Month: May 2007

Categories
LBS Thoughts

The price of a map on my phone – £0.00

There is a campaign that Mastercard runs in the UK and maybe elsewhere comparing the value of goods and services with the value of Mastercard, of course the value of Mastercard is always priceless ! Well is appears over the past couple of months and with the latest announcement from Motorola picked up by All Points Blog, The price of maps on a phone is zero.

I have two mobile devices I carry around with me, my N95 and a Blackberry both of which have manufacturer installed mapping applications which offer extensive street level mapping data free of charge.. in the case of the N95 I can even download offline a global mapping dataset to store on my 2GB storage card so that I won’t incur the stupid data rates imposed by the network operators in the UK

Of course if you don’t have a new Nokia, Motorola or Blackberry you can download Google Maps for Mobile which delivers the same Google maps experience of the desktop on any mobile device which can run Java.

I remember as a data supplier we had such high hopes of the mobile market and LBS taking off as a major revenue stream, it still is a potentially a major stream, but it is certainly not going to be the gold mine it was hoped to be with individual transaction based billing of consumers. That was always going to be too costly and complex to build a business model around, at best a subscription model as used for some of the navigation applications might be sustainable.. but time will tell.

Written and submitted from Hyatt Hotel, Calgary, using its in-room wired network.

Categories
GIS Thoughts

GeoTEC – GIS Conferences the Canadian way..

GeoTEc 2007

This week I’m in Calgary at the GeoTEC 2007 conference, where I was asked to deliver the Keynote and it is proving to be an interesting contrast with conferences back in the UK.

Outside of user conferences and a few academic conferences, it is unusual to find particularly technical presentations and workshop sessions – things that appeal to me and the “hands-on people” in GIS.

Well that is certainly not the case here, taken at random from the programme..

Advanced LIDAR processing;

Intercomparison of DEM Terrain and Watershed Attributes Derived from Three Independent Sources;

Google Earth adds a New Dimension: Dynamic Time based Data Display;

and The 1901 Census as a indication of the Spatial Existence of a Letis Homeland.

Matt Ball and his team have developed a strong technical programme which has attracted over 1000 people to Calgary, and most of those will have had to fly here, arrange accommodation etc.. In Canada at least there is a strong demand for such content – and this is the 21st GeoTEC conference.

I have often had the debate with people back in the UK why we don’t have such strong technical programmes at UK conferences, which end up often only with “Hello I’m from [organisation A] and I did this with my GIS, and here is [Vendor X] who helped me do it”, or lets bash the OS (easy target) and “Why does nobody listen to us”.

Answers on a postcard, or maybe I can convince Matt to come and run a conference in the UK.

Written and submitted from Hyatt Hotel, Calgary, using its in-room wired network.

Categories
Google Maps LBS neogeography

LBS and actionable content..

Like myself you may have been using the mobile version of Google Maps for the last year or so and it works very well, the application is well adapted to mobile devices – if you look carefully you will see that it uses a different rendering to the normal browser based Google Maps – mobile cartography needs to be different !!

Google Maps Mobile

This week a new version of maps was released in the UK which starts to really deliver on the potential of location based services, now like our American cousins we have up to date points of interest information available, so that if you try to search for a business you will actually find one now..

It’s not new or unique but what I think is really important here it that the content about locations is actionable, so if I search for a pub in London called “The Garrison” I am presented with a map, directions to the pub from where I might be, its address and telephone number which if I click on actually is dialled by the phone – remember the N95 and suchlike actually have telephone capability as well as GPS, WiFi, cameras, coffee machines etc. in them as well 🙂

Content that is actionable is key I believe to LBS finally taking off, a map on a screen is not enough, it’s still often easier to ask somebody for directions, but how likely is it that they will know a pub’s telephone number or its opening hours..

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