Category: Technology

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Technology Thoughts where 2.0 wherecamp

Camping Geowanking style

From Wherecamp 2008

This weekend the geowankers camped out at the Googleplex for the second Wherecamp.

What has become an annual event the weekend after Where 2.0, Wherecamp is an unconference, a self organised event which starts without an agenda, and features talks, hacking sessions and debates suggested by the people who turn up. As Andrew Turner captured so successfully on twitter, “#wherecamp is Where2.0 2009 beta, 2010 alpha”, or maybe the other way round ?

The camp featured many excellent presentations and discussions, The value of 3D data (aka “Is 3D shit ?” ), building 3D displays, cartography for the web, geosearch, data licensing, micro formats etc., and because of the nature of the event plenty of opportunity for practical demonstrations, including the creation of gigipan images by Rich Gibson.

Gigiapan
click to see gigapan at work

And Jeff Johnson of PictEarth capturing aerial photography of the Googleplex using a Nokia N95, in an r/c model aircraft..

Googleplex from an airborne N95

As an old geezer I skipped the camping part, retreating to the comfort of my hotel room rather than a google tent for the night, but it was a great format and a great event. The contrast to the established GIS conferences in Europe is marked, the barcamp format, provides a great opportunity for more open debate and the presentation of ideas rather than products, and it’s just great fun.

EuroWherecamp Anyone ?

Written and submitted from the Googleplex, using the Google 802.11 network.

Categories
Google Earth Technology

Backyard Space Photography

Picture from 30km

From the excellent Google Earth Blog, Frank links to another great example of what the process of democratising technology has achieved.

A group of guys launched a fully instrumented sensor package below a helium balloon, which was tracked in real time using google earth and produced some stunning images. The video on their site of the launch and recovery of the balloon, are great fun – you can just sense the excitement !!

Ok so this may not be a practical remote sensing application yet, but it’s amazing.. pictures from 30 km high, a third of the way to space, taking with a Canon Digital camera you could buy on the high street.

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

Categories
Data Policy Technology

In praise of the iPlayer

iplayer

In the past I have been very critical of the BBC approach to making their programmes available online, which until December required you to use Microsoft DRM, and hence was PC only. However in December the beeb released the streaming version of
iPlayer using the latest Adobe technology to allow users to watch selected programmes online for a week after they are broadcast, and this is a cross platform service.

I must say this is really well down, the interface is simple and well designed, the quality of the video is very good and the flexibility such as service offers the viewers of the BBC is massive, along with on-demand services offered by virginmedia my cable supplier, my household rarely watches live broadcast TV, other than the news, choosing what to watch, when we want to watch it.

We are not alone the BBC reports today that 3.5 million shows have been streamed or downloaded since Christmas Day. Interestingly the number of people streaming the programmes outnumber those downloading using the Microsoft DRM by a factor of eight.

This could be interesting in context to the expected announcement from Apple that they will now support movie rental from itunes, is it that the video market unlike music is one where we don’t feel it necessary to “own’ the media, or is it now the fact that access to the cloud is so pervasive we don’t mind accessing information when we need it and then throwing it away.

Either way again, you can’t help but draw comparisons with how geodata is licensed, and ask similar questions, for example as a developer building some new houses, would you not want to license the data for just the period of build ?

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