How serious is Nokia about the LBS and Local Search space, well at least $7bn is would appear if today’s report in the Wall Street Journal is accurate. Following the Tom-Tom play for Tele Atlas, Navteq was always going to be up next.
At $7bn this makes the Tele Atlas deal of approx €2bn look great value ?
Written and submitted from the Scandic Regina Hotel, Herning, Denmark, using the hotels free 802.11 network.
No hell has not frozen over, Ordnance Survey finally launched their explore portal this week, a site designed for walkers, hikers, cyclists and anyone interested in the outdoors to share their walks and favourite places.
Although this is nothing new, platial after all offered similar functionality a few years ago, this has been a long time coming, I was involved in some of the design work over a year ago! this is still an important step forward for the OS.
From a technology point of view the service was/is underpinned by the backend system developed to support the long delayed OpenSpace project, so hopefully there will be news about that soon.
Although I would take issue with some of the T&C’s, this really is progress in the right direction from Southampton.
Update: My first walk is here.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
I am not going to comment on this weeks Story in the Guardian, as I would never discuss the details of any potential commercial arrangement in public.
But I am personally very disappointed for the people at CASA at University College London who have developed a world class 3D city model which could potentially have been licensed to many organisations, not just Google.
Keep up the great work guys, it is vital for University departments to both move forward the science of GIS but also innovate in a commercial setting and develop products and techniques which have the potential to be used both by Industry and Government.
Have a few beers over the weekend, and enjoy the rest of your vacation !!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Just listening to the conference call on the Tom Tom acquisition of Tele Atlas one of the major drivers behind the deal is the recognition of an ecosystem between PND’s capturing geospatial data and traditional “professional” GIS data capture techniques.
Without community generated content, in a online future if will not be possible to provide the expected level of currency of data – Strong stuff but hard to argue with.
If this is not a wake-up call for the traditional mapping organsiations I don’t know what else is !!
Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.
If you really want to take the temperature of the wider GI community this weekends The State of the Map meeting in Manchester should be well worth the trip.
The potential for community generated geo data is now recognised by many of the major commercial providers of Geodata, and I’m hearing rumours that the much delayed OS OpenSpace API will be released soon.
Hope to see you there !!
Written and Submitted from the Hotel du Lac Hotel, d’Enghien-Les-Bains, France using the in-room broadband network.
Projects like OpenStreetMap have proved that it is possible to replicate professional ground survey using low cost consumer grade GPS to create vector data sets that have the potential to complete with commercial datasets. Today I came across a website which describes a technology that could do the same for aerial imagery. Pict’Earth describe combining low cost devices which many of us already have to develop a very low cost real time aerial surveillance platform.
Using a Nokia N95, Imagery and positional information is captured and sent to the ground live during flight on a low cost model aircraft and displayed in Google Earth in near real-time. This imagery can be shared via the web with any internet connected google earth client, anywhere in the world.
Alternatively the same information can be post-processed to produce geo-referenced photo mosaics.
This is just amazing !! Ok so its not orthophotography, but then for most applications that’s not needed, key other than some good software, is the use of the N95, a 5 megapixel camera, a commuincation device and a GPS is a small cheap package – and you thought it was a phone !
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg have completed, their important review of the potential value of Government generated information, when combined with citizen contributed information and tools.
The Power of Information review commissioned by the cabinet office, is a very important report in my opinion – noting the value of Public Sector information, but also recognising that it is when this information is in the hands of the citizen, it becomes most valuable.
The report should be seen as a way for government to catch up with and serve the needs of the “mash-up” generation who will increasingly become a demanding group of citizens who understand the power of information.
It will be interesting to see the Governments response to the report, as is often the case we must remember that Government does not speak with a single voice, but the fact that the Cabinet office commissioned this independent report in the the first place is very positive.
If you are a UK reader I recommend downloading and reading this report, there is one recommendation that is close to my heart :-), and another that is just vital –
Recommendation 9. By Budget 2008, government should commission and publish an
independent review of the costs and benefits of the current trading fund charging model for the re-use of public sector information, including the role of the five largest trading funds, the balance of direct versus downstream economic revenue, and the impact on the quality of public sector information.
For too long the debate about cost recovery has been carried out in a vacuum without an authoritative economic justification of the statue quo – this recommendation would either prove the case for the OS so it would no longer have to defend itself, or prove the case of the free data lobby – and we could then get on with the important business of using geography to make the world a better place to live in.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
This week the guardian “free our data” campaign recaps on a years activities and what progress has been made, not a great deal I’m afraid, awareness may have been increased, but this is still not an issue on the political radar screen because as Charles and Michael point out, there really is nobody in government with the remit for information.
This week a comment I made at the Open Knowledge conference last weekend is used, I think, to support the campaigns aims, maybe it can be used in that way, but my intention in bringing up the “Lockerbie question” was to point out the dangers of under-funding national mapping.
The “next Lockerbie” – a disaster such as a plane crash in a remote area – could bring problems for emergency services. Last year the government ended its “National Interest Mapping Service Agreement”, which funded the mapping by Ordnance Survey of remote areas that a private organisation might not bother with. As recently as 2004-05, Nimsa made up 11% of the Ordnance Survey’s turnover. The effect, says Ed Parsons, until December chief technology officer of OS, is that changes in remote areas of Scotland may go unmapped for years – “which is fine, until the next Lockerbie happens”. OS says it will continue a “mapping for emergencies” helpline service.
I would argue that the demise of NIMSA points out the major weakness in the argument for direct taxpayer funding of national mapping activities, in the one area of the work carried out by the OS which was directly funded by government, that funding was cut when the money got tight, and these activities were sacrificed to allow DCLG to continue to fund tasks it deemed more important.
The only organisations which actually value information are those who use it, and it therefore is logical that they should pay for it.
However, although I firmly believe the current funding model for the OS is the correct one, I am not going to argue that as currently defined the licensing framework around the crown copyright data the OS manages is fit for purpose.
There needs to be a fundamentally new approach to licensing OS data which allows greater access to information, and yes for some types of data and for some types of user this would be without cost to the end user. This could be achieved with minimal impact on the financial performance of OS but could inject a major boost to the UK GI industry.
Written and submitted from the BA lounge, Schipol, using the BT Openzone 802.11 network.
The Free Our Data campaign this week asks “Will the government try to privatise the UK Hydrographic Office?” – Such a development I believe has been on the cards for some time and is a result to some extent of the continuing lack of focus or understanding of information as an asset.
You get the impression that the management of information is seen by government purely as a cost to endure rather than the potential benefit it would be, if government information was better managed and shared across .gov.uk.
In saying that, UKHO is actually more an aggregator of information rather than a producer, its value as an organisation comes from the systems and processes to carry out the complex task of rapidly bringing together global datasets produced by 100’s of other marine data collectors – quite a specialised field.
If this niche is seen as valuable enough to consider privatisation, then how much more interest can the treasury have in the other agencies which create information and therefore sit on more valuable assets ?
Written and submitted from the Apple Store, London, using its free 802.11 network.