Categories
Data Policy Ordnance Survey

OS report hits all the right buttons..

A little from left field as most people have been thinking about the upcoming Location Strategy publication, The Communities and Local Government Select Committee published their report on the Ordnance Survey on Saturday.

OS Report

Despite the dry nature of a select committee report, it is worth reading because there are some key findings nobody other than the members of Southampton’s littoral head burying club (joke for geomorphologists there..) could disagree with..

“We are concerned that organisations charged with carrying out vital public services sometimes find OS’s licensing conditions too complex and inflexible” – Amen !!

btw the report can be downloaded from here

Written and submitted from the BA Lounge, using the BT Openzone 802.11 network.

Categories
virgin media are crap

Virgin Media – Diluting the brand and the board

Virgin, the brand what does that mean to you..

Are you looking to fly the Atlantic, or become a space tourist, or are you a concerned saver of the Northern Rock bank, in such cases virgin is probably a positive association, innovative products, good customer service etc., indeed these are the aspects of customer service that has made the virgin brand so valuable to Sir Richard Branson… however the problem with allowing others to exploit you brand is that they may not value your principles to the same degree.

virgin mediaA case in point, Virgin Media…

Virgin Media until yesterday when I finally snapped was my ISP and cable TV supplier.

For the past year or so since the combined Telewest/NTL companies have been known as Virgin Media, the quality of their customer service and more importantly the quality of their actual service has plummeted.

Through under-investment and poor technology choices their cable TV PVR system has become a running joke, rarely running for more than 24 hours without crashing, poor quality images (Dumb choice to use MPEG2 as a broadcast standard), and only a single HD channel due to bandwidth constraints.

The final straw for me has been the appalling quality of the virgin media broadband offering, I have been paying £37 per month of their top of the range product “XL” which should offer 20Mbs download delivered via their dedicated fibre network, sounds a good if expensive proposition does it not… well for the past couple of months this is the network performance I have been consistently achieving with virgin media..

Speed test

Yes that’s £37 per month, for just over 1 Mbs .. well no longer.. I’m off to O2 broadband who can also offer 20 Mb/s over DSL, so I say farewell to Virgin media and join the last UK based director of the company who left the company today.

BTW Richard, if you don’t want mud all over you nice logo be careful with who you let use it !!

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
iphone Thoughts

The cult of iPhone

For many years as a user of Apple computers since the Macintosh LC I was quite happy to be a member of the minority of computer users at odds with the majority of other computers users, happy to stand out as a member of “the cult of mac“. Now of course things are different pop into any Starbucks anywhere is the world and you will see Macbooks everywhere, Macs are slowly becoming more mainstream.

iPhoneThis week I was in California and it seemed that almost every other person was using an iPhone, in the Google office it was more extreme almost everybody had one. Yet back home in the UK, I think I have seen maybe two or three other iPhone users in London, and one user on a train from Manchester, the contrast with San Francisco is enormous !

Although there are well known limitations with todays iPhone, no 3G, poor camera, no MMS, the iPhone is by a very long way the best mobile phone I have owned, I actually don’t think it is the spec of the iPhone that is the problem is Europe.

So what has gone wrong, clearly Apple hoped that the iPhone would in Europe follow the success of the phone in the US market, but of course the markets are very different.

Despite the widespread (compared to the US) availability of SIM free phones in Europe, most people still expect to be given a free phone when opening a new contract or renewing an expired contract.

These operator provided “free” phones are not low end models either, the number of people on the train I see with Nokia N95’s is staggering – many I’m sure not even aware of the capability of their “mobile computers”, against this few people outside the geek minority are willing to spend nearly three hundred pounds on a iPhone.

Never mind, I enjoy my smugness as a member of the “cult of iPhone”, knowing that I have spent a large sum of money to have a technically superior device, others think is an extravagant waste of money… ah yes back to the good old days !!

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
neogeography Ordnance Survey Thoughts

OS OpenSpace thank you !

OK so it’s a lot more limited than many other mapping API’s out there, and it has certainly taken a long time to reach this point but the fact that OS Openspace is now open for business is a huge achievement, and believe me I know personally what a great achievement getting to this point is.

For many the people the limited nature of the API will not be an issue, they and the users of the applications they build will get access to the high quality cartography OS is famous for. Yes of course this is not quite what I had opened Openspace would be, but given the constraints that the OS has supporting commercial partners with less functionality than you or I now have, what we have is a great first step and will hopefully lead to the much needed rethink on how OS data and services are licensed.

However, (you knew there would be a but…) why does the OS need to know so much about any potential Openspace developer, you get your API key you need to complete this form.

Registration form

I don’t understand why the OS needs more than the url of the site that is going to be used, and it is unforgivable with the poor reputation of UK government in managing personal information that there is no promianate statement of how the data submitted will be managed and used or no clear privacy policy.

This needs to be changed immediately !!

