How serious is Nokia about the LBS and Local Search space, well at least $7bn is would appear if today’s report in the Wall Street Journal is accurate. Following the Tom-Tom play for Tele Atlas, Navteq was always going to be up next.
At $7bn this makes the Tele Atlas deal of approx €2bn look great value ?
Written and submitted from the Scandic Regina Hotel, Herning, Denmark, using the hotels free 802.11 network.
Today the long anticipated Pixelmator image editing application for the Mac was released, and for me it is quite a birthday present. For a long time I have used Photoshop which was too complicated for my needs, or Photoshop Elements which was just too windows like.
Pixelmator the product of London Brothers Saulius and Aidas Dailide is just perfect for my needs – and boy does it exploit the modern Macintosh system exploiting OS X’s core image technology and making use of that powerful GPU you have sitting in your Mac, it is fast and looks beautiful.
For just over £30 if this does not win awards this year there is no justice.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
If you are looking for GIS stuff, move on.
As a business, a premiership football team is the property of its owners, so in this case of course Abramovich can do as he pleases.. but the departure of Jose Mourinho is just Madness.
As a result, my predicted squad for the United game on Sunday is.. Shevchenko, Shevchenko, Ballack, Shevchenko, Ballack, Shevchenko, Shevchenko, Ballack, Shevchenko,Ballack and Shevchenko !
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Just got back from the 2007 AGI conference, which I thought was a massive improvement on previous years events. Steven Feldman and his team at the AGI have done a great job downscaling the event, and taking a new direction as a residential conference for the GI industry to talk to itself.
The GI industry in the UK is now well beyond the stage in its maturity where there is a need for a big conference and exhibition to attract new users – today if you need GIS, you are already a user.
So this years conference was really an opportunity for the industry to meet and discuss issues and developments, and to help develop a sense of community.
This year the recurring theme seemed to be the impact of Neogeography (Andrew Turner has a lot to answer for !!) on the traditional GIS industry or Paleogeography as I called it in my keynote.
I think, there is still someway to go for the GIS industry to fully come to terms with the potential that a neogeography approach to providing solutions to users has, and there is still a large amount of scepticism, but I was really pleased to see a programme which contained a number of “neogeo” presentations.
Of particular note for me, Ian Holt and John Abbott of Widr gave two excellent practical demonstrations of building mashups using location aware API’s, Ed Freyfogle of Nestoria was impressive as ever and Nick Black opened many peoples eyes in the audience to OpenStreetMap, many of whom it would appear had not come across it before.
Nick introduced Cloud Made a new project in collaboration with Steve Coast to offer commercial support to organisations wanting to use OpenStreetMap data – Cloud Made is only just getting off the ground, but think Redhat and Linux.
There really are two ages of geography at the moment, the established GIS industry is great at serving the needs of organisations for which geospatial data really is core and for creating core large scale geospatial data. This will not change fundamentally, although there are important lessons in particular around simplicity of tools and licensing models that can be picked up from neogeography !
On the other hand Neogeography offers a better approach to communicate and engage with communities of users who need to use geography to put whatever data they are interested in, in context. This is potentially everybody !!
Vanessa Lawrence in her presentation confirmed that the OS will be releasing the OpenSpace API before Christmas!! I have a couple of bottles of Champagne I promised the team once upon a time, that I can put back on the ice !
In many ways this year the conference also seemed to represent to some extent a handover to a more relaxed and down to earth view of the industry, no better demonstrated than by the soon to be infamous AGI party, partly captured on my camera phone !
GIS professionals dressed up as village people… that would never have worked 15 years ago in Birmingham !!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
I can now count the days until I get my sticky hands on a iphone, get ready to find out my new phone number in November as I and many others transfer to 02 – the only carrier I have not used so far in the UK funny enough.
Despite the fact that it is EDGE only, a closed platform and rather expensive I and my wife will be moving. Why because even though technically my Nokia N95 is superior – I still don’t like using it – the S60 user interface sucks and we all put up with out mobiles because we have no choice . Don’t even try to talk to Lisa about her N70 !!
