An eventful week with both W3G “the unconference” and Everything Happens Somewhere (the National Land and Property Gazetteer Awards). W3G at the newish Google Campus near Silicon Roundabout, was loosely themed around the question “Is Open the New Black” and a lot of the talks (including mine) were about open data. The presentation of the day for me was Lawrence Penney (@lorp) talking about 1 dimensional maps (or strip maps) with an enormous, amazing collection of […]
Yearly Archives: 2012
16 posts
If they have a web connection in the afterlife Steve Jobs must be fuming about the gaffes in Apple Maps and thinking “This would never have happened on my watch” By now you have probably read about the catalogue of errors, incorrect data, wrong routes etc in the new Apple Maps app released with iOS 6, if not you can see some of the funniest here or here for some UK specifics, oh and here for some […]
Last night was the warm up night for GeoCommunity with the first couple of hundred delegates arriving for an evening of impossible quizzes, engineering with spaghetti and marshmallows (see result below), meeting up with old friends and making some new ones. I found myself in a thought provoking conversation with a couple of long term proponents of GI about whether we make too many claims for the power of geo/location/spatial/place. It seems like a good question […]
This week I spent 2 days at the OSGeo UK Chapter event in Nottingham. OSGIS 2012 was a fun combination of workshops and presentations. OSM-GB ran a workshop showing how to use their WMS and WFS in QGIS and even though I thought I knew how useful the services could be I was impressed by the simplicity of filtering and querying against the WFS, one of the attendees came up with a neat business use […]
A few days ago the Royal Mail published some information on their new Pinpoint positional accuracy programme “Location-based information is used by the emergency services, satellite navigation systems and smartphone applications. We want to help improve the accuracy of this information. So, we are mapping address information which is accurate to the front door of every home and business in your area. This could, for example, help the satellite navigation systems in the cars […]
I was looking forward to hearing Uri Levene, the CEO of Waze, talking about Redefining Social Networks and Crowd Sourcing at the Innovate Israel event this morning. Waze provides real time traffic information from user/contributors who have also helped them to build a road network by contributing their GPS traces from their phones as they drive. He showed some very itoWorld like animations of contributions flashing up on the map and suggested that they had […]
I met Yotam, the founder of wibbitz.com at the Innovate Israel event, he was virtually the only person not wearing a suit at a tech conference. His company offers a solution for automatically generating video content from text which looks as if it could have a mass of applications. Here is what happened when I entered the KnowWhere URL in the sample generator on the wibbitz site: Pretty neat except for the pronunciation of “KnowWhere” […]
In case you hadn’t heard a crowd of geogeeks have climbed mountains, written proposals, garnered support, tweeted their hearts out, started a pledge, created campaigning web sites and convinced the nice and very wise people at OSGeo to entrust us with their treasured FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geo) conference in 2013 at the East Midlands Conference Centre at Nottingham University. No, despite some of the hysteria it is not repeat not like hosting […]
This morning I woke up to a piece on Radio 4 mentioning a Daily Mail piece about Google and Apple putting spy planes in the sky that would capture 10cm resolution images and be able to see into our homes. At least this piece was in the Science section and explored or (rehashed) the much discussed issues of privacy – however in the world of technophobes and DM readers this so called news (how long […]
How big is the UK geomarket? What does it comprise? A recent report by ConsultingWhere entitled “The UK Location Market Survey 2012” suggests that the market is now valued at £1.2bn per annum. That’s pretty big and certainly more than my informal but informed guess/envelope calculation/hunch which either means that they’ve got it wrong or that I don’t know as much as I thought I knew (probably the latter since their research is largely sourced […]
Last week the NAO published its Implementing Transparency report. The objectives of transparency are summarised in the report as accountability, service improvement based on user choice and comparative data and the much sought but elusive economic growth from new products and services based on OpenData. The Guardian in an uncharacteristically scathing piece summarised the report. “Read between the lines of its [the NAO] report out today, Implementing Transparency, and you will see a government which has been chucking […]
Open Source Geo and Open Geospatial Consortium Standards have been active for over a decade, OpenStreetMap since 2004 and OpenData is the new kid on the block. But something seems to have shifted, it seems that you can barely go for a day in the UK geoworld without stumbling on an event, an article, a vendor or consultant talking about Open something. Why has Open become the badge that everyone wants to flaunt? Not everyone […]