Sat, August 21, 2010 at 12:06AM This reminds me of a small (once publicly-traded Canadian company) producing 3D models from parcels around 2000. If you remember their name, please let me know. I can't recall.
Sat, July 24, 2010 at 2:25PM For about four years, I've made a hobby of collecting Location Technology mergers and acquisitions transaction data - a project I started to support my own independent market research. In addition to my own uses of the information, I've also always made the it publicly available as a community resource. I've received feedback that it's useful and that it has helped a few folks. That's all I could hope for. If it helps the community, great.
That said, I've recently felt pressure to continue regular upkeep of the list, and as a result, I've entrusted Marc Prioleau to help keep it in good standing going forward. Before passing the baton however, I wanted to publish one last piece of good will. The below infographic was created by Infographic World. They did a fantastic job creating this beautiful image from the list. I can't thank Justin enough for all his effort to produce it. If you ever need an infographic, please give him a call.
;)
Mon, June 14, 2010 at 9:30PM Those who know me well, know I've been teaching a Location-based Services masters topic at the University of London since I graduated there in 2001. When I joined the University as a student, the GISc distance learning course was the first correspondence MS in GISc program in the world. Today, I help students located all over the world two days per year. It occupies little time to contribute, I'm happy to do it, and proud of the now ten-year affiliation I have with the college.
When I was enrolled as a student, the Internet and tools & tricks of the Web made it possible for me to learn. Today, those tools are even more powerful, helping anyone with the will, a computer, and broadband to pursue a world class education from the comfort of their home or office with flexible study hours. It's a wonderful thing.
A few weeks ago, Google posted an invitation to Geo educators on their Lat/Long blog.
This July, Google is hosting the first Google Geo Teachers Institute. This event is a FREE professional development experience designed to help educators get the most from Google's Geo products and technologies. The Geo Teachers Institute is an intensive, two-day event where participants get hands-on experience with Google's Geo products: Google Earth, Google Maps, and SketchUp, including a focus on features like Mars, Moon and Sky in Google Earth. Attendees will learn about innovative instructional strategies and receive resources to share with colleagues. The Google Geo Education team hopes this event will empower educators to bring the world's geographic information to students in a
compelling, fresh, and fun way.
I applied as soon as I saw the above. Today I received an acceptance email from Google to join them and 200 other educators from all over the world for two days at the Googleplex. I can't wait to get my hands on more Geo tools and learn more tricks to help others learn the same way I did. Thanks Google. My hope is to take away new skills and ideas to inspire other students to continue outstanding location-based services research work such as this.
Tue, May 25, 2010 at 8:31PM 
I just returned from an extended-family visit to the UK - a trip I try to do once a year. Our Hythe home on Southampton Water is a great base both for my rods & reals passion and for launching off to visit relatives. Every year, my father-in-law insists on a final Sunday pub lunch at The Foley on the Isle of Wight, which is a half-hour sail from his marina. I tracked our sail this visit and posted our speedy ride using a trusty tool I use religiously for tracking another outdoor passion-pursuit on the west side of the pond - snowboarding. The map is decent for context, but not great. I wanted to make it better...
Last week, I was excited to hear about the beta release of ArcGIS.com - esri's new "maps-and-apps-for-everyone" offering. I was also itching to get my hands on their basemap options, which from what I saw from Jack & Jeremy's demo at Where 2.0, would allow me to overlay my 'UGC' content atop a vast variety of esri basemap options, including supported nautical charts which aren't available on other common Web mapping portals. Here's a snapshot of esri's world nautical chart, plus a view of what other tiled basemap options are available from esri and ArcGIS.com:
I liked the above map more than what Google offered, so I proceeded to the next step in ArcGIS.com to create a map - my hope was I could export out the KML or GPX file from my trusty service and simply upload personal data into ArcGIS.com to create a more relevant nautical chart map to post, share, and archive in a travel diary. When I tried to upload the KML file, here's what happened:
ArcGIS Online supports ArcGIS map files (mxd, nmf, 3dd, sxd, ncfg, mpk, wmpk, and pmf), ArcGIS layer files (lyr, lpk, and nmc), and ArcGIS tools (eaz, and esriaddin).