To really appreciate the issue take a look a the first blog post by Stephen Fry. Yes it is the Stephen Fry, one of the great treasures of Britain, and it now appears an excellent technology writer and well as writer, actor, director etc. Stephen claims to have owned most smart phones and like most people have never found one he liked…
Well things are about to change at last !
Written and submitted from The Holiday Inn, Stratford-upon-Avon using a UMTS data connection on my soon to be retired Nokia N95.
Last week I was in Norway attending the annual InformNorden Conference, which is an event which covers the issues and impacts of ICT on Public Transport in Northern Europe. To some extent you might imagine this represents a culture clash between largely conservative public sector organisations administrating transport networks and technology providers.
This is actually not the case, and in the Nordic region in particular, public transport makes excellent use of technology; from journey planning to card based payment systems like London’s Oyster. In most cities it is common to see electronic displays with arrival times of buses/trams subway trains etc.
This has, in most cities, had a noticeable impact on the use of public transport, with increased passenger numbers following the introduction of the technology.
My interest in the conference was in talking to these public transport operators to get access to their schedule information to include in Google Transit, a project to bring routing using public transport to users of Google applications, like Google Maps and Google Maps for Mobile.
This complements the operators own web-sites by providing schedule information alongside other points of interest data and imagery, users can always click through to the operators own web-sites for real time information and service updates.
Technology like this really can make a big difference in terms of making public transport a more acceptable solution for many, knowing a bus will be at you local bus stop in 6 minutes might just stop you jumping in the car to make the same journey. Or knowing that there is a tram stop 1 minute away from the cinema and that there is a tram arriving there 15 minutes before the movie.
Imagine your commute to work downloading tunes to your new iPod Touch via wifi using the pilot system running in Helsinki at the moment. This system which by providing broadband internet access on a proportion of the bus and tram fleet in Helsinki, means that it is possible to track these buses and trams in real time using a Google Maps application – very cool.
Following along with the transport technology theme, this post was submitted from the 13:00 London-Edinburgh GNER train service somewhere outside Peterborough, using the onboard wifi service.
No hell has not frozen over, Ordnance Survey finally launched their explore portal this week, a site designed for walkers, hikers, cyclists and anyone interested in the outdoors to share their walks and favourite places.
Although this is nothing new, platial after all offered similar functionality a few years ago, this has been a long time coming, I was involved in some of the design work over a year ago! this is still an important step forward for the OS.
From a technology point of view the service was/is underpinned by the backend system developed to support the long delayed OpenSpace project, so hopefully there will be news about that soon.
Although I would take issue with some of the T&C’s, this really is progress in the right direction from Southampton.
Update: My first walk is here.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
As with all software Easter Eggs who first finds them is open to debate, Marco’s Blog a blog by a South African student has at least been reported in a couple of places..
Well it’s a bit of fun, and actually if you are into to VFR flying (looking out of the windows rather than using instruments) it’s a pretty good expereince. As many have noted the SR22 is easier to get started with than with the F16 , which is way sensitive.
Just don’t expect the FAA to allow hours on Google Earth to count towards your ticket 🙂
Written and submitted from the BA Lounge, Gatwick Airport, using the BT Openzone network.
In the effort to find lower cost wireless data access I like I’m sure many others signed up to the new Vodafone “Mobile Internet” tariff for data access on my N95.
This offers be 120Mb of data per month for £7.50 or $15.00 – not brilliant value but OK !
So imagine my surprise when I got a monthly bill for well over £100 ($200), of course I went straight to the vodafone website to check my bill, but all I got was this..
The online billing part of the Vodafone website has been broken for at least the last week ? Could this be anything to do with vodafone billing its customers the old and very expensive tariff for data by mistake ?
I waiting now for a paper bill to see why my last months bill is three or four times what it usually is – some coincidence don’t you think ?
Check you bills vodafone customers !!
Written and submitted from the M11 Services, using the BTOpenzone wifi network.
(Glamourous life this !!)
We were joking in the office last week, while preparing for the launch of sky in Goggle earth, how long would it take for somebody to mash-up the USS enterprise somewhere in the universe.
Well we were close in our estimates,Captain Kirk was found within a few hours !
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.