Monthly Archives: May 2010

7 posts

Selling your soul for a freebie

I keep bumping into the privacy topic and for a while I have thought that there is something materially different about the intersection of your location, your trail of personal breadcrumbs on the internet and what smart people could/might do with that info. Location is a subtle privacy setting that people will find even more difficult to set than the 150 options on Facebook. At an event last year someone said words to the effect […]

“I don’t care what my friends are doing and I don’t want to see them on a stupid map!”

Apparently I said “I don’t care what my friends are doing and I don’t want to see them on a stupid map” last week at GeoData2010 in my talk. At least that is the sentiment Jenny Watson captured and shared via twitter. No retraction from me on this, Foursquare, Gowalla etc just don’t do it for me. But so what if an ageing paleo doesn’t get the new hot LBS game? That does not mean […]

Is this the future for LA mapsites? I hope not!

GIS Professional landed on my desk recently. The cover image and lead article caught my attention “Is this the future for LA mapsites?” Barrow Borough Council have implemented an open source web GIS and the author explains the reasons why they went down this route in preference to a proprietary solution or using Google. Apparently the reasons for building a home grown solution on an open source stack were affordability and an improved web experience […]

New lamps for old

A couple of weeks ago PBBI announced their new cloud strategy at their Insights conference. There was much mention of cloud, SaaS and DaaS along with the launch of some new (newish) products and services and collaboration with WeoGeo and Microsoft. You can find more detail in the coverage by Joe Francica of Directions who was at the conference. PBBI are doing some sensible but not necessarily revolutionary things to adapt to a changing marketplace. […]

Geobabble, football, blinded by the light

Who says you cannot mix football and geo? Certainly not Alun Jones and the team at GeoInformation Group. Today the guys behind the UKMap hosted a day of geostuff at the Emirates, yes that right geobabble at the home of my beloved Arsenal. How good is that? I will tell you – it was exceedingly good Mr Kipling. It was very strange to come out of the Arsenal tube station (others please note we are […]

ESRI UK Conference – so what’s new?

The last two days I have been at the ESRI UK User Conference in London. I had been invited to talk to the GeoFutures track on the shape of UK GI in 2015 based on the AGI Foresight Study (more on that in a bit). I attended my first ESRI conference 2 years ago at the QE Centre, a far from ideal venue near the Houses of Parliament and was massively impressed at the time, […]

geo.me

Over the last two years I have become convinced that there is a big opportunity to build a professional quality business on top of the API’s provided by Google, Bing and of course OpenStreetMap to serve mainstream clients in public sector and commercial markets who want more than a quick mashup. Sort of neo stuff for some more traditional clients. So amidst all of the networking, consulting, conferences and other activities I have been on […]