I often talk about the use of Google Earth for storytelling, illustrating a story with its geographical context displayed interactively is very powerful, to see what I mean just watch the first few minutes of the launch event for the new Palm Pre at last weeks CES show.
BTW Its great to see Palm that seem to be getting their original mojo back, remember how cool the original Palm V was..
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
Just got back from doing a plenary presentation at ESRI UK’s kick-off meeting, wow has that organisation grown some.. came back on the No. 285 bus – I do love these local meetings 🙂
The topic of my presentation was the increasingly mainstream appeal of geospatial technology, not so much the geoweb/neogeography of the tech community but the applications that have real mass-market appeal like the Santa tracking sites over christmas, and yesterdays announcement of geotagging in iPhoto 09.
The mainstream applications all share a common characteristic they are from a user perspective simple applications which provide a useful purpose / entertainment, but which nevertheless are built on a hidden geospatial infrastructure which may be very complex and sophisticated.
Now from what I have seen, iPhoto 09 may have quite limited geotagging capabilities compared to existing services, however the interface is very appealing and the process of geo-tagging straightforward. And it is of course simple, there is no mention of reverse geocoding or geoparsing, all of which is part of the process and necessary – but hidden.
The future of geospatial I believe will increasingly take this form, where complex geospatial functionality disappears hidden behind great interface design and brilliant process engineering.
Today I was drawn to use a wonderful Douglas Adams anecdote.. Douglas was told that one day all houses would have a centralised electric motor to run all sorts of home appliances, and what better job could one have than to be an electric motor repair man.
The study of electric motors was thus recommended as “the” thing to study. Of course today there are no centralised electric motors, and no electric motor repair men, but our houses are full of electric motors invisible in devices all around the house (Just counted over 20 in the very room I am sitting in, computers, hi-fi, coffee maker , etc.).
The parallel is clear for electric motor read GIS.. in the future, important and even more widespread than today; but ultimately invisible.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network
Your help is needed.. if you have any local knowledge of Gaza please respond to Mikel’s request none of the online sites have adequate mapping and given the urgent nature of the situation this needs to be addressed as quickly as possible.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network
Having last night watched the excellent “The Lives of Others” DVD last night, a film about the activities of the Stasi in East Germany, the suggestion that the Police should hack more is more than a little scary. So we can expect the police to be running around installing key-loggers and trojans to any one who might disagree with the government of the day ?
And who do you go to now if you suspect the men sitting in the car outside you house are trying to hack into your wifi, the Police.. it might be the police in the first place.
This is a story of most interest to those outside of the UK however, as most IP traffic in the UK is already intercepted by GCHQ via their black boxes at UK ISP’s, a benefit of the nearly 10 year old Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.. and confirmed by Constable Jones of Twickenham Police Station in his Vauxhall Astra parked outside.
From the cool photography of Wai Fong Fung, Christmas Greetings from a Galaxy far far away…
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.. with my feet up actually.
Early this week to test a new Android application and to walk of the Google Christmas Lunch, I went for an early afternoon walk near the office.
The application I was testing was My Maps Editor and Android application to create and edit Google My Maps, and it pretty much worked first time as expected allowing be to create a simple map of my walk.
At the end of 2008 it’s quite difficult to get really excited by this as we have come to expect so much from mainstream geospatial technology.
But just think what I have achieved from my walk, not only have I created a multimedia rich database with potentially metre accuracy geospatial features, I have also created a distribution channel to publish the database within minutes to hundreds of millions of users.
All from a mobile device that costs a few hundred pounds.
So this type of technology may never be used to create base map data, but for many organisations who need to be able to do simple data capture outside of the office there is huge potential here.
Maybe over christmas I will complete my recycling map for Richmond 🙂
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
The Guardian after a gap of a couple of years has a list of its top sites of the year, and as the article points out the two big trends have been in collaboration and LBS applications.
One of the sites selected is a personal favourite of mine “where’s the path” a mashup of Google and OS mapping..
Ironic then, the publicity of the national newspaper mentions results in..
Perhaps out of embarrassment, the OS may up the daily limit ?
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
As anyone who has spent any time as a demo jockey can tell you, the best demos paint a picture for your audience of a future using your tools/products which is both exciting and believable. If your demo and your product was really good your audience would leave enthused with the possibilities now achievable, and can’t wait to try themselves.
On rare occasions you might get an opportunity to demonstrate something a little more radical, something that is really just out of the labs but which has the potential to really change the industry, I think about the first time I saw MapGuide in late 1995 and of course Google Earth ten years later, both products which have had a major impact on the Geospatial industry directly or indirectly.
40 years ago however a demo was given that truly radical, so audacious in terms of its content to many who saw it, it seemed so different from the current technology that it appeared to be science fiction rather than IT. Yet the demo given by Doug Engelbart and his colleagues from the Stanford Augmentation Research Centre, was so influential it has become known as the mother of all demos, it’s pretty much a demonstration of the computer you are sitting in-front of today, with mouse , web like hypertext documents delivered via a wide area network which allowed real time collaboration with remote colleagues, there is even an example of structuring data using location !
Now thanks to the modern version of that technology you too can watch the complete demo on youTube. While watching this, don’t forget that the primary mechanism to interact with a computer was the punch card.
Oh and by the way, iPhone product mangers take note – there is a great demo of copy and paste in part 2 of 10 if you need some inspiration..
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
Then look no further than the latest release of GeoServer which has fantastic new KML serving capabilities on a par with the Google Earth Enterprise server.
The key new capability here is to stream vector and raster data to Google Earth as the user zooms or pans making sure that only just the minimum amount of information is transferred thereby giving the great performance you expect from Google Earth.
This release of GeoServer can also extrude KML with a height attributes allowing users to stream simple 3D model data to Google Earth.
GeoServer continues to develop into a serious enterprise application which no doubt is getting the attention of the guys in Redlands and is providing much needed competition in the market. From a KML perspective it is now possible for an organisation to self publish almost any type and size of geospatial database using an open technology stack.
And it runs nicely on my Mac !!!
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
An excellent post by Richard Allan on the Power of Information blog, Geographic Data that Should be Free (In All Senses of the Word).
As the post points out there could be a very simple solution to the current problem with OS derived data, make certain types of geospatial data including administrative boundaries and the locations of public services free .
This would have a very minor impact on the revenue of the OS, the real “cash cow” for the OS is its large scale Mastermap data, it could almost give away all it’s other data products and not really notice the difference.
Written and submitted from a First Great Western Train, near Reading using my Three 3G modem.