Category: Thoughts

The redesigned Google Maps Developers site is a great resource not only for documentation for the now numerous API’s but also a great showcase of how developers have brought mapping to their sites. Of particular interest to me are the case studies from the creative agencies where mapping and in particular Street View has resulted in some really cool sites.. forget pins on a map, how about Zombies outside your house!

The family of API’s have long ago moved beyond fixing pins on the map, complex routing between multiple points can be calculated using the distance matrix web service, visualised using the styled maps API and integrated with location aware applications using the places API.

And despite what you might have heard all this comes free for most sites !

The maps API has come a long way from Housing Maps

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Great to see the late Tommy Flowers getting the recognition he deserves, a man who because of secrecy and lack of vision was never fully appreciated in the UK.

This brilliant new video on Colossus explains the story..

This blog post by Lynette coincides with the opening of a new Gallery at the National Museum of Computing featuring the rebuilt Colossus computer itself the product of the amazing effort of Tony Sale.

I spent an amazing hour with Tony a few years ago, before his death last year, as he showed me around the Colossus, I imagine Tommy was similar .. a quiet unassuming man who changed the world.

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

“Will A “Geo-Divide” Arise Between Nations In The Future?”

Kevin is right on the money with this, although I would argue the timeframes could be compressed by a factor of two.. we are already beginning to see a divide emerging even within Europe.. Street view vs. non-Street view countries for example.. or the ludicrous decision of a French court re Google Maps !

The fundamental tension remains the ability of Governmental and legal frameworks to keep pace with technological change, but increasingly this is no longer an academic debate as nations economies will be directly impacted.

If you were a geo entrepreneur where would you set up your business ?

Written and Submitted from the ALoft Hotel, Broomfield. CO. (39.905N, 105.090W)

One of the benefits of getting comprehensive public transport information fully integrated in Google Maps is the potential to include public transport in all forms of local search. An example of this is the experiment launched over the weekend to search for hotels based upon a travel time from a location. In the example below searching for Hotels within 25 minutes of the Google Office by public transport…

The use of travel time or isocrone maps is of course not new , Mapumental really pioneered they use on line with their public transport map developed with Channel 4,  the next step for Google was greater integration of  this analytical capability with local search in near real time !

The areas you can easily reach from your point of interest are spotlighted on the map, and you can modify the search criteria using different maximum travel times or methods of travel, perhaps you only want to find hotels only within 10 minutes walk,  the map will update automatically to show a new spotlighted area and the nearby hotels.

You can also drag the red pin to find hotels near other places you might like to visit and agin the map will automatically refresh.

This has been a very long time in coming, finally national travel planning become easier as Google Maps now includes information on National train routes and timetables. The National Rail information joins local transit data, to offer true national multi-modal travel planning to users of Google Maps on the web, and more importantly mobile via Google Maps for Mobile.

This is a great example of the benefits of opening up public data sets, the national rail timetable data is been provided via the people at thetrainline.com who have great expertise in dealing with the complexities of the unique railway system in Britain.

It’s now possible to get step by step directions from your Hotel in Bristol to Edinburgh Castle only using public transport, a combination of walking, bus and train travel delivered to your mobile phone.

If you are a tech-savy parent and are wondering how you can help your children learn useful ICT skills after the well deserved criticism of the GCSE IT curriculum, buy a Raspberry Pi when they go on sale and let your kinds discover computers perhaps in the way you did ?

Oh, did I mention they will only cost $35 !

I’m planning to order a Raspberry PI, when they go on sale, but the latest update from the team producing the cheap hobbyist computer should be required reading for UK politicians trying to restart manufacturing capacity in Britain.

Bottom line, UK companies are too slow, too expensive and perhaps most importantly it is more tax efficient to import a device manufactured outside the UK than it is to build one here !

Freedom is in Peril

A sister to the more famous “Keep Calm Carry on” World War II poster, this version seems a most approriate message to all users on the internet in 2012.

Interestingly according to the people at the Imperial War Museum, neither version was actually used, although the simplicity and directness of both messages in these days of social media status updates is very effective.

#blogpost

Makes me proud to be a Googler ! #blogpost

Google has donated £550,000 ($850,000) towards the £15 million project to renovate Bletchley Park. The donation from Mountain View is part of a $100 million charitable program that's previously helped rescue Alan Turing's personal papers. The country estate is the former home of Station X and the British Government's Code and Cypher School, which was where the World War Two model of the Enigma Machine was decrypted. Turing, its most famous alumnus went on to pioneer computer science and artif…

Area51a? now visible in Google Earth/Maps.

Interesting contrast with the main site at Groom Lake, seems operating UAV’s needs much less space and infrastructure. Not sure what Chuck Yeager would think of robot pilots, but its clearly the future.
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A new satellite image of an isolated airstrip in Nevada shows a secret but operational unmanned air vehicle (UAV) test facility. The Yucca Lake airfield,…