Goggles is a flash based ‘Flight simulator” that lets you fly around Google Maps imagery.
Great fun, don’t fly to low, but who knows what licensing issues this throws up 🙂
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Silicon.com reports the latest findings from analysts Canalys, who note that sales of GPS navigation systems (Satnavs) have again grown over 100% in the past year, with Tom Tom and Garmin the major players.
Doubling market share soon moves a market, so the road atlas may soon go the same way as the eight track stereo – I’m still to be convinced about smart phones as navigation devices, although clearly off-board navigation and the required wireless capability will be important over the next couple of years, the form factor is still all wrong.
The big deal will be the first sub £100, €100, $100 device..the race is on!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
So I waved farewell to my Powerbook in its bag at the check-in desk at Los Angeles Airport, with nothing more to protect than a British Airways fragile label, and watched as it disappeared down a baggage conveyor on its way to the hold of a Boeing 747 along with cases, bags, pushchairs and the gentle touch of the baggage handlers.
15 hours later, that’s 10 hours flying and five hours of general waiting, down the baggage carousel at Heathrow crashed my bag, rapidly followed by a large Samsonite and a North Face duffel bag.
So did it survive its Disney like adventure into the underworld of hold baggage… well I’m writing this entry on it, and there was not a scratch!!
So how did it survive? Good fortune.. and a few tips you might find useful if you are travelling to the UK..
Ideally you would not chose to travel with your laptop in these conditions, but life must go one..
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Hope you like the look of the new edparsons.com, based on a WordPress theme designed by Lisa Sabin of the E.Webscapes design studio, it features a Surveyors Compass, an appropriate icon giving the topic of the blog.
I just felt like a change !! and had time on my hands awaiting a long flight home to the UK, more details to follow..
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
I thought it was best to sleep on my thoughts for day 1 of the conference to contemplate what I have heard… I’m still trying to get over seeing AutoCAD and Intergraph GeoMedia demonstrated on Mainstage at a ESRI UC – that’s real interoperability for you.
Many people I have spoken to were a little disappointed by the lack of “new” stuff, as many people were already aware of the functionality in ArcGIS 9.2 at least from a desktop point of view. The Big story here however is one of consolidation around desktop, but the new stuff is all around the Server products and the wider GeoWeb vision.
I not sure everybody really “gets” what this means or the real impact of this.. In many ways the focus on servers is a more fundamental shift in thinking than the move to ArcGIS from Arc/Info, but initially for the vast majority of users at the UC whose only experience is off the desktop products this may all seem a little remote.
As I noted on Sunday, the GeoWeb vision will not be a easy ride, there are many issues to resolve not only the technology, but there is no doubt about Jack and ESRI’s commitment to it.
Written and submitted from the Wyndham San Diego Hotel, using a local open wifi network.
Jessie and Sue of Very Spatial have some temporary competition in the shape of the Directions Magazine Podcast for the ESRI UC. Their first a review of the Senior Executive Leadership Seminar is a great start.
Written and submitted from the Wyndham San Diego Hotel, using a local open wifi network.
I of course knew it was coming, but is was nevertheless a very strange experience to see my face projected 10 metres high on the six screens at the ESRI user conference, as a video made by ESRI at the OS to celebrate the organisation winning this years Presidents Award was shown.
We are of course very proud to have been given the award, but what I don’t think came across very clearly today, is that it is really an award for the whole organisation, a wonderful team of people who are represented by the eleven of us here at the user conference.
The OS Away team with Jack, David Walsh, Steve Bennett, myself, Vanessa Lawrence, David Henderson, Matt White, Tim Warr, and Chris Maidens (Not in the picture Chiran Paruchuri, Rex Corfield and Malcolm Havercroft)
The OS has come a long way in the last few years and has even further to travel to really meet the needs of our customers, but where we are today is the product of hundreds of very bright people who care with a passion about their work and the organisation they work for.
My thanks to them and to Jack for recognising our success.
Written and submitted from the Wyndham San Diego Hotel, using a local open wifi network.
And so once again 14,000 ESRI GIS users descend on Downtown San Diego for a week of technical sessions and events which often has the atmosphere of a revivalist gathering, such is the ‘Cult of ESRI”, and I really mean that is a positive way, as I am a willing member of the other great technology cult, “the cult of mac“.
The size of this event for anyone coming from the Europe is staggering, the big convention is a North American phenomenon, the ESRI UC alone for San Diego is worth no less than $46m each year.
Today I attended the Executive Session of the User Conference, both a high level introduction to GIS and an insight into the current vision of ESRI which will be covered in much more detail tomorrow, remember this is for a senior executive audience, there is little technical detail 🙂
There is a clear vision developing around the concept of the Geoweb, a network of both GI clients and servers which offer the potential to democratise not just geographic data, but also geographical knowledge as represented by the publishing of spatial models or the mounting of analytical task based servers, the ability for example for a server in Australia to process data on a server in the USA, for display on a PDA in England.
This is an evolution beyond where we are today with the publishing of Data Services as described by ESRI for some time, and popularised by the mapping API’s of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. This moves away from the relative simple and stable world of one to many publishing to the slightly scary world of many to many publishing.. initially these developments may be restricted to with corporate networks but ultimately, and here comes a very quotable phase from Jack, “The whole web becomes one GIS”.
So how realistic is this vision and how committed are ESRI to it, well ESRI as a private company have more latitude in their ability to make statements about the future than a public company, so words are cheap – however there are a couple of things that really make me think this is serious.
Firstly ESRI have put so much effort into building the necessary services technology over the past couple of years, literally thousands of man years..
The second hint is much less explicit, but is just as telling.. to make this vision work you need interoperability between systems and data, not everybody after-all is going to be using ESRI software.
For a number of years ESRI have offered I believe only lukewarm support of the OGC, and OGC standards, quite rightly in some cases being critical of some elements of them.. recently things have changed, you hear the OGC mentioned much more by ESRI staff and ESRI are much more active in the OGC helping to fix the things they think are wrong.
So time will tell, looks like another interesting week.
Written and submitted from the Wyndham San Diego Hotel, using a local open wifi network.
I watched a BBC4 documentary on my TVDrive last night (Yes it is sort of working now – for everything but LOST !) a programme called “Journeys into the ring of Fire” which looked at how the physical environment of Japan had effected things like urban settlement patterns and even the Japanese national character… does this sound like Geography to you ? Well the presenter is a geologist and all of the above is actually according to the programme due to Geology.
OK maybe I am a little sensitive about this, but the programme coincided with an email i got from David Rayner who is running a campaign to improve the profile of Geography in the media called “Give Geography its
Place”.
David does have a point I think, the GIS industry has worked hard to lose the Geography label coming up with terms like spatial and geospatial.. why ?
What is wrong with describing what we do as Geography ?
I’m on my way to the ESRI UC next week, and it good to see that they at least are still proud to be geographers, and what better call to action could a discipline want then the conference title “Geography Communicating Our World”
An interesting post from Tim who is a GeoWeb 2006 in Vancouver. Great new blog by the way..
Tim notes comments from Microsoft about their plans to create 3D city models in a “different” way to Google. Just speculating but maybe the different approach its something to do with the fact that Microsoft also own a gaming platform ?