Category: Blog

Blog posts

GIS

Why LBS Applications Fail

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date January 31, 2007

Directions have an interesting article by David Williams, on why LBS has failed to taken off so far identifying the “Seven” deadly sins which cause LBS Applications to fail.

The sins to me look like they could be applied to any new mobile application type, so perhaps there is actually nothing special about LBS – how many other new families of Mobile applications have actually developed in the last five years and are actually increasing ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) ? Music downloads maybe ?
To me it is still about the user experience… despite being a guy and naturally reticent about asking people for directions – it is still easier and more useful to do so, than to use one of today’s LBS applications.

Written and submitted from Zurich Airport, using the Swisscom 802.11 network.

Neogeography defined

Neogeography shortcut If you want a quick introduction into the new ways of creating and using Geographic Information, that has got such a lot of us excited, you could not go wrong by handing over $7.99 to the guys at O’Reilly.com for a copy of “An Introduction to Neogeography” by Andrew Turner the guy behind the highearthorbit blog.

As with the other O’Reilly Short Cuts this is a short (54 page) pdf primer to the subject which gives a great overview of a new emerging part of the technology landscape.

Read this and you should understand why the established GI Industry needs to be looking over its shoulder.

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

GIS GPS

Lets be having you by GPS

The BBC reports on the antics of some New York Thieves, who stole some GPS receivers thinking they were phones and we caught when the GPS systems “phoned home” and told the cops where they and the thieves were hanging out !!

Surely a candidate for a new category of Darwin Awards

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

Google Earth Thoughts

Google Earth developers campout

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date January 20, 2007

Where do you find the development team behind the Mac version of Google Earth, the night before the Macworld Expo, Yes they join the line outside to get the best keynote seats the night before. Well they get my respect!!

Campout

That is real team building.. Well done Rose !!

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

GIS web 2.0

Mash-up lessons for e-Government

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date January 18, 2007
6 Comments on Mash-up lessons for e-Government

I was asked to speak yesterday at the e-Government National Awards Conference at the Savoy, in London – very nice gig btw!!! I was presenting on the potential impact of web 2.0 approaches and the development of mash-up applications to future e-Government services.

Coincidently a perfect example of what I was suggesting as a future approach was announced yesterday by the US Environmental Protection Agency who are taking their first steps by publishing the locations of some contaminated land sites in XML of their website, with the specific intention of allowing citizens to analyse the data themselves. Of course raw data has always been more available in the US and I not getting into that debate… the difference here is that by publishing data in XML the EPA are opening up the data for people to manipulate using their own lightweight applications.

Such approaches to providing public access to government information are by their nature simple and rapid to implement, with the current focus on “shared services” in government and bringing together back-end systems to reduce cost, we should not forget that they are simple and cheap approaches to providing greater levels of information to the citizen by allowing the citizen to carry out the analysis themselves.

Another key point I made was that the next generation of citizens, “Generation Y” if you like, are in many ways more open to sharing data, having grown up defining they characters on-line on mySpace and Bebo than today’s. However this willingness to share data with others, even government? comes from the fact that as authors their “own” their own data and are free to modify, correct and update it.

For anyone delivering the citizen services of the future here is an important lesson – it is NOT your data, it is the citizens and they must feel true ownership of it.

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

GIS LBS Thoughts

The challenge to deliver Location based services

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date January 16, 2007
2 Comments on The challenge to deliver Location based services

Last week I spent a couple of days with Reuters, as part of their excellent Innovation Programme looking at the potential for new products and services in the next 5-10 years. It is vital for information businesses such as Reuters to do this, as it is for any knowledge business, as the barriers to entry in the web 2.0 world are low for future potential competitors.

Within the geospatial industry many of us are excited by the prospect of ambient geospatial information and the ability of future devices to really deliver services using the location of the user to provide the much needed context.

The interest of Reuters in this is just one example of the increased awareness of the importance of “where” in delivering future consumer focused services, as with many things maybe it will take at least three or four attempts for “location based services” to reach the mainstream.

There are still many challenges to deliver LBS operationally, data availability, privacy concerns, standards, etc and of course the business model – however maybe awareness and the interest to innovate in this space is no longer a problem

If you don’t believe me just type iPhone and GPS into Google and see what you get !

Written and submitted from Starbucks, Fleet Street, using the BTOpenzone 802.11 network.

GIS web 2.0

Nestoria Interview

Nestoria, a real UK based Web 2.0 success story, have an interview with me on their company blog.

If you are not sure of the business impact of the use of mash-up technology, and the difference the widespread availability of geospatial data and tools is making to new innovative businesses you should look at what Nestoria are doing.

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

Apple

“Not too shabby, is it..”

I want one on these… but can I really wait a year !! Interesting that one of the main apps chosen by Steve Jobs to demonstrate the Apple phone was Google Maps !!

Wifi, Bluetooth, iPod functionality, and very useful mobile browser based on Safari, and of course a user interface to die for..

Very, Very Cool !!

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

Apple GPS

MacWorld Expo – First cool thing…Geophoto

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date January 9, 2007
2 Comments on MacWorld Expo – First cool thing…Geophoto

A few hours before the keynote and already the PR pieces are flowing, little detail yet but Geophoto from Ovolab looks interesting, a iPhoto related tool for managing your images geographically on a globe.

I still think Apple may thinking along similar lines themselves… remember that in October hackers found references to GPS within the latest release of iPhoto.

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

GIS

Pass it on..

My Christmas read this year was Richard Dawkins latest, “The God Delusion“, so it seemed appropriate that I received a blog meme from Mikel last week.

Dawkins introduced the term meme to describe a element of cultural information transferred between communities, the social networking version of a gene, I guess, in the blogosphere the term is used to describe a question or debating topic which is propagated across different blogs.

An interesting web 2.0 effect or just a modern form of the scary chain letter – I’m not sure, anyway this one seems mostly harmless so here are five things you don’t know about me.. btw it would be really interesting to work out where this started and when ? Would this not be an interesting spatial-temporal distribution problem.. I can see the time series in ArcGIS 9.2 or Google Earth any day now…

1) If not for a Field Trip in South Wales, taken at the end of my O-Levels, Geography would have passed me by, despite the fact it was about the only subject I was good at – My head was turned by jumping in and out of rivers with a bunch of girls to make stream discharge measurements ( Steady now !!) and analysing landslips using a model developed in BASIC on a Apple IIe !

Looking back why would I have taken technical drawing ?

2) I share a birthday with a great hero of mine, the great British inventor Barnes Wallis who most famously developed the bouncing bomb, Wellington Bomber and the R100 airship. A man of great principles, but an individual never completely at home with the establishment. The bouncing bomb was tested a few hundred metres from when I live in Teddington

3) I grew up in Chelsea, the famous West London “Village”, just off the Kings Road actually, missing both the cultural explosion of Punk (too young) and Sloane Rangers (too poor). Still at least I can say I still support the local team I grew up with.

4) At university for six months I dressed only in a surplus flying suit and red converse all stars, fortunately no photographs of this exist.

5) I nearly appeared on the Radio 4 Today programme to do a segment with Edward Stourton and the editor of a certain walking magazine to debate the merits of satellite navigation compared to “good old” OS maps. At 8.20 I was there sitting across from John Humphrys in the studio, ready to evangelise on the benefits of GPS, problem was the other guy got lost trying to find the studio!

So to continue this meme experiment I hand the tag onto The Very Spatial guys (Sue, Jesse and Frank – a combined answer ?), Jeff, Mr Bridges, Geoff and Dominic

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