Stefan Geens the man behind the fantastic Ogle Earth blog, has put together an amazing DIY TV show using Google Earth and Wirecast.
Everyday the tools that where once only in the hands of the professionals are now available to the professional-amateur, although I think Stefan may have another career on IPTV waiting for him!
Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.
I am not going to comment on this weeks Story in the Guardian, as I would never discuss the details of any potential commercial arrangement in public.
But I am personally very disappointed for the people at CASA at University College London who have developed a world class 3D city model which could potentially have been licensed to many organisations, not just Google.
Keep up the great work guys, it is vital for University departments to both move forward the science of GIS but also innovate in a commercial setting and develop products and techniques which have the potential to be used both by Industry and Government.
Have a few beers over the weekend, and enjoy the rest of your vacation !!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
I loved Appleworks ( previously know as Clarisworks) and it has been finally retired with the addition of the numbers spreadsheet to Apples iWork suite. Not sure where the MacDraw like drawing application replacement is but never mind.
The long life of Claris/Applework is both a reflection on the perceived dominance of Microsoft Office and a focus on Apple else where, but it is also interesting to note that is was always a very popular application all the way to its end because it was very simple, fast and well integrated. I have only just managed to stop my wife using it exclusively and moved her onto to Pages/Word.
Few users of Office use more than 10% of the capabilty of their applications and while in a business seeting there is always someone who might use more, this is not the case for the vast major of home office, and personal users.
I’m sure there are lessons for GIS designers in recognising the demand for simple applications that offer 10% on the functionality of a tool kit desktop GIS system but to 99% of the users – there are still people hanging on to their copies of ArcView 3.x I’m sure?
Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.
This is actually quite funny, maybe I have discovered a method of telling the time of year from the stories in the press.
This time last year, I was sitting in the studio’s of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, about to do a piece about how terrible Satellite Navigation was, and how PND’s are a threat to the continued existence of western civilisation.
Sitting next to John Humphrys is a bit scary, but he is actually a nice chap, anyway the nation was saved my defence of SatNav by the “Map Supporter” of the debate, the editor of Walking Magazine in the UK getting lost on the way to the Radio Studio !!
So this year we have this story in the Daily Mail, reporting on some research carried out by a car insurance company, which suggests people had difficulty recognising obscure map symbols on a OS Road Map.
So what is the concern here.. I doubt actually that people could ever recognise this symbols in the first place, PND’s and in-car SatNavs have not made people less map literate, they were never map literate in this way in the first place.
Most people use a map to plan routes, from place A to B not something you need and awareness of the fact that green shading represents mud!
Fewer people carrying maps in their cars, is a result not only on the increased use of satellite navigation, but also the use of online route planning tools like Google maps, which are often more up to date that road atlases. People also no longer carry extensive tool kits and spare parts in their cars as they would have once done.
We must remember that SatNavs are not perfect, but in almost all cases, contain the same information as road atlases, but presented in a more useable way and with the massive advantage of knowing where you are !!.
Congratulations to the insurance company for recognising the opportunity of the August quite time for the news, they won’t be getting my custom I’m afraid, but lets look forward to next Augusts story.
Written and submitted from the SAS Radisson Hotel, Stockholm, using the free hotel WiFi
So once again we find ourselves facing an outbreak of Foot and Mouth, hopefully this time around the importance of the geographical information in fighting the spread of the disease will be recognised early on. Things look hopeful, Defra have already a map of the initial outbreak on their website, and of course today the tools to communicate this information are very different from the last outbreak in 2001.
I was able to create this KML file in 5 minutes from the details on the Defra website.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Today the BBC opened up its iPlayer service as a public beta, offering on-demand viewing of the BBC’s excellent programming to users of Microsoft Windows XP. If you don’t have XP, don’t want XP then you have to wait as this is all down to Digital Rights Management, protecting the content you have already paid for as television license payers.
