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.
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.
This week the innovative guys as Nestroia have launched an experimental version of their great real estate aggregation site using OpenStreetMap mapping as an alternative to the usual Google Map Tiles. This is great vote of confidence for OpenstreetMap, but it also highlights some of the problems creating geodata from the cloud.
Where OSM data is comprehenive the map tiles are often more detailed than those Google supply which are based on commerical available datasets. For example this section of tiles covering my childhood neighbourhood in London is truely beatiful, in many ways a better map than the commerical websites.
However the problem is that the coverage for OSM data is not yet complete, and where there is incomplete coverage, for this type of application, its use is a problem. Look at these examples from Wokingham, West of London and part of the UK’s silicon valley.
The Google maps tiles using Tele Atlas data are pretty much complete..
However the OSM version has a lot of missing detail..
Mapping data really does need to offer complete coverage for it to be really useful, some may remember in the UK in the early days of mobile phones there was an alterative system based on local hotspots called Rabbit. This failed becasue you had to be within 100m or so of a hot spot, unlike the wider coverage of the early analogue mobile systems.
Mapping data needs to be as comprehensive, with no coverage gaps, what is great about Nestoria’s early exposure of the data in a real application is to highlight where more volunteer work needs to be done to complete the work.. If this is achieved by the OSM community, the critic’s of open source geodata will be silenced.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
The annual Applegeek fest known as MacWorld is coming up next week, and I’m all ready to play “keynote bingo” crossing off the expected phases as Steve says them.
Me I’m prediciting as with everybody else, some sort of sub-notebook device related more to the iphone than a macbook, with a docking station for power, keyboard etc.. lots of talk about the iPhone SDK and more media coming to iTunes/Apple TV.
I like the bingo idea, perhaps I will put one together for this years AGI conference in the UK, anyone like to suggest the key phases beyond “Master-Map of the Nation” ?
Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.
The Power of Information Report continues to have its impact around Whitehall, following the hell frezzing release of OS Openspace (alpha) just before the deadline of December last year, the Office of Public Sector Informtion (OPSI) has announced plans to run a barcamp a week on Saturday (12th January).
The BarCampPOIR8 will have as it’s subject the creation of web-based channel to support requests for the publication of specific public information datasets. This was recommendation 8 of the report hence POIR8 !
It’s rather short notice, but great to see Government bodies reaching out to the information policy and developement community in this way.
For those not familiar with the tradtion, this article explains what a barcamp is 🙂
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
So roll on 2008, it’s a great time to be involved with geospatial technology in all it forms, and for its great to be part of an industry that is touching so many more peoples lives…
Part of the excitment I feel is due to the fact that the industry is changing to finally better suit the needs of a wider community of users rather than just the professional GIS users. Some indication of this rate of change can be seen in a simple analysis of the search terms used in our favourite serach engine and how these have changed over the last few years.
Using the Google Trends tool it is possible to track how often a term is searched for, and to compare this over time.
Search for “Ordnance Survey”
For example it is interesting to compare the decreasing trend for “Ordnance Survey” with the increasing trend for “Tele Atlas” and “Navteq”.
Search for “Navteq”
The change reflected here I would suggest is the change is focus of users away from local data provders to international suppliers and of course the move away from paper mapping to electronic mapping for many consumers.
Of course it’s easy to read too much into these trends, but as a measure of interest or attention amongst internet users these trends are interesting, I’ll leave it up to you to stop other geospatial search term trends, but look forward for another 12 months of upheaval as the structure and focus of the industry concerned with geographic information continues to change and broaden its appeal beyond the professional (paleogeography) market.
Happy New Year !!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
In this years New Years Honours my old boss at the OS has been made a Companion of the Order of the Bath, a honour bestowed upon senior members of the civil service within the UK and a true badge of the establishment.
Congratulations Vanessa, this is well deserved (I’m sure getting OpenSpace out of the door helped 🙂 ), btw can you get me an introduction with Kylie ?
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
This week I ended up unexpectedly staying a night in Manchester and chose the City Inn Hotel close to the station (No drunk Manchester Utd players is always a plus point in my mind), anyway I was amazed to see rather than the usual hotel room TV, a iMac sitting on the desk.
It was running a highly customerised version of Front Row which allowed me to watch TV, but it also gave me full user access to MacOS, so i could surf, email, charge my iphone etc.
Very neat !
Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.
An excellent BBC Click Online show which puts a sat-nav equiped car up against a London Taxi Driver to navigate around London. As you would expect the Cabbie wins, but it’s an excellent explanation of how satnav works warts and all.
At the end of the day like many other applications of Geospatial technology, it the data that makes all the difference.
Although this show is a lot better than many others I have seen, comparing a satnav to local knowledge is always unfair, local knowledge will always win, a better comparison is between satnav and a road atlas, or even asking people directions.
My Advice re choosing a GPS, never waste money on a factory fitted system, they are too expensive and are often a year or two behind the capabilities of modern Tom-Tom or Garmin system, however I just love the Ozzy Osbourne instructions driving instructions !
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
The OS OpenSpace API has finally launched, just weeks before the deadline imposed by the Cabinet Office, with a alpha test phase with the system finally opening up early next year..
I’d love to see comments from anyone who is part of the alpha, but I guess they are under pretty strict NDA at the moment. [UPDATE 15/12 – There is no NDA, so I’m not sure why there are no examples]
One observation is the limit on the number of maps tiles which may be rendered for an API key, this is not something I have seen elsewhere, but I can understand it as a defence against accusations from commercial users of the data of unfairness.
Still is great to see something I put so much effort into during my time at the OS finally reaching the public.
Written and Submitted from the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Manama, Bahrain, using its wifi broadband network.