Categories
GIS

Here comes 2008 !

So roll on 2008, it’s a great time to be involved with geospatial technology in all it forms, and for its great to be part of an industry that is touching so many more peoples lives…

Part of the excitment I feel is due to the fact that the industry is changing to finally better suit the needs of a wider community of users rather than just the professional GIS users. Some indication of this rate of change can be seen in a simple analysis of the search terms used in our favourite serach engine and how these have changed over the last few years.

Using the Google Trends tool it is possible to track how often a term is searched for, and to compare this over time.

OS Trends
Search for “Ordnance Survey”

For example it is interesting to compare the decreasing trend for “Ordnance Survey” with the increasing trend for “Tele Atlas” and “Navteq”.

navteq_graph.png
Search for “Navteq”

The change reflected here I would suggest is the change is focus of users away from local data provders to international suppliers and of course the move away from paper mapping to electronic mapping for many consumers.

Of course it’s easy to read too much into these trends, but as a measure of interest or attention amongst internet users these trends are interesting, I’ll leave it up to you to stop other geospatial search term trends, but look forward for another 12 months of upheaval as the structure and focus of the industry concerned with geographic information continues to change and broaden its appeal beyond the professional (paleogeography) market.

Happy New Year !!

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

Categories
Ordnance Survey Thoughts

Dr Vanessa V Lawrence CB

In this years New Years Honours my old boss at the OS has been made a Companion of the Order of the Bath, a honour bestowed upon senior members of the civil service within the UK and a true badge of the establishment.

Congratulations Vanessa, this is well deserved (I’m sure getting OpenSpace out of the door helped 🙂 ), btw can you get me an introduction with Kylie ?

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

Categories
Technology Thoughts

Someday all hotel rooms will come with an iMac

City Inn with iMac

This week I ended up unexpectedly staying a night in Manchester and chose the City Inn Hotel close to the station (No drunk Manchester Utd players is always a plus point in my mind), anyway I was amazed to see rather than the usual hotel room TV, a iMac sitting on the desk.

It was running a highly customerised version of Front Row which allowed me to watch TV, but it also gave me full user access to MacOS, so i could surf, email, charge my iphone etc.

Very neat !

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.