Business model wars

I lead a session at the Ordnance Survey Partner conference last week discussing our future geoweb services plans, and not surprising the main topic of discussion was business models. Nobody in the industry today really knows what will happen in the market, I in the past have often drawn parallels with the download music market …

Don’t mess with the map !

Its interesting to observe the amount of concern, it appears, has been generated by the BBC TV decision to change how they display their weather maps. Comments have focused on the use of brown rather than green to represent “Land” on the graphics, the use of animation rather than symbols to represent rain or snow …

Nokia releases Sentient Computing app

Nokia this week released a mobile phone application that perhaps paves the way for other ‘Sentient Computing” applications. Sentient Computing uses location as the underlying framework to deliver user centric applications – the key here is that location information is implicit not explicit as in traditional LBS applications (there are no maps !!!). Sentient Computing …

Spot the vendor ?

I have just returned from the Informed Solutions international conference held this year in Estepona, Spain. I presented an overview of the Ordnance Survey and a stab at the dynamics of the future Geodata market. This was my first time at this conference and I must admit I was rather impressed by the format, a …

More on Map Middle East

One of the recurring topics amongst the excellent programme at Map Middle East was the common issue of implementing spatial data infrastructures (SDI). This topic seems to come up in every geographic area at almost every scale from local to global – the common element always seems to be how do you prove the value …