Over the holidays there was a flurry of excitement, particularly among OpenStreetMap fans, prompted by Ed Freyfogle’s announcement that Nestoria were switching from using the Google Maps API to using an OpenStreetMap tile service provided by MapQuest. The switch was prompted by Google’s announcement in April of last year that they would be introducing some volume limits on the usage of the free Maps API: “We are also introducing transaction limits on the number of maps […]
geo.me
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On Tuesday I went to the Google Geospatial Summit at the Science Museum with the guys from geo.me who had a booth at the event. The event was pretty plush with the background of the Science Museum and the auditorium was the IMax cinema which was impressive, particularly if you were sitting high up! The main focus of the event was to launch Google Earth Builder in the UK. GEB follows on from Google […]
In his recent post on geotags in twitter Thierry Gregorius said “If you use Twitter then you will have noticed that the service encourages people to geocode their tweets, that is, to record their physical location at the moment of tweeting. What particular purpose this may serve is another point altogether, but let’s not get into that.” Well I do want to “get into that” With so called smartphones it is easy to add an x,y to almost everything, photos, tweets, checkins, blogposts. For many […]
A couple of weeks back I was invited to talk to the graduate class at the Arup University. Arup offer a great study program for their staff that leads to an MSc in GIS, this was the final part of the program when the students come from around the world for a final week of workshops and talks. I thought I would be talking to about 10-15 students, in the event Ewan had publicised the […]
Last year Geo.me were in discussions with a potential partner in Local Government and the dreaded derived data question came up, something along the lines of “we’d love to work with you but …” There still seems to be quite a lot of confusion about what data Local Government (or for that matter any public sector user of Ordnance Survey base maps) can or cannot publish using the Google Maps API. I thought that I […]
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 […]
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 […]