Love this youTube video review from Nicks Technopics of the ground breaking Map Share feature on the current generation of Tom-Tom devices, but just look out for the coolest cheatcodes yet at the end of the video.
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
So my plans have changed and I will now be going along to the State of the Map Conference in Limerick. I Look forward to continuing the discussion of Map Maker over a few pints of the dark stuff…
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
The latest release of one of my favourite location aware web applications Dopplr, has a fun new element as part of offering public profiles. Your “Personal Velocity” compares your travels and the time taken to make them, and nominates the animal closest to your average speed.
I’m very happy to say that I’m a speedy squirrel !
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
Ok, so I like many geeks of my age along with my early Sinclair computers was an Amstrad user having a CPC and a PC clone at one point. Amstrad as a manufacturer of computers disappeared years ago, there is now the Viglen brand, but they are only bought by public sector organisation who don’t know better.
Last weeks Money Programme on Bill Gates featured an interview with Sir Alan Sugar, the boss of Amstrad, indeed the AMS of Alan Michael Sugar Trading.
Siralan as he is now known from the UK version of The Apprentice, is a great character.. but if you want to understand why there is no UK company like, Apple, Microsoft, Intel or Nokia just listen to his views…
Very sad….
Written and submitted from the Frankfurt Airport, Germany, using the T-Mobile WiFi Network
As reported today in the Guardian today, there are now guidelines as to how civil servants should make use of the web as a method of communication. The result, announced by the very web literate minister Tom Watson, is a very practical and simple set of guidelines.
I can speak from personal experience that such guidelines are vital, believe it or not I was once accused of breaking the civil service code, and breaching the Official Secrets Act based on the contents of this blog… Yes really !!
I would love to see someone else from the OS take up blogging under these new guidelines and provide a much needed “human” face to the organisation.
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
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| From Wherecamp 2008 |
This weekend the geowankers camped out at the Googleplex for the second Wherecamp.
What has become an annual event the weekend after Where 2.0, Wherecamp is an unconference, a self organised event which starts without an agenda, and features talks, hacking sessions and debates suggested by the people who turn up. As Andrew Turner captured so successfully on twitter, “#wherecamp is Where2.0 2009 beta, 2010 alpha”, or maybe the other way round ?
The camp featured many excellent presentations and discussions, The value of 3D data (aka “Is 3D shit ?” ), building 3D displays, cartography for the web, geosearch, data licensing, micro formats etc., and because of the nature of the event plenty of opportunity for practical demonstrations, including the creation of gigipan images by Rich Gibson.
click to see gigapan at work
And Jeff Johnson of PictEarth capturing aerial photography of the Googleplex using a Nokia N95, in an r/c model aircraft..
As an old geezer I skipped the camping part, retreating to the comfort of my hotel room rather than a google tent for the night, but it was a great format and a great event. The contrast to the established GIS conferences in Europe is marked, the barcamp format, provides a great opportunity for more open debate and the presentation of ideas rather than products, and it’s just great fun.
EuroWherecamp Anyone ?
Written and submitted from the Googleplex, using the Google 802.11 network.
As someone points out in the comments of this Free Our Data post, the definition of the Ordnance Survey’s public task was clearly written by the OS, I would suggest maybe even Vanessa Lawrence herself.
But if you were the CEO of a large commercial organisation would you not want to write your own mission statement ? Of course you would, but in most public companies this would be done with reference to your shareholders and discussed by your executive board with the input of your industry experienced chairman, well at least in theory anyway.
The problem here is the lack of knowledgeable oversight of the activities of the OS, the public task of the OS was defined by the OS because nobody else within government was either qualified or interested to do so, things are certainly beginning to change post the Power of Information report, but still the underlying value of geospatial information; and it’s huge potential if made more accessible, remains hidden behind bureaucratic processes.
Perhaps the mythical UK Location Strategy might suggest a way forward, I wonder who wrote that…
Written and submitted from the Iberia Lounge, Madrid Airport, using its 802.11 network.
So the results are in for the Android Developer Challenge and is amazing to see how many of the nearly fifty winning entiries can be described as some form of LBS application.
As we have always thought location is a key component to the mobile applications of the future.
The example here eco2go, is an application for tracking your carbon footprint.
Take a look at the winners yourself, I can’t wait to get hold of my android phone and try some of these out..
Written and submitted from the Melia Barajas Hotel, Madrid, using its free 802.11 network.
Yahoo have released the initial version of their Yahoo! Internet Location Platform an API to access a database of place ID’s known as WOEID (Where on Earth ID’s).
In the UK we are familiar with the concept of location identifiers from the OS Mastermap TOID, which it fair to say is still to really achieve much traction. Key to success for these type of systems is their openness, something which perhaps not surprisingly, is not a major feature of TOID’s
For example try to find the TOID and location of Buckingham Palace and you will struggle unless you have licensed the very expensive Mastermap database for London, on the other hand the following http get request;
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q(‘buckingham%20palace’)
returns
22474234Point of InterestBuckingham PalaceUnited KingdomEnglandGreater LondonLondonSW1A 151.500919-0.1413651.500469-0.1420951.501369-0.14063
A nice hierarchical representation of the place of interest and its absolute location !
This could be a neat way of providing a little more structure around the geotag clouds currently multiplying, resulting in the location of popular features such as Buckingham Place becoming clusters of points.
I think this is a great start, it will be interesting to see how the APi develops with the addition of some verbs, /add for example.
Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London. (yes I’m not a where 2.0 this year, I’m saving my energy for this weekends wherecamp, and Google I/O)
Amazing what you find in the Google Cafe.. These guys are pretty cool.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.