Category: Blog

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iphone

A clash of cultures..

In the Retail industry the growth of Apple Sores has really stood out, as a success story in the electronics sector, and anyone who has ever visited a PC World or Currys Digital (Its still Dixons to me) cannot but comment on the different experiences, knowledgable enthusiastic staff, slick processes, great design etc.

Well the wheels have come of the Apple Store shine for the past two weeks, following the launch of the iPhone 3G. What a shambles, from The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Chris Mac Morrison took this photo in the Regent Street Apple store of the queue of people waiting to buy their iPhones.

Rather than continue the ground breaking activate your iPhone at home process from the old iPhone, it would appear that Apple has given in to the demands of the mobile phone operators and are selling iPhones in the same way other phones are sold on the high street, with the required ID checks, credit checks, DNA samples and general humiliation.

And of course we all know how well the O2 online store worked !

Not the usual Apple store

The tragedy is that Apple had the opportunity to change an aspect of the mobile phone industry, one of many aspects people dislike, actually its difficult to find anyone who has much positive to say about their mobile phone operator. 

I personally believe the whole industry would be in a better state if all phone were sold sim free, users would of course have to pay the full price for their devices but would then have the freedom to change operators more easily and in the process through competition drive up the standards of service provided by the operators.

Would you be happy to buy a car subsidised by a particular oil company, with the agreement that you would only buy petrol (Gas) from that companies service stations ?

A real missed opportunity, and Apple as a brand has been tarnished by association.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
Data Policy Google Maps

Show us a better way on a map

As many of us have always suspected, geospatial data is a great foundation to finding and publishing all types of government information, so it should not be unexpected that many of the entries for the Show us a better way competition to develop applications using public sector information make use of geospatial technology.

These move beyond the simple map mash-ups including for example some mobile LBS applications.

It’s wonderful to see organisations like the Dept. for Transport, Post Office and the OS 🙂 opening up their databases via API’s and simple click through licenses. These are of course temporary arrangements in many cases, but this is a great opportunity to prove the potential of publishing this information in this way.

For many years the supporters of both sides of the argument around the release of public sector information  based their argument not on real evidence, but on dogmatic positions.. hopefully we will soon have some real world examples to develop evidence to conclude the arguments one way or the other.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
iphone

02 iPhone 3G 13,000 orders per second !!

Got a nice email from Jennifer from O2 this morning, explaining why the iPhone 3G upgrade was such a disaster, the servers broke because…

“Demand for iPhone 3G is staggering. We invested heavily in our website capacity which was tested carefully in advance, but we were experiencing 13,000 orders per second being placed, far beyond our expectations.”

Wow !!! 13,000 orders per second, thats 780,000 per minute or 46 Million per hour. So Apple at that rate would reach it’s annual global sales target in the UK alone in 15 minutes.

This is either outrageous hype, or a mad cover story to hide poor planning and design of the O2 website, or .. well you had better drop everything and join everybody else you know or have ever met in the queue outside your nearest O2 store.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
iphone

O2 iPhone update : your fired !!

Upgrade not if O2 can help it

You would have though given the amount of hype, O2 would have expected people to try and buy/upgrade their iPhones as soon as they could. So with just a few days to the July 11th launch date, they roll out a clearly under powered infrastructure to take orders.. Love to hear if you manage it today, I’m going to wait till next week..

Is anybody surprised this has happened, maybe some of siralans candidates took up positions with O2 ? 

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

 

Categories
Data Policy

Show Us a Better Way

Show us a better way

I am impressed by the work that the Power of Information Task Force are doing, to drive forward the recommendations of last years highly influential report. Their latest initiative is Show Us a Better Way a £20,000 competition over the summer to identify the most useful new service which could be developed if public sector information was made more accessible.

So if your are thinking of developing a new mash-up, this is a great opportunity..

Written and submitted from the Google Office, Zurich.

Categories
GIS Google Earth Google Maps

What Map Maker is /is not

Last week Google introduced Map Maker a set of online map making tools to very positive… but not universal acclaim.

I can understand where SteveC is coming from, but I think it’s important to clarify a few points.

Map Maker is clearly not an open source project, and as such is not in competition with openstreetmap and does not I believe represent a forking opportunity for the creation of open geodata. If you wish to help build an open geodata based global map then openstreetmap is the project for you.

What Map Maker represents is the public exposure of the tool Google has been using internally for a while to “fill in the gaps” of our global mapping coverage, specifically mapping areas not currently covered by the commercial map data providers. We are now asking the users of Google Maps to help us by providing mapping data using the same tool. The data submitted is licensed by contributors to Google to eventually become part of Google Maps/Earth following moderation by Google.

This is a key difference in approach to openstreetmap, most end users of Google Maps/Earth etc. and most developers using their api’s don’t want or need access to the raw data, for them such information is most usefully made available as pre-rendered tiles.

Although not currently an open source project, it does produce data that is free to users, the information contributed by the community becomes freely available to them via Google Maps and the Maps and Earth API’s

At the moment, I believe this is the best way to rapidly expand the availability of mapping and to provide access to detailed online maps to communities which up until now have just not had access to something most of use take for granted.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
Data Policy

Crime mapping gets political

Over the past few months Crime Mapping has floated up the political agenda, reaching the mainstream with Boris Johnson’s recent call for crime mapping, echoed by the Guardian’s Free our Data campaign, and this morning followed up by the reporting of Louise Casey’s Cabinet Office report.

You would think from the media, that this is something new in the UK, but in fact Crime Mapping has been taking place for many years, and the UK has world renowned expertise as demonstrated by the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at UCL who next month are running the 6th, yes that’s the 6th National Crime Mapping Conference in Manchester.

What is new, and what should be applauded, is at last a focus on making much of this information available to the public- until now the efforts have concentrated on producing crime maps for internal consumption by police forces themselves.

As a matter of principal, making information public is always a good thing, when the information allows citizens to make decisions, and to independently monitor the services provided to them by Government.

We should not have to rely on maps like the one below created by Keir Clarke, who scraped local authority websites to build this mash-up.

London Crime map

If I can use this website to monitor the performance of British Airways, should I not be able to monitor the effectiveness of my local police force.

There is often a disconnect between peoples perception of crime and its actual occurrence, a map with a few push-pins representing successful neighbourhood policing will be much more valuable than the next crime survey report finding.

Of course there must be mechanisms to protect the identity of individual victims of crime, but is the situation really much different from the crime reporting in Local Newspapers ?

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
GIS opensource

State of the Map looking good

State of the Map

I’m afraid I won’t be able to attend this years State of the Map Conference, but the schedule looks fantastic and I’m sure Limerick as a location will provide great craic. If you have not already registered, this is a conference I would really recommend attending, without question crowd sourced geodata will be an important part of the Geospatial Industry of the future, and this is the event to hear from the pioneers.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
Google Maps

Out of Africa

Kenya

There is a great story behind this map, which illustrates why the Geospatial Industry is just so exciting at the moment, and hints at the potential of the geoweb as a global phenomenon.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
iphone

Why you need a iPhone 3G in the UK

iphone 3gActually, I’m not that excited about the GPS, and the speed of UMTS is great but for me the most important part of the new package is the UMTS network itself and its coverage.

In the UK O2 never really invested in a EDGE network as a result, most iPhone users in the UK were limited to basic GPRS networking. The 3G network of O2 is much more extensive, so I expect to be able to get faster wireless access more often.

The combination of both Cloud and BT Openzone wireless access as part of the deal, may also mean that I spend more time on wifi anyway.

And yes of course I will be picking up a new iPhone on 11 July !

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.