Written and submitted from the BA Lounge , SFO, using the t-mobile wifi network.

Categories
GIS Google Maps opensource

If Dr Who needed a mash-up…

One of the topics which most often comes up in conversation when talking about creating new maps, is how historic information is recorded and displayed. Spatio-Temporal data modelling is a big and scary topic which has occupied the GI Research community for a number of years, and will do for a many more.

Today a simple and pragmatic approach to the problem has been introduced with the launch of the Time Space, which links a wiki database of historical events to their locations. This is not the first example of this type of web application, but the first in my knowledge to really exploit the potential of the community at a global level to contribute.

Timespace map

It will be interesting to see how this added dimension to user generated geodata develops, I can think of many potential applications, and it will be interesting to see how social history is represented compared to the big historical events.

Written and submitted from the Googleplex , Mountain View.

Categories
Google Earth Technology

Backyard Space Photography

Picture from 30km

From the excellent Google Earth Blog, Frank links to another great example of what the process of democratising technology has achieved.

A group of guys launched a fully instrumented sensor package below a helium balloon, which was tracked in real time using google earth and produced some stunning images. The video on their site of the launch and recovery of the balloon, are great fun – you can just sense the excitement !!

Ok so this may not be a practical remote sensing application yet, but it’s amazing.. pictures from 30 km high, a third of the way to space, taking with a Canon Digital camera you could buy on the high street.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
Data Policy Thoughts

Whitehall and laptops..

An interesting news story from silicon.com, noting that government staff are to be banned from removing laptops containing personal information from their offices.

Is it just me, but should we not be asking why they have such data on their laptops in the first place ? Surely all such information should be held only in databases on the government secure network, where they use can be monitored and protected.. if this needs to be accessed from home or on the road then VPN into the network ?

For too long this has been reported as Government being careless losing laptops, the real story is a complete lack of information management. If this type of debate gets your interest, take a look a Cory Doctorow’s article in the Guardian last week.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
Data Policy Ordnance Survey web 2.0

Zillow move should allow other small scale experiments

Last weeks announcement on the Zillow blog that is was releasing its neighbourhood boundary data to the community in Shapefile format is the story of the year so far… (ok so we are only a few weeks in… but this is important)

Zillow.com

Zillow is the US Real Estate web site that uses much web 2.0 goodness to actually carry out simple analysis of the housing market, a largely geographical phenomena of course, and allows the user to produce simple hotspot maps of the relative activities in house prices in different neighbourhoods, amongst other things.

This is where the Open Source boundary data comes in… the best people to help define and keep the neighbour boundary data “up to date” are the people themselves, and as the OpenStreetMap guys have found there is a growing community of people willing to do so.

I would be really interested to see how peoples perception of their neighbourhood compares with the “official” data, there is of course much folk-law as to the practices of Estates Agents in London calling Battersea an a rough area when I grew up “South Chelsea”, of course it is gentrified now…

We are only just developing the tools which allow users to express their own sense of place, this is an exciting first step in many ways, and will no doubt point the way to more collaborative mapping applications.

Again ,of course, this raises the question as to other data sets which could be maintained by the community in such a manner, the completeness of OpenStreetMap in the UK (shields up) could be improved overnight if data could be open sourced in this way as it has in the Netherlands for example.

The OS spends relatively little keeping its small scale business geographics data products such as strategi maintained, and it returns similarly modest revenues… worth a small-scale experiment perhaps ?

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
Apple

Genius MacWorld Keynote in a minute…

Credit to the Mahalo daily, no great surprises and nothing for me to run out and buy.. although I’m looking forward to the free firmware update for my Apple TV !

I got four on my keynote bingo game however !

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
Data Policy Technology

In praise of the iPlayer

iplayer

In the past I have been very critical of the BBC approach to making their programmes available online, which until December required you to use Microsoft DRM, and hence was PC only. However in December the beeb released the streaming version of
iPlayer using the latest Adobe technology to allow users to watch selected programmes online for a week after they are broadcast, and this is a cross platform service.

I must say this is really well down, the interface is simple and well designed, the quality of the video is very good and the flexibility such as service offers the viewers of the BBC is massive, along with on-demand services offered by virginmedia my cable supplier, my household rarely watches live broadcast TV, other than the news, choosing what to watch, when we want to watch it.

We are not alone the BBC reports today that 3.5 million shows have been streamed or downloaded since Christmas Day. Interestingly the number of people streaming the programmes outnumber those downloading using the Microsoft DRM by a factor of eight.

This could be interesting in context to the expected announcement from Apple that they will now support movie rental from itunes, is it that the video market unlike music is one where we don’t feel it necessary to “own’ the media, or is it now the fact that access to the cloud is so pervasive we don’t mind accessing information when we need it and then throwing it away.

Either way again, you can’t help but draw comparisons with how geodata is licensed, and ask similar questions, for example as a developer building some new houses, would you not want to license the data for just the period of build ?

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.