Blog posts
Mr Jobs… No not that Steve…
This one..
Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer believes Android is ‘just a press release’, well just wait till the release of the SDK next week Steve, its way more than a press release – I know because I have seen it !
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
For the first time in my many trips to the valley, I felt the earth move this evening as the San Francisco Bay area experienced a moderate earthquake.
Of course as soon as I could I looked online at the USGS site, and within minutes the KML of the epicentre was there to view – a system that just works !
Seems that everytime I’m in Mountain View, Andy and the guys at CASA build a really useful tool, (so I need to do this trip more often) their PhotoOverlay tool, is a great help in exploiting my favourite feature of Google Earth 4.2 as demonstrated by one of my holiday pictures above.
Now if someone could come up with a method of automating the calculation of the bearing a geocoded photo was taken on, we could have millions of these PhotoOverlays available to us.
Written and submitted from the Googleplex , Mountain View.
OK so just a little tongue in cheek, but the AGI team behind the annual UK GI conference would like input in bringing in the perspective of the “Neo-geographers” in planning next years event.
This is a great idea, let’s hope that enough people in the new world of users of GI find such organisations still relevant.. this years AGI event went some way to breaking down the boundaries between the two ages of geography , lets hope the paleo-geograpahers are ready for the guys in jeans for there is much to learn !!
Written and submitted from the Googleplex , Mountain View.
I have just returned home from a well earned family vacation in Dubai, a destination that is a cross between SimCity and Disneyland as my wife describes it.
Of course I took my laptop along to keep up with email and stuff, and was thus quite impressed to see Mikel’s post about getting OSM onto the maps application on the iPhone !
Now in my mind this is one of those things that is cool that is can be done but actually nobody would do for real unless maybe they lived on the Isle of Wight, and whats wrong with Google maps anyway 🙂
However the reason for my story is that actually I could only imagine what OSM looked like on the iphone as my access to Mikel’s blog or to be precise the images on mikel’s blog was restricted.
So all I got was broken graphics icon, and if I clicked on these to force the images to be displayed I got this..
So what does the government of the UAE have against OSM on the iphone..
Nothing, actually the web filter was rejecting the images because they were served from flickr and well there are all sorts of images there that may be inconsistent with the religious, cultural and moral values of the UAE !
So I had to wait to get back home to see Mikel’s hard work, although for a few seconds I did think dark forces were at work !!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Some of the guys in the London office have been working on the Symbian native version of Google Maps for Mobile over the past months and yesterday like expectant parents launched their baby to the world, so finally you can make use of your GPS powered N95 with Google Maps !!
This is a really cool application, if you have the most up-to- date Nokia firmware you can expect to see a map centered on your location as indicated by the little blue flashing dot now familiar to GPS Blackberry GMM users, within a minute.
Have fun its at www.google.com/gmm, should work with any S60 device with built in or bluetooth GPS.
Now this is something I will miss on the Jesus Phone 🙂
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
The Analysts views on the Nokia offer for Navteq makes some interesting reading. Now that the initial excitement is over, the collective view as excellently summarised by Adena at All Points Blog is in some ways surprising.
On many occasions these industry experts describe Navteq and for that matter Tele Atlas as GPS companies, clearly demonstrating a lack of understanding of the GI / PND market.
Navteq and Tele Atlas are classic examples of the “Data is the Intel Inside” O’Reilly-ism, provided a crucial element to a larger solution not just in the navigation space, but to a lesser extent web-mapping, and even professional GIS. It’s interesting however that neither company while still independent was able to achieve brand recognition, to the extent it registered with the consumer – one did not hear “Sorry I will only buy your device if it has Tele Atlas data”.
Clearly Nokia are positioning Navigation, Maps and LBS even as a major part of their offering, in Europe marketing a Nokia PND which competes directly with Tom-Tom. But Nokia (and Tom-Tom) realises I’m sure that the future of personal navigation will increasingly be off-board navigation delivered to mobile devices perhaps delivered through channels independent of both the mobile industry and the automotive industry who are too conservative in their approach.
For the PND potential alone this deals make sense for Tom-Tom and Nokia as they provide control over a major cost of their solutions, what will be interesting in the future will be the relative contribution made by “Cloud” collected data, as organisations like OpenStreetMap, and the new generation of devices start to collect data themselves as they are used. If this grows as rapidly as some expect, it will make there acquisitions appear even more expensive.
Written and submitted from the BA Lounge, Heathrow Airport, using the BTOpenzone 802.11 network.
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.
Today the long anticipated Pixelmator image editing application for the Mac was released, and for me it is quite a birthday present. For a long time I have used Photoshop which was too complicated for my needs, or Photoshop Elements which was just too windows like.
Pixelmator the product of London Brothers Saulius and Aidas Dailide is just perfect for my needs – and boy does it exploit the modern Macintosh system exploiting OS X’s core image technology and making use of that powerful GPU you have sitting in your Mac, it is fast and looks beautiful.
For just over £30 if this does not win awards this year there is no justice.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Just got back from the 2007 AGI conference, which I thought was a massive improvement on previous years events. Steven Feldman and his team at the AGI have done a great job downscaling the event, and taking a new direction as a residential conference for the GI industry to talk to itself.
The GI industry in the UK is now well beyond the stage in its maturity where there is a need for a big conference and exhibition to attract new users – today if you need GIS, you are already a user.
So this years conference was really an opportunity for the industry to meet and discuss issues and developments, and to help develop a sense of community.
This year the recurring theme seemed to be the impact of Neogeography (Andrew Turner has a lot to answer for !!) on the traditional GIS industry or Paleogeography as I called it in my keynote.
I think, there is still someway to go for the GIS industry to fully come to terms with the potential that a neogeography approach to providing solutions to users has, and there is still a large amount of scepticism, but I was really pleased to see a programme which contained a number of “neogeo” presentations.
Of particular note for me, Ian Holt and John Abbott of Widr gave two excellent practical demonstrations of building mashups using location aware API’s, Ed Freyfogle of Nestoria was impressive as ever and Nick Black opened many peoples eyes in the audience to OpenStreetMap, many of whom it would appear had not come across it before.
Nick introduced Cloud Made a new project in collaboration with Steve Coast to offer commercial support to organisations wanting to use OpenStreetMap data – Cloud Made is only just getting off the ground, but think Redhat and Linux.
There really are two ages of geography at the moment, the established GIS industry is great at serving the needs of organisations for which geospatial data really is core and for creating core large scale geospatial data. This will not change fundamentally, although there are important lessons in particular around simplicity of tools and licensing models that can be picked up from neogeography !
On the other hand Neogeography offers a better approach to communicate and engage with communities of users who need to use geography to put whatever data they are interested in, in context. This is potentially everybody !!
Vanessa Lawrence in her presentation confirmed that the OS will be releasing the OpenSpace API before Christmas!! I have a couple of bottles of Champagne I promised the team once upon a time, that I can put back on the ice !
In many ways this year the conference also seemed to represent to some extent a handover to a more relaxed and down to earth view of the industry, no better demonstrated than by the soon to be infamous AGI party, partly captured on my camera phone !
GIS professionals dressed up as village people… that would never have worked 15 years ago in Birmingham !!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.