I can’t believe I had not come across this video before, from a 2007 Superbowl advert from Garmin, the Maposaurus !
Happy Friday everyone !!
Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)
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Yesterday I made a presentation at the 13th GSDI Conference in Quebec (thanks to Geoff for his commentary), it was only a flying visit but I left in a more positive frame of mind that I expected.
The high level message of my presentation was, we need to think more about the I in SDI e.g. infrastructure, that we already have a well adopted information infrastructure we can use called the World Wide Web, to use it Geo people just have to be better web citizens.
For too long the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure community has been dominated by the producers of geospatial data, the Mapping Agencies, Cadastres and the Technology companies that serve their perceived needs. As a result discussions of Spatial Data, quality, standards and policy dominated.
I was pleased to see this observation reflected in a number of the plenary presentations, and the obvious logical extension that more focus needs to be concentrated on the potential users of SDI’s and their needs. This point was made brilliantly clear by Gilberto Câmara director of Brazils National Space Research Institute, INPE.
He introduced four questions any SDI supporter should answer..
- How much is your SDI being used to build a modern state ?
- How much is your SDI being used to enforce the rule of law ?
- How much is your SDI being used to support public accountability ?
- Is data from your SDI reaching those that need it ?
Key to answering these questions positively is I think a recognition that the true beneficiaries of a successful SDI, are not other data producers, governments, or public sector bodies, but society as a whole.
Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)
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The half-life of an LBS app..
Is around 5 years ??
Well I would estimate that is the case from the imminent closure of Plazes, one of the earliest Location Sharing applications developed back in 2004.
I used Plazes on and off for a few years starting on my first real smartphone the Nokia N95 and for a while it powered the Where Ed function on this blog. Plazes was acquired by Nokia in 2008 and it’s technology was rolled into the ovi platform, although Plazes.com continued as a stand-alone service.
This week Nokia announced the closure of the service, offering users the ability to download and export their location history. This is an important step and one which Nokia should be commended for, your location data is your data and in the spirit of data liberation you should be able to take it with you wherever you want to go..
So why is plazes closing, my personal view is that location sharing as a discrete service is just not that compelling, your location is a useful piece of contextual information whose real value comes from it’s integration with other personal data.
Knowing I’m currently in Calgary, Alberta is interesting..
Knowing I’m in Calgary, it’s 5pm, I’m flying out to San Francisco at 9pm, it’s raining and there is a Tim Hortons my favourite Coffee Shop on the quickest route based on the current traffic conditions is actually valuable.
Written and submitted from the GeoAlberta Conference (51.059N, 113.979W)
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Parallax on maps
Once upon a time I was a young teaching assistant teaching Aerial Photography Interpretation, and one of the aspects that I found difficult to demonstrate was Parallax, the displacement of high features such as towers in photographs. You will see this today when looking at some of the images in Google Earth which have not been corrected to remove the resulting building lean.
Now as a result of the technological marvel thats is WebGL you can seen Parallax demonstrated dynamically in Google Maps, just one of the ways online maps are moving beyond the static paradigm of traditional cartography.
Watch the dome of St.Paul’s as the map is scrolled
Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)
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NRE App – just wrong !
Today National Rail Enquires have released a free iPhone app for real time train information. Hang-on you may say, I though that app already existed.. well it does !
For the last few years National Rail Enquires (NRE) have been licensing at some considerable cost it’s information to independent software developers for them to develop their own apps, indeed one of my favourite all time apps is UK Train Times developed by Dave Addey and his team at Agant.
Todays release is clearly a case of channel conflict by a Quasi-Government organisation, and I would suggest anti-competitive.
NRE should not be developing an app and competing with it’s “partners” who have developed a range of apps for the last few years. NRE should just release the data under an Open Gov Licence and let the ecosystem develop !
So much for the release of government data empowering the software industry, my old friends at Ordnance Survey always recognised this was an issue and kept out of their partners space, not developing a mobile OS maps application despite what I might have argued at the time 🙂
Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)
After successful events in the US two Google Geo Teachers Institutes are to be held on June 13 and 14 in Dublin, and June 20 and 21, 2012 in London. Both events will be held at the local Google office.
The two-day events are free and designed to help teachers get the most from Google’s geography-related products and technologies. Participants receive hands-on experience and learn best practices and tips for using Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google SketchUp.
If you are interested complete the online application form before April 30, 2012.
Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)
The deadline for our next round of Google Research Awards is 11:59pm PDT on April 15, 2012. The Research Awards are one-year awards structured as unrestricted gifts to universities to support the work of world-class full-time staff members at top universities around the world.
Member of academic staff can apply for Research Awards by submitting a proposal via the Faculty Research Awards program website.
Although the majority of grants go to applications in Computer Science and Software Engineering, Geospatial is increasingly represented, last year grants were provided to researchers in Mapping/GIS at,
- Columbia University
- Princeton University
- Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
- ETH Zurich
- UCL / University of Southampton
- Institut d’Etudes politiques de Paris
- McGill University
The last call resulted in the funding of 119 awards for a total of $6 million !
If you have any questions please feel free to get in touch, but I suggest looking at this advice first.
Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)
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8bit maps..
The retro computing meme continues to gain momentum, just because you are restricted to 8bit computing, there is no reason you should miss out on using Google Maps, so today a new tile set designed for use by the Nintendo Entertainment System has been released.
Happy Memories ? I was more of a Sinclair Spectrum man myself…
Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)
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App Engine for Academics
As the geospatial world moves every closer to the mainstream IT, the potential of “Cloud” based technology to share mapping data and provide distributed processing for spatial analysis is increasing relevant to academics and researchers working in higher education.
Yesterday Google announced a programme to allow academics use of Google App Engine for their research projects. App Engine is the service used by Google for building and hosting web applications and offers fast development and deployment, simple administration and built-in scalability.
This new award programme will support up to 15 projects by providing App Engine credits in the amount of $60,000 to each project for one year. In its first year, the program is launched in a limited number of countries, including the UK.
See the RFP for details.
Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)
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Beyond the pin..
The redesigned Google Maps Developers site is a great resource not only for documentation for the now numerous API’s but also a great showcase of how developers have brought mapping to their sites. Of particular interest to me are the case studies from the creative agencies where mapping and in particular Street View has resulted in some really cool sites.. forget pins on a map, how about Zombies outside your house!
The family of API’s have long ago moved beyond fixing pins on the map, complex routing between multiple points can be calculated using the distance matrix web service, visualised using the styled maps API and integrated with location aware applications using the places API.
And despite what you might have heard all this comes free for most sites !
The maps API has come a long way from Housing Maps
Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)