iRobot, the company behind the Roomba vacuum, along with other cleaning robots, has sold 15 million of those little suckers worldwide. Part of the Roomba’s brilliance is mapping your house in order to be as effective and efficient as possible. However, many people are not aware of this mapping feature, and even those who are may not realize that the mapping data – i.e. the map of their home – is being sent back to iRobot HQ, and stored in the cloud. Nor have they likely realized that iRobot might like to share the map of their home with others. But that is exactly part of iRobot’s business strategy.

Those Google slippy maps (the term for maps that you can pull around and zoom in or out on) are the result of far more effort than you may realize. The Google street view vans (and backpacks) are only a small part of what goes into the Google mapping project Ground Truth. (A list of countries mapped by Google Ground Truth is below.)

As preposterous as it may sound, it seems that the Apple Maps satellite may have captured an image of the fabled Loch Ness monster, Nessie. Described as looking like the wake of a boat, but with no boat around, the image distinctly shows something that seems to be underwater, and appears to have fin-like appendages on either side.

When spam first became a widespread phenomenon, back, oh, between 15 and 20 years ago, part of the problem in using existing laws to go after spam – or, indeed, in creating new laws specifically addressing spam – was that nobody could really agree on what is spam. What is the definition of spam? It was sort of like that classic line from Justice Potter Stewart – everyone would know it when they saw it, but nobody could quite agree on what “it” was. That all changed when Paul Vixie, founder of Mail Abuse Prevention System (“MAPS” – which is ‘spam’ spelled backwards) and I sat down and hammered out the definitive definition of spam.

We all quickly figured out that Apple Maps is a debacle of epic proportions (link), but deadly? Australian authorities are warning motorists to use another mapping option, calling Apple Maps a “potentially life-threatening issue.”

Google had made shopping, sight-seeing and travel even easier, by making the indoor floor plans of malls, museums, libraries, transit stations and airports, worldwide, available through Google Maps. The feature, previously exclusively available through Google Maps for Android, is now available on your desktop so that it can be used by all.

Google Street View is back for iOS 6 users. It seems that Google is the knight in shining armor to the whole Mapplegate fiasco that has left scores of iOS 6 users frustrated with the quality of Apple maps. The victory is small, but at this point, iOS 6 users will take any scrap thrown their way.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has issued an open letter apologizing for how badly the new Apple iPhone 5 iOS 6 Mapping app sucks. In the mapping apology, Cook acknowledges that with the stunning issues with the iPhone 5’s maps, which has been dubbed ‘Mapplegate’, Apple “fell short on their commitment” to “deliver the best experience possible to our customers.” However, he also claims that the more people use the map app, the better it will get, which somehow sounds like “we released it half-baked so that our users could be the guinea pigs who get the data into it.”