Excuse the corny title and associated video but I couldn’t resist it. What3Words’s accounts for 2023 have just been published and the cynics who have doubted W3W’s commercial model were confounded by the outstanding progress that the company has made in 2023. Here are a few highlights to save you reading through 45 pages. You might think that summary was a bit dry so I asked a friendly AI to give me a slightly more […]
General
333 posts
A few weeks ago I recorded a Geomob Podcast with Ana Lucía González Paz about her beautiful flipbook, A Map Inside. You can read the book in a few minutes and then you can listen to the podcast Towards the end of each podcast, I give my guest the opportunity to go off piste and talk about a subject that they choose (in the past we have talked about digital privacy, mental health and open […]
I must have said this before but I will say it again, if you live anywhere near to London and you are into geotech, maps or location influenced applications then you should give Geomob a try. I’d offer you a money back guarantee but as it’s free that isn’t necesary but more on that later. On Wednesday night (24th Jan 2024) we had nearly a hundred people attending what truly was a cracking event, the […]
We published the Christmas Chaos edition of the Geomob Podcast just after Christmas. It has become a tradition that the participants make some lighthearted predictions of what might happen in the coming year. Usually they prove to be completely wrong but it is fun to look back on them a year later. Ed Freyfogle and I have just started to use a new podcast recording platform that provided quite decent transcriptions so that has ensured […]
A few months back I had their pleasure of talking with Maxime Lenormand , the man behind the podcast Minds Behind Maps. It was a sort of meta podcast with me interviewing another geo podcaster. Ed had pointed me at Max’s two and a half hour long podcast interview with Steve Coast, I had thought that I could never listen to something that long but of course I did (in chunks)! After the podcast recording […]
So we did our Christmas thing again, Denise, Alex, Ed, Jeremy, Ken, Mark and I sat down for our review of the year with a glass or two of wine and a microphone. You can listen to the Geomob podcast Christmas Chaos edition here. This year there were justifiable claims that some of last year’s predictions were at least partly correct, or they had happened but slower than anticipated, but some were just plain wrong. […]
Leaving Death Valley by me This week the team at Astun got together for their Spring Event in Richmond, it was the first time that we had all been together since December 2019 so there was a lot of laughing, hugging and catching up to do with friends and colleagues, old and new. Mike Saunt asked me if I would talk about some of the changes in Astun since I have been working with them […]
This is going to be a brain dump, I don’t know if it will make any sense! I have been an evangelist for open source software for a decade or longer and I sincerely believe that the open source model offers a strong alternative to proprietary software, particularly for public sector and even more so in recent years as we have seen an accelerated move to the cloud. This is not going to be another […]
This post is reposted from Mappery Yesterday the open source and open data geo communities were devastated by the tragic news of the passing of our friend and colleague Malena Libman. There was an outpouring of grief and celebration of her zest for life, humour, warmth and contribution to open geo. Jody Garnett posted this picture of Malena’s tattoo which is truly a Map in the Wild today. I met Malena in 2018 in Dar […]
Pah to 2020! There is little about 2020 that can be looked back on with affection but one of of my highlights has been recording over 50 episodes of the Geomob Podcast with Ed Freyfogle. I don’t think either of us really thought that it would become a “thing” but it certainly has. Plus recording a podcast is something that you sort of have to do from home so it has become a lockdown past-time. […]
Over the last week I have spent a bit of time helping older friends and family members get started with video conferencing so they could stay in touch with their friends, their study groups, choir sectionals or religious services. It looks as if we are going to be socially distancing (or worse) for quite a while so I expect there are going to be more people who will need a little help with this stuff. […]
A few weeks ago my good friend Giuseppe Sollazzo published some maps that he had been working on. The first in the series was a thematic map of London coloured by the road name suffix (i.e. Street, Road, Avenue, etc.), a whole series of these maps appeared soon afterwards including Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester. My immediate response was “why would you do that?”, I couldn’t see the point and felt that […]