Monthly Archives: February 2009

I’ve been at Terra Future for the last two days. Ordnance Survey organised the event at the RGS with a theme of “Tackling grand challenges through mass collaboration” the challenges being: Sustainable living Climate change Sustainable transport Pretty worthy stuff though I went in not sure that these problems could actually be solved by more use of Mastermap. Fortunately this was a much broader event than just GI with a wide range of thought provoking […]

A press release from TDC caught my attention “New GIS software for Blackberry under $1000”. I initially thought $1000/user sounded rather pricy but in fact it is $999 for a server licence with unlimited numbers of users sitting on top of ArcGIS Server. The application looks quite neat and the list of US local government clients suggests that they have identified a market.  Many people have identified mobile workflows as “the next big thing” but […]

Budding geo-entrepreneurs should take time to listen to this Directions podcast that reviews 3 unsuccessful startups.  Makes me wonder whether now is such a great time for startups.

I have blogged a couple of times on using GI within the schools sylabus. I inteneded to regularly update the Educational Links section in the side panel here but haven’t got round to it for ages. So many thanks to Mark Smith of the Grammar School at Leeds for his mail. As for good educational links, their scarcity is part of the problem teachers face in implementing school based GIS, especially when it comes to […]

This afternoon I was talking with some friends at BeLocal about their soon to be launched local communities site.  The discussion was about when you are discovering what is happening in your (hyper) local area do you need a map to locate events, news, community activity etc? I felt that the nature of hyperlocal is that you know your local geography and you don’t need a map to understand where things are relative to your […]

Off topic.  Just the joy of seeing Eduardo da Silva make his first start for Arsenal after the most horrendous injury a year ago. Oh yes he scored twice just to put the icing on the cake. Welcome back Eduardo! A bit of geography Eduardo was born in Brazil, lived in Croatia and elected to play for their national team and now plays in North London. See – football is all about geography, or is […]

Belated congratulations to the CloudMade team for a sparkling and professional event last Thursday that would put some of the duller mainstream players in the shadows. For those of you who don’t know CloudMade, they are the business that is endeavouring to deliver robust commercial services, through their recently launched API’s, on top of the community sourced OpenStreetMap data. Which brings me to a point of confusion for me and I believe for others, the […]

The call for papers for GeoCommunity ’09 was launched today. The themes are grouped as  Enterprise Mashups Futures UK SDI Informal Geography Data Politics RoI Geography Making a Difference Submit a paper, if your paper is selected you will get a free days attendance at the conference. If you twitter (or even if you don’t) you can follow the discussion around the conference by following GeoCommunity on Twitter or just by searching for #GeoCommunity

The other night I was invited to speak at a Free Our Data debate hoted by the Policy Exchange thinktank. In the absence of any government speakers or representatives of the Trading Funds I think I was there as a surrogate.  I have participated in the discussion about policy and funding of geographic data for a while now and the dialogue has probably helped me and other participants to find an increasing amount of common ground. […]

The Policy Exchange, a think tank, is hosting a debate tomorrow evening Feb 10th at 5pm in Westminster.  Speakers are Ed Parsons, Geospatial Technologist at Google and Charles Arthur, Editor of Guardian Technology,  Shane O’Neill, consultant and member of APPSI and Adam Afriyie, the Shadow Minister for Innovation, plus yours truly.  Hopefully in the light of the PoIT report we can move the discussion on a bit. If you fancy coming along mail the organisers

The awesomely named Power of Information Taskforce has published a beta version of its report for comment. There is a lot to read but for me the overall thrust of the report is summarised by this excerpt from the exec summary: This report is about improving Digital Britons’ online experience by providing expert help from the public sector online, where people seek it, and by freeing up the UK’s public sector information for innovative new […]

In the last month three groups have submitted proposals to the US Government for funding to create a US National Map or NSDI within the $700Bn economic resuscitation bill. Directions posed 3 questions to each of the authors: Before it was posted to the Web, to whom was the proposal sent for review, if anyone? Was the proposal sent to, or formally presented to, any members of the U.S. Congress or their staff? If so, […]