of missing update as the source of the year 2007 should be reliable I am not sure on Tasmap update cycle but lets say it is twenty-five years then some maps sold by MemoryMap could be thirty years old and the most recent five years. How does this compare to their stated update policy?

Cheers

[Miyata610]

It still fits. I guess you've lost me with your argument. Never mind. It's happened before.

[tastrax]

I think there are two issues here. When was the last update and when was the last scan.

I suspect in years past individual paper maps were updated then scanned however I suspect these days with digital technology that the whole state could be a single digital file and the individual maps just a "snapshot" from that single file.

Now as for the underlying data within specific areas... check out the TASMAP web site for its update schedule for specific areas

https://www.tasmap.tas.gov.au/mappingPr ... rogPage.do

[Ent]

Hi

The point is I believed that MemoryMap last purchased updates in 2007. In that time period with say Cathedral, Tasmap in 2011 updated the maps from the 1988 version of the data. So any updates from 2007 onward are not reflected in MemoryMap. When I had MemoryMap it appeared that the scans were of individual printed maps based on color and line mismatch. It would make sense now to have the whole state produced direct from Tasmap's database so the DPI could be the maximum level that they store with no loss of detail from scanning a printed map. The big question I am not sure on does Tasmap use vector maps and then convert to raster or use raster maps or a mixture of these two approaches?

Cheers