Categories
Google Maps StreetView

The other pin on the web..

When talking to people about Google Maps I always mention the unique ability of Street View to provide a sense of place, the final level of zoom of Google Maps takes you beyond the abstract world of Cartography to “standing on the street corner”. Images are incredibility powerful often bringing back memories of places we may have visited.

This year marks the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II,and to commemorate this Google has worked with Historypin to launch an interactive online gallery filled with memories of her time as Queen.

The Pinning The Queen’s History project will be made up of photographic images, videos and audio clips pinned directly onto a Google Map on the dedicated Historypin site.  There is a crowd-sourcing element to the site as users are invited  to submit photos, videos and other memories of the Queen during her many visits around the UK and the rest of the World..

Of course the most interesting images will be the ones local to your neighbourhood for me, my favourite so far is this one taken in Kew Gardens !

So go search under the bed for your shoebox of old photos and get scanning !

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Categories
Thoughts

Tommy Flowers : Colossus

Great to see the late Tommy Flowers getting the recognition he deserves, a man who because of secrecy and lack of vision was never fully appreciated in the UK.

This brilliant new video on Colossus explains the story..

This blog post by Lynette coincides with the opening of a new Gallery at the National Museum of Computing featuring the rebuilt Colossus computer itself the product of the amazing effort of Tony Sale.

I spent an amazing hour with Tony a few years ago, before his death last year, as he showed me around the Colossus, I imagine Tommy was similar .. a quiet unassuming man who changed the world.

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Categories
Technology

Head West young man !

Well in the UK and want to experience the 4G LTE  new iPad you need to head to Newquay or St. Newlyn in Cornwall where two cell sites have been upgraded by Everything Everywhere and BT. There is also talk of a trial in Bristol !

For the rest of use we need to wait for OFCOM to auction the spectrum and the UK operators to build out their new 4G networks… Perhaps another 2 years ?

Of course HSPA is slowly rolling out around the UK, offering speeds approaching LTE, but LTE offers much greater capacity for data traffic which is of course increasingly the important factor.

You could head East of course to France, Germany, Sweden etc to try LTE now..

Welcome to the wireless slow lane..

Written and Submitted from the Festival Hall, London. (51.505N, 0.116W)

Categories
LBS

Discount for the LBS Summit Europe 2012

I am once again speaking at the LBS summit in Amsterdam this year.

The conference is the closest Europe gets to something like the Where conference, and is the must attend conference for the location and mobile marketing industry. There’ll be lots of in-depth discussion, interesting debate and great networking opportunities with over 150 senior execs from the LBS eco-system.

To get all the info on this event, get the brochure here –
http://www.thewherebusiness.com/locationsummit/conference-event-brochure.php

As a speaker I am entitled to invite 5 of my friends, clients or colleagues along at exclusive discounted rates!  So, just quote my name when booking and get the exclusive discount, saving you an extra €100 on the current listed rates when you register.

The code is only good for 5 people, so be quick if you want to make use of it.

To qualify for this saving, simply quote LBS12SPKR when registering at
https://secure.thewherebusiness.com/locationsummit/register.php

Categories
Thoughts

A two speed geospatial world ?

“Will A “Geo-Divide” Arise Between Nations In The Future?”

Kevin is right on the money with this, although I would argue the timeframes could be compressed by a factor of two.. we are already beginning to see a divide emerging even within Europe.. Street view vs. non-Street view countries for example.. or the ludicrous decision of a French court re Google Maps !

The fundamental tension remains the ability of Governmental and legal frameworks to keep pace with technological change, but increasingly this is no longer an academic debate as nations economies will be directly impacted.

If you were a geo entrepreneur where would you set up your business ?

Written and Submitted from the ALoft Hotel, Broomfield. CO. (39.905N, 105.090W)

Categories
Google Maps StreetView

Universally.. If it’s good for Guildford

 

 

 

 

When talking about Google I often mention the mission statement that dates back to the earliest days of Google and has remained a constant despite all of the changes and innovation that have happened since 1998.

The statement is actually still fundamental to what happens at Google and is for me a rich source of material to talk about.. for example the meaning of “useful” or “accessible” is key to understanding many of Google’s Geo products and Services.

Along these lines “universally” I think has two key meaning, universal in terms of who and where the user looking for information is, and universal in respect to the very geographical concept of coverage.

Since 2005 Google Maps coverage has expanded to cover (with a few exceptions) every country with both imagery and street maps. For the last 5 years Street View coverage has also expanded and as of this week the team has begun collecting Street View imagery in the wonderful African nation of Botswana.

Capturing and processing Street View Imagery is a huge task far more complex that creating street maps, but you only need to ask anyone who has used Street View how useful it is.. so if is useful to a user in Guildford will it not be as useful to a user in Gaborone ?

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

 

Categories
where 2.0 wherecamp

Where Conference

2.0 is rather passé in tech circles these days, so it now the O’Reilly’s Where Conference!

The annual meeting of the Geo tribes, this year takes place in downtown San Francisco in early April.

This is, despite the competition, the main conference to attend and along with it’s unofficial Wherecamp sister (this years date and location still in planning). It is worth a trip just to soak up the atmosphere of innovation and plain optimism you will not find at more traditional GIS conferences.

That said this year I will be stuck this side of the Atlantic that week attending other events, but many Googlers will be presenting and as an old hand O’Reilly have provided me with a conference discount code offering 20% of registration fees, so if you are going feel free to use the code “PARS20“.

Hope you like the new more stream lined blog design, I took the opportunity this weekend to update things when I moved domain and server hosting from GoDaddy (I know shameful) to an excellent UK operation tsohost, who have real support people answering email at 11pm on a saturday night !

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Categories
Presentation

My ENTER2012 presentation

Yesterday I had the pleasure to present at the ENTER2012 eTourism conference in Helsingborg, Sweden. The ENTER conference is an excellent combination of academics and practitioners, a mix that other industry conferences would do well to replicate.

My presentation was on the continuing innovation is geospatial technology and how the addition of both social and curated content may impact on destination and travel solutions.

Here are my slides, as usual not that useful if your were not in the audience!

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Categories
Thoughts

Find a hotel using isochrones

One of the benefits of getting comprehensive public transport information fully integrated in Google Maps is the potential to include public transport in all forms of local search. An example of this is the experiment launched over the weekend to search for hotels based upon a travel time from a location. In the example below searching for Hotels within 25 minutes of the Google Office by public transport…

The use of travel time or isocrone maps is of course not new , Mapumental really pioneered they use on line with their public transport map developed with Channel 4,  the next step for Google was greater integration of  this analytical capability with local search in near real time !

The areas you can easily reach from your point of interest are spotlighted on the map, and you can modify the search criteria using different maximum travel times or methods of travel, perhaps you only want to find hotels only within 10 minutes walk,  the map will update automatically to show a new spotlighted area and the nearby hotels.

You can also drag the red pin to find hotels near other places you might like to visit and agin the map will automatically refresh.

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)
Categories
Thoughts

Multi-Modal travel planning comes to Google Maps !

This has been a very long time in coming, finally national travel planning become easier as Google Maps now includes information on National train routes and timetables. The National Rail information joins local transit data, to offer true national multi-modal travel planning to users of Google Maps on the web, and more importantly mobile via Google Maps for Mobile.

This is a great example of the benefits of opening up public data sets, the national rail timetable data is been provided via the people at thetrainline.com who have great expertise in dealing with the complexities of the unique railway system in Britain.

It’s now possible to get step by step directions from your Hotel in Bristol to Edinburgh Castle only using public transport, a combination of walking, bus and train travel delivered to your mobile phone.

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)