Summer of Code 2009

  Google have announced the 2009 Summer of Code programme. If you are an organisation which would like to get student help in moving forward your Open Source project now it the time to get involved. Last year 1000 students took part ,working on projects from 175 organisations, including OSGeo and OpenStreetMap. Written and submitted from the …

OK if the AGI can change…

Last year I pretty much gave up on the AGI conference as it did not seem to be representative of the Geographic Industry I could see around me.  However over the past few months my attitude has begun to change, finally I pushed into completely reversing my opinion my this communication.. Yes,this is a Twitter message from AGI conference organisers announcing a stream …

mashup* – Being Location Aware Event

I am going to be speaking at the  mashup* – Being-Location-Aware Event in London on the 19th March, an event which I hope will really capture the current excitement around using  location in both mobile and desktop applications. After many false starts, your location is finally easily available to application developers allowing them to create a …

History in Google Earth – Did you miss it ?

With last months launch of Google Earth 5.0 much “mainstream” interest was focused on the capability to view under the ocean, and of course to begin the search for the lost city of Atlantis 🙂 For many however, myself included, the most important new capability is the ability to view historic images from the Google archive of satellite and aerial imagery. …

AfricaMap – GSDI 2.0 ?

As highlighted by Keir on the excellent Google Maps Mania last week,  AfricaMap is an interesting  attempt to build a repository of geospatial data about Africa, developed by the Center for Geographic analysis at Harvard University.   What is interesting about this site, is both the scope of the project and the approach taken. From decades many individuals, groups and organisations have been trying to develop Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) at …

UK government starts to get open source

As the Guardian Technology blog notes the UK government is once again trying to push Government Departments into looking at Open Source software solutions at least as an alternative to the proprietary software we all know and love. This is not the big stick approach which has been used in some other countries, here the policy is from a procurement perspective to just make …

Mapping the Victorian fires – Some important lessons for Europe ?

Nobody can have failed to be moved by the tragedy of the Bush fires which have been devastating Victoria, Australia this weekend. As reported by Official Google Australia Blog the Google Geo team in Sydney worked fast yesterday to get a real-time map of the extent of the fires available online and is has seen extensive use over the last 24 hours. A crucial …

Just brilliant @uk_trains

Blogger at the excellent Mobile Industry Review, Ben Smith has developed one of the most useful services to emerge from the event that will become known to many as #uksnow. UK trains is a BBC Backstage powered mash-up which sends travel update information from all the UK Train Operating companies to dedicated twitter feeds, so for me to …