So it seems in order to make a simple nautical chart map, I must now find a data conversion tool in order to convert my KML data (which I might add is an OGC standard) to something more esri friendly. I thought we were beyond this formatting nonsense consuming endless hours of time... In his talk at Where 2.0, Jack emphasized the freedom and freeness of ArcGIS.com. If I have to spend time finding a shareware converter or buy ArcGIS, FME, Arc2Earth, or some other data converter to publish a Web map, it's not free nor is it open from my perspective. I was really looking forward to making a different map for this now not-so-different experience. Come on esri... ArcGIS.com has tremendous potential. You can do better than this. Please open up a bit more. It won't hurt business, just make special maps more special & useful.
Thu, April 22, 2010 at 10:43AM An article headline appeared in my saved search results over a hundred times last week. It was about iPhone background Location and its importance once OS 4 is released. The same piece gathered retweeted signaling status at least another hundred times. I honestly don't know what all the fuss was about, but suspect some assume multitasking support for background location will change everything and lead to new apps and business models unseen thus far leading to billions in new revenue. It won't.
The iPhone is not the first mobile phone or smartphone to support background location atop a multitasking OS. While I appreciate the Weborati excitement, and empathize with it to a common degree, before getting too excited about the possibilities, it might be helpful to revisit some mobile location history and lessons learned from other multitasking background capabilities that arose, won brief time to shine, and later became red herring examples of what not to do. For those of you rolling your eyes, thinking "oh geez Spinney, not another history lesson", please bear with me. This one is abbreviated. I promise :-)
I asked a couple weeks ago if anyone remembered the Motorola i58sr and its background GPS capabilities. No one responded (even though I offered a prize incentive) so I can only assume my tweets are not worth responding to or no one recalled. Released in 2002, it was the US' first Java-programmble GPS-enabled mobile phone. A brick-ishly ugly, feature-dumb phone, it sported a postage stamp-sized monochrome screen, an ARM 7 processor, a SiRF (now CSR) chipset with a mediocre ceramic GPS antenna, a multitasking JVM with support for a JSR-179 layer atop it, and included a battery juiced for 2.75 hrs of continuous talk time with 71 hrs of standby time. Location data (via autonomous GPS) was easily accessible (Motorola had a freely available SDK) and developers built apps by the thousands despite its swine-like appearance. Initially, developers used the i58sr to build check-in apps focused on workforce payroll automation and job order auditing. Others, such as David Cohen's venture iContact built mobile social networking services atop and around the device, which admittedly failed.
Early check-in apps for workforce payroll automation and job order auditing worked fine. When workers weren't chirping back and forth with each other and the office over push-to-talk, they were using their i58sr's as digital time cards. They opened their app, selected 'start job' and then put the device away while they got to work. The 'start job' action captured a time-stamped location. When they finished their job, they hit 'end job' which captured another time-stamped location. The check-in and check-out interpolated times were used to supply back-end payroll systems with data needed to automate hourly payroll and audit jobs - essentially knowing where and when a worker was throughout the day in comparison to a daily job manifest. Here's an example:
Things then got crazy. A few developers discovered the multitasking JVM could support both background GPS queries while running other "apps" like PTT, voice, and simultaneous data, so they designed apps to continually poll the GPS locally on the phone thinking they could track users all day. Ignoring physics is sometimes liberating for right-sided creativity, but it's certainly not practical in most cases, and certainly not with a device sporting a cheap GPS antenna and weak battery. The dung eventually hit the fan. A deluge of complaints flooded customer support lines - "I think I need a new battery", "Your battery sucks!", "There's something wrong with my phone.", "This thing only works for three hours at a time!", "I constantly have to recharge this piece of crap" were all commonly overheard customer sentiments shared with first lines of support at SMBs.
Accessible background location in iPhone will either use wifi or GPS. iPhone's wifi implementation will continually query reference points to update itself. The GPS implementation will search the sky find a 3D fix and continue fixing itself over and over. Either option will drