Google are now trialing more sophisticated sponsored locations, including company logo and url. As noted before, we should not be surprised by this, the basic Google business model is built on advertising, expected to be worth $7.5b next year, and there is no such thing as a free map !!
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.
As reported in this weeks Guardian OS Story, Tim Berners-Lee has commented on the OS and the role of Geographic Information in the semantic web.
Contrary to earlier reports, Sir Tim seems NOT to be asking for free access to geospatial data… instead, intelligent, feature based geospatial data, rather than simple mapping should be made more accessible.
Quoting directly from the Guardian…
Berners-Lee said it may be reasonable for OS, the premier state-owned supplier of public sector information, to continue to charge for its high-resolution mapping. But even if licences were required, he added, OS should make its data open to manipulation. “I want to do something with the data, I want to be able to join it with all my other data,” he said. “I want to be able to do Google Maps things to a ridiculous extent, and not limited in the way that Google Maps is.”
This is consistent with the work the OS have been undertaking in semantic referencing systems over the past couple of years, and with the development of intelligent geospatial database products like OS MasterMap.
I’m really proud of the work we are doing in this area, and it is good to see this is recognised by Sir Tim, to find out more this is a good reading list.
Written and submitted from the Holiday Inn Express Portsmouth, using my Vodafone 3G network card.
At heart I am a geographer, this IT stuff I do is really the hobby, and the geographer in me was really engaged by one of the best podcasts I have every listened too!
As part of IT Conversations excellent series, I came across the presentation of Suketu Mehta from last years Pop!Tech conference.
There is no real technology here, instead Suketu paints a very powerful picture of his home town, and as anyone who has visitied India will also recognise, he identifies much to be hopeful despite the difficulties. There is an interesting GIS message at the end, where the value of digitising Land Records is reducing rural corruption.
Find an hour or so to listen, you won’t regret it.
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.
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.
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.
I got thinking last week about the actual impact of GPS navigation systems on peoples driving habits after reports of satnavs sending people through villages as short cuts. I’m not sure this is actually the case, why I’m uncertain was an experience on a Friday evening a few weeks previously…
I travel north up the M3 almost every night, and just after the Farnborough junction hit the end of a 10-15 mile tailback. Using the AA trafficwatch service on my mobile I discovered the cause of the queue was an accident at the M25 junction a few hours earlier which had involved a truck carrying livestock !! visions of cows and sheep on the motorway – the end result was the motorway was completely closed.
As I sat in the traffic in the darkness I could not but help to notice than at least 10% of the cars had the glow of a GPS navigation system on their dashboards, if you regularly drive in the UK at night you will no doubt have become aware of the rapid growth of satnavs over the past six months or so – well done tom-tom !!!
So as I switched my satnav to detour mode, to get me off the motorway at the next junction, I had the expectation I would be joined by many others making our ways through the A-Roads of Surrey. However when I came off the motorway and followed the route shown in the map below I was almost the only car on the road, it seemed many where happy to sit and wait on the motorway ?
Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland.
With some smugness I rejoined the now empty M3 at the M25 Junction and drove home… so my question is, just how confident are people in using satnav’s to go “off route” ?
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
As James at Spatially Adjusted points out MapQuest joins GMY with it’s mapping API. Beyond the “Me too” aspects what is interesting here is that MapQuests’ business model is already very well established as an application service provider.
So here the free API is almost a demo for its commerical services, as the T&C’s state..
“The MapQuest OpenAPI is available free of charge for non-commercial use within the stated transaction levels of 50,000 combined maps and geocodes and 5,000 routes per day. If your needs fall outside of OpenAPI’s terms please refer to MapQuest Business Solutions for additional options.”
It’s easy to forget with all the hype around google local and local live, that MapQuest is still the most used web mapping engine.
Today is the first birthday of my blog, one year ago today I wrote my first blog entry and a lot has happened since!
In the industry we have seen the Web 2.0 meets mapping developments of GMY (Google, Microsoft and Yahoo), Google Earth and the announcement of ESRI”s ArcGIS Explorer a very important product for Redlands.
In the UK the creation of Address databases continues to be a complete minefield for all involved (just don’t ask me talk about address databases!!) and the debate around the funding of National Geospatial data continues, while community spatial databases like openstreetmap become a reality.
Increasing people are looking to blogs as a valid source of information as an alternative to more traditional media outlets which are often slower and increasingly lack any journalistic value just becoming repeaters of corporate PR.
There is a danger than many blogs may go that way also, I hope not – where blogs really add value is in allowing authors opinions to be expressed without restriction and this is particularly powerfully when combined with “insider” information.
I know I would be lost without my daily fix of All-Points, Spatially Adjusted with James Fee, Very Spatial, The Tao of Mac, Adam Curry Podcast.
Over the past year I have posted 157 entries on edparsons.com which have generated nearly 200,000 discrete site visits and over 600,000 page impressions.
I’m just on my way to the OGC meeting in Huntville, more details next week.
Written and submitted from Heathrow Airport, using the free internet connection in the BA lounge.
Adena at All Points Blog links to an article on Galileo in the UK’s WhatPC magazine. Now I am a little sceptical about the business model to operate Galileo, but technically i think it is an appropriate solution, but one that has been oversold.
While it is right to question the multitudes of “new” applications only possible with Galileo, it is a fact that the existing uses of Global Positioning constrained by the current GPS technology will be reduced, for example the OS surveyors maintaining our database find it almost impossible to use GPS in highly urban areas, or sometimes even too close to tree canopies – these limitations will be removed.
Other applications such as the use of precision landing systems for aircraft are possible today, but for safety reasons require the quality of location signal that Galileo will provide.
The WhatPC? article also seems to confuse the availability of good quality data and positioning, just because the UK has excellent large scale databases and a comprehensive system of postcodes does not mean that you don’t need accurate positioning technology – actually I would argue it means you actually are more reliant on positioning to provide useful services.
But at the end of the day we need to realise that Galileo is equally a political project, and who is to say that a future President McCain might not just switch of the GPS signal one day because of a potential security alert in Washington.
In these days of shabby reporting of technology stories in the mainstream media, it’s really refreshing to see the BBC’s Newsnight reporter owning up to writing a poor story on BitTorent and putting things right with a well argued online article addressing the issue with more balance.
Now if only the media could get the stories accurate in the first place, but as Adam Livingstone points out in the media’s eye the internet is populated with paedophiles and terrorists!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.