Imagine if you could only watch BBC 1 on Televisions made by Phillips, or only get TV listings from the Daily Mail.
Don’t think this is right.. then sign this Petition.
A Great example of community mapping and the immediacy of tools like the My Maps feature of Google Maps is this map by Oliver Williams who is collating images, videos and reports relating to the current river floods in England.
When I looked this maps was less than a hour old !!
Not only is this a potentially powerful way of communicating up-to-date information quickly, it is also great at telling the human story of such events.
Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.
Just listening to the conference call on the Tom Tom acquisition of Tele Atlas one of the major drivers behind the deal is the recognition of an ecosystem between PND’s capturing geospatial data and traditional “professional” GIS data capture techniques.
Without community generated content, in a online future if will not be possible to provide the expected level of currency of data – Strong stuff but hard to argue with.
If this is not a wake-up call for the traditional mapping organsiations I don’t know what else is !!
Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.
Here are my slides from the State of the Map Conference in Manchester, as is my way I’m afraid on their own they don’t mean a great deal, but in due course all the presentations will appear as podcasts, so you can follow along.
For me I got the feeling that the momentum behind OpenStreetMap is really building with interest from “Professional” GI companies increasing and in some cases beginning to either use OSM data or adopt similar methodologies. Which reminds me, Dominic over at Geometrybag has a great script to import OSM into ArcGIS.This week I’m at the Cambridge Conference, an invite only conference aimed at senior people from the worlds National Mapping Organisations. (update – there are podcasts of many of the presentations here ) This evening the prestigious Hotline Lecture was given by Martin Sweeting, of SSTL the guys who are having amazing success building micro-satellites, built from commercial off the shelf components which are competing successfully with the traditional large and expensive satellite systems.I could not help but think of the obvious parallels now with mapping.Written and submitted from the Cambridge Conference, Cambridge, using the free CC2007 wifi network (Great Job Mr Bridges !!!).
A while ago I speculated that the Nokia N95, might be using a A-GPS solution, now with the V12 firmware release available for unlocked phones from Nokia A-GPS really is supported and it does seem to make a difference.
There is a lot of confusion on the blogs and discussion groups as to what A-GPS, assisted GPS is, and how it works. This is a technology that is indepedent of network operators and does not use the location of Cell towers.
A-GPS works by supplementing the performance of the “not very good” GPS chipset on the N95 with an assistance server operated by Nokia. The assistance server knows the up to date ephemeris data of the GPS constellation and can help process whatever weak signal the phone is picking up and pass a possible location back to the phone.
This in theory and to some extent in practice means that the time to first location is reduced and you can expect to get a location in some areas where without A-GPS it would not be possible.
So how do you set it up and how can you tell it’s working… This is more informed speculation… some definitive information from Nokia would be good !!!
First you need to be brave and upgrade you firmware, after backing up everything on your N95, I still find this a little scary – a bit like a heart transplant operation for your phone..
With the V12 firmware you will find you have a new menu at – Tools>Settings>General>Positioning.
Here there are two sub-menus, Positioning Methods with the new option on Assisted GPS, which you need to enable and a sub menu called Positioning Server which contains the details for the assistance server. Here you will find the Nokia server already listed as supl.nokia.com , but you will need to manually enter an existing network access point to allow network access to the server, for me I used the Vodafone WAP APN on which I get vodafone’s new “unlimited” data tariff. You will need to enter your networks own APN here, I guess a Wifi access point should work just as well, but I have not tried.
Go to the Maps application or GPS Data tool and select the View Satellite Status menu, you should now more quickly than in the past see the familiar list of GPS satellite numbers and the open estimated signal strength bars – this is now coming from the assistance server and within a minute at least three of these will turn solid and you will have a location.
This has just worked for me on the window sill of a hotel room in the centre of Manchester giving a location in around 50 seconds !!!
I have been wrong about this in the past, but this seems to be progress !!
Written and submitted from the Novotel Manchester, using the Orange 802.11 network.