Category: Technology

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Technology Thoughts

Scoble : from blogger to talking head

Scoble on Newsnight

Just finished watching Newsnight on TV, which had a piece on the “retirement” from full time employment at Microsoft of Bill Gates in 2008. I wonder it this announcement will have more success in delivering to date than Vista ?

Anyhow what was interesting was the BBC’s choice of Microsoft spokesperson, rather than the standard PR person or available VP they selected soon to be ex-Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble.

A case of unintended consequences perhaps or that bloggers are recognised by producers as “spin-free” ?

Anyway thought he did a pretty good job for a “not a PR person.”

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

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Technology Thoughts

BBC reports the end of the Scobleizer blog

The importance of corporate bloggers as a source of useful information (mostly without spin) was demonstrated by yesterdays reporting of the resignation of Robert Scoble from Microsoft by the BBC.

Scobles’ blog, for many a must read to understand what was actually happening in Redmond, had become a true icon of the blogosphere.

I’m not sure either Scoble or Microsoft fully understand the impact of his resignation, or the shift in users focus from relining on corporate PR to blogs for information.

Written and submitted from the Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, using the hotels broadband network.

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Technology Thoughts

Berners-Lee backs net neutrality

Silicon.com reports on a presentation given by Tim Berners-Lee in Edinburgh yesterday putting his support behind the movement to maintain the concept of “Net Neutrality”.

Net Neutrality describes the current status quo where all network traffic is equal in the eyes of the providers of network infrastructure, e.g your network packet containing email to granny is the same as a packet containing some video from youtube.com.

The network providers, in the US in particular, want to change this and charge a premium for particular content, as a way of potentially reducing plague of p2p traffic you might look at this, but the reality is these guys just want to get paid twice.

I hate to say this but this may be a difficult battle to fight, the idea of value based pricing of infrastructure is well established in other areas, your car tax is much less than that of a 30 tonne truck…
however we really must try all we can to protect the pricing model of today, unlike the physical world there is no actual difference between network traffic containing different content, unfortunately lawmakers seem to have great difficulty understanding the world of bits rather than atoms !

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GIS GPS Technology Thoughts

London Black Cabs add GPS

Evening Standard

This evenings Evening Standard, London’s evening newspaper reports that for the first time London’s Black Taxi Cab drivers are to be allowed to supplement they “Knowledge” of the streets of London with GPS navigation systems.

For the Public Carriage Office, not an organisation known for its grip on technology (have you ever tried to pay by credit card in a London Taxi ?) to adopt this is a massive leap forward.

This could get interesting.. is the navigation system a match for the encyclopaedic knowledge of you average London taxi driver, I actually doubt it, the intricate knowledge of the streets of London and how congested they are likely to be at any point of time is something very difficult to capture at present – another “sense of place” type of data where traditional GI approaches fail.

Still there is no longer an excuse to hear.. “Sorry Guv, Can’t go south of the river!”

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

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Technology

edparsons.com nominated for 2006 New Media Awards

nma2006nominatedbutton.gif

My Blog has been nominated for this years New Statesman New Media Award, in the Modernising government category, which aims to highlight “the most innovative use of new media technology to improve efficiency and modernise services at any level of government.”

While I’m very pleased to be nominated, I am most proud of the fact that the nomination came from Tom Steinberg of mysociety, the driving force behind the www.theyworkforyou.com and www.writetothem.com websites, two of the most influential public participation websites in the UK.

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

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GIS Technology Thoughts

The Search for Geospatial Attention

As a regular listener to Steve Gillmors’ Gillmor Gang podcast, I have become familiar with the concept of Attention, which is now entering the technology mainstream with a good writeup in MIT’s Technology Review

Attention as a concept is a realisation that with the massive increase in content on the internet, both professional and “consumer” generated, what we as users chose as sources of useful information actually has value.

What a community of knowledgeable individuals has an interested in, their combined attention has enormous value for other users – who need to know the current “in-thing”. This attention is also of interest to the marketing and advertising industries which are driving the economy of Web 2.0, having much more value that the simplistic view of page views as a measure of eyeballs!

To see attention at work just look at the ‘Hot Tags” at a site like Technorati, which to a certain extent express the combined attention of the blogging community. Likewise you purchase history at itunes, amazon etc, your shared bookmarks at del.icio.us are also manifestations of your attention.

There is a growing concern that such attention information, because of its value, needs protection and the development of the Attention Trust to raise awareness of the issue is very timely.

So where does this discussion interact with the world of geospatial information, well…

Did you realise how much information the developers of Geographic Exploration Systems and web mapping applications have the ability to collect, based on how you interact with their systems?

They know which parts of the planet you virtually visit with the most frequency, when you produce mapping of a particular area, and where you then next produce mapping for, they know where you are from IP location processing and potentially much more if you have registered to use their systems.

I wonder what the value to a marketing company would be to know the most popular searched location for IT workers in Denver, or after looking a maps of Las Vegas Strip the next location visited by the majority of users was ….

Remember your attention has value !!

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

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Technology Thoughts

Are you Web 2.0 ?

So how cool is you site, do you use AJAX? is your content developed by a community of interested users as an experiment is social networks, do you have millions of users and no obvious business model (hang on.. that can’t be right), in other words is your site on the Web2.0 List.

If you want to impress you friends in the pub tonight and convince them that you are worth some VC funding, just throw any dozen of these sites into your conversation and remember to drop the last ‘e’ from your site name.

I’m off for a few days holiday so have a great Eastr weekend 🙂

Categories
GIS Technology Thoughts

Location, Location, Location

Location Intelligence

My wife Lisa, loves the Channel 4 TV programme Location, Location, Location in which Phil and Kirstie our friendly property experts, try to find a new house for a member of the general public who think they know what they want, but almost always don’t have enough money.

I mention this, as today I attended the Location Intelligence Conference, and was on a panel discussing “For how long will spatial data be free” – the short answer is that is isn’t now and it never will be!! – more on this in a later post…

Anyway Phil and Kirstie come into this because I was amazed at the number of mash-ups presented which were ‘Real Estate” applications, clearly the first real mash-up of Google Maps and Craigs List was groundbreaking, but over a year later I was looking for a bit more innovation.

Maybe this is a reflection of where the money is, the excellent theme of the conference is profiting from Location Intelligence Technology, and clearly there is a real market here which can be addressed by tools build using Microsoft Live Local technology for example. But in many ways the mash-up session felt like a similar session 10 years ago, when the same applications were developed using the first generation of desktop GIS, the technology has changed but the commercial markets are the same ?

Eye Candy remains important, and the best audience response was reserved for the wonderful “Pirate map” interface developed using the Yahoo Flash api.

An interesting question was posed at the final Q&A session of the day, and was left unsurprisingly unanswered… When will there be a standard mapping api adopted by all the portal vendors so that an application developed using google local, would work with MapQuest and Microsoft ?

Written and submitted from the Parc 55 Hotel, San Francisco, using the hotels broadband connection.

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Apple Technology Thoughts

Is that a laptop in your bag ?

X-Ray of Powerbook

Peter Cochrane this week in his blog, talks about the potential of technology such as Iris scanning to spend up the process of security checks at airports.

As someone who has passed through Heathrow a couple of times in the last month, what I want to understand is what has gone wrong with the x-ray machines, that laptops now need to be screened outside of their bags. The BAA website is now warning of the potential delays caused by the change.

I know this has been the case in the USA since 9/11, but then the TSA also x-ray your shoes and confiscate plastic toy dinosaurs !!

You would think with the sophistication of modern x-ray machines a few millimetres of nylon bag would not confuse them – or maybe I’m missing something ?

Written and submitted from the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Dubai, using the hotels broadband connection.

Categories
GIS GPS Technology Thoughts

Outdoor Gadgets

Outdoors Show 2006

I spent a very enjoyable Saturday this weekend, helping to man the Ordnance Survey stand at the Outdoors Show, a public exhibition for everybody who enjoys the outdoors.

Amongst all the stands showing canoes, sleeping bags, climbing ropes, and maps !! what really got my interest was the every growing number of vendors of “high tech” equipment that offer, in effect, consumer GIS software.

Doing very good business were Memory Map, Anquet and Fugawi all selling applications which provide the display of OS Landranger and Explorer mapping on PC’s, and most relevantly on PDA’s and Smartphones.

Garmin had a large stand with their wide range of consumer focused GPS recievers, including the nuvi, which I blogged about last year

But “Best of Show” for me was some real innovation from a small Cambridge company, Viewranger. The OS research team have demonstrated in the past a PDA prototype “Magic window”, which demonstrated the concept of using a mobile device and a geographic information to allow users to identify geographic features based on their location and the know location of the viewer.

Magic Window

It’s fantastic to see Ordnance Survey partners making these concepts reality, ViewRanger is an immersive mapping tool that displays a labelled representation of a view from any particular point on a GPS enabled, symbian based mobile phone.

Viewranger

It also allows users to upload “tags” or comments and photographs of particular locations onto a central server, where they can be shared, a very nice touch and another example of how important social networking techniques will be for geographic information.

Viewrangers’ Mike Brocklehurst, told me they are working on a windows mobile version of this application, so although its still early days – it clear outdoor gadgets are becoming very cool !

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