What happens to SVG now ?

With todays purchase of Macromedia by Adobe – what is the future for SVG. For me Adobes support of SVG was a lifelife to lukewarm support from the rest of the industry which supported flash as a platform for developing interactive graphic applications. SVG offers potentially much more than flash for developing data driven applications …

BBC Election Flash map

The BBC today posted an interesting Election map contianing candidate and constituency details for the upcoming election. Its always intersting to see a non-GIS approach to a developing a mini-site like this. I think we have a lot to learn as a industry here from the media on understanding user needs. Also another Flash based …

More on Open Geodata

I went along yesterday to the Open Knowledge Forum meeting on Open Geodata in London. Overall I was very impressed by the debate, apart from a couple of exceptions we seem to be moving the arguement away from the simple “free data good, charging for data bad” mantra – in particular Roger Longhorns’ presentation was …

Is the show over ?

Remember the excitement of your first trade show, hundreds if not thousands of people thronging the showfloor, bags full of brochures, silly bug giveaways, I remember one year at Autodesk we gave away bottles of bubble liquid – popular with the kids !!, fond memories. Increasing distant memories perhaps as the trade show slowly dies …

Magic batteries – not aprils fools yet!!

The Register this morning reports that Toshiba have developed a new type of battery for mobile devices which can be fast charged reaching 80% capacity in just one minute!! The battery also lasts much longer than today’s best of breed Lithium ion batteries and operates more effectively over a wider temperature range, down to -40°C. …

Apple buys Schemasoft

Well Known in the GML community Schemasoft the Vancouver based software company was acquired by Apple Inc on Wednesday. Although most well known in the GI industry from its GML – SVG tools, Schemasoft has worked behind the scenes with all the major vendors including Microsoft, Correl and Apple. So no need to get too …

Is anybody using LBS ?

An interesting article in Electronics Weekly reports on the findings of a DTI sponsored study visit to Japan looking at the uptake of Location Based Services (LBS). The headline is that less than 10% of the users of advanced LBS capable phones on the KDDI network actually make any use of the available services. This …

A free lunch anyone ?

The ongoing and mostly ill-informed debate on the funding of digital geographical information today hit the national press with a article published by Michael Cross in the Guardian . Now I have been a great fan of Cross’s often insightful journalism in the past but today’s article is full of errors and misrepresentation of the …