Month: September 2005

Categories
Technology

Beauty and the beast

So after months of speculation and delayed launch dates, the i-tunes phone is released – and its a lemon !
An ugly old Motorola phone, the MotoROKR phone does not allow you to download music via a mobile network, you cannot sync songs using bluetooth and it has a Motorola user interface – remember no two Motorola phones have the same UI !!

Even during Steves Jobs demo, he came unstuck trying to use it.

The new iPod nano of the other hand is just THE thing to lust after, a very small flash-memory based iPod photo – I bought mine today at the Apple Store in London and I can’t stop just picking it up and playing with it – the design is just magical !!

If anyone every needed a lesson in the importance of industrial design this is it – I expect the iPod to continue to dominate the market, everybody will want a nano, and the ROKR will disappear.

Categories
GIS Thoughts

First Where 2.0 Podcast online

Back at the end of June, the O’Reilly media Where 2.0 conference took place in San Francisco and saw presentations from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo amongst others on their perspective of the expanding mainstream GI market. The first audio recording from this conference is now available online at the ITConversations website.

The Past and Future of Mapping is a presentation by David Rumsey a well known map collector and historian who spends 30 minutes looking at the major historical developments in cartography and points out that we are revisiting many of the techniques of the past with the latest generation of web mapping sites. This is a very interest presentation well worth listening to.

I’m just disappointed with a comment David makes at the end of the podcast comparing the situation in the US where USGS makes available geodata at no change, with the OS policy of licensing geodata to fund its operations.

David comments, as do many, that OS geodata should be free – well perhaps he would like to send us all a copy of his book Cartographica Extraordinaire: The Historical Map Transformed” for free rather than charging $80 ? – but then again maybe he needs to recover the publishing costs of the book and make a little profit to expand his collection ?

Unlike the USGS the OS is not funded by the taxpayer, and like David the OS needs to cover its costs.

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

Categories
GIS Technology

The State of the GI Nation

David Sonnen captures very well the current “State of the Nation” as far as the GI industry is concerned in his Directions Magazine article Spatial Information Management (SIM) – Then, Now, Next . I think David is right to see the disruptive effect of “big guys” on the established GI industry – funny to think of Microsoft as disruptive :-), and the move towards a mainstream SOA future for the industry.

But I think he may be missing the impact of what I would call the underground GI industry of google map hackers and the open geodata movement – here real innovation is happening. Look at how fast new datasets, OK of variable quality, appeared to track the progress of the Hurricane Katrina disaster – in some cases as the most up to date source of information.

Written and submitted from Cambridge, using a Starbucks T-Mobile 802.11 network.