neogeography – Page 7 – edparsons.com

Mass-market standards

This week finds me in Sunny Zürich one of Googles Global Engineering hubs, learning how the Google machine works and trying to catch up on a weeks worth of email..

Last week while I sheltered from the storms lashing New York, (so much for spring as the best time to visit !!) with the family, the OGC held a TC/PC meeting in Ottawa and is appears that considerable progress has been made in beginning to adopt the new “mass market” standards KML and GeoRSS.

This is really great news and will help I believe to bring geographic information to a wider community of users and will allow the creation of a community of spatial data developers, who will be is the position to easily publish their own information.

With this new user community in mind I think it is vital that we communicate clearly what are the most appropriate technologies to use and when, for example I can easily imagine some confusion in the minds of potential users as to the choice of GeoRSS , KML or simple GML as the format of choice to publish their simple geospatial information.

The relative benefits of these formats is clear in my mind (at least i think it is) I’d be interested in your views dear reader ?

Written and submitted from the Hilton Zurich Airport Hotel, using its wifi 802.11 network.

Where 2.0 comes to Europe – Geoware2007

Life is really busy at the moment, but I am finally in a position to put down a few thoughts about this weeks Geoware in Arhus.

I was very impressed by the organisation and quality of speakers, credit is due to Anders, Peter and the rest of the team at the innovation lab for putting the event together.

Nicholas Nova who gave a very interesting talk on mobile gaming gives a good review of the event on his blog. This is the closet I have seen to the “must visit” Where 2.0 in Europe.

To me one of the most interesting debates was around business models for these new mobile services, and the fact that for the most part quite traditional business models based on advertising or commission payments underlie these new services.

Nokia for example who demonstrated the N95 smartphone ( Forget the iPhone, this is the phone for geo-geeks) which ships with a free mapping and navigation package for Europe, with POI data sponsored by Restaurants, Hotels, Car hire companies etc. Nokia receive a commission from any transaction, such as booking a hotel which comes from their mobile service – a business model as old as publishing !
I wonder if we will see a similar event in the UK , and if so who would organise it? I know from trying to run the innovation process at the OS how difficult a task it is to get UK companies to think along these lines… and of course the other obvious challenges to GI based startups regarding availability of data are well known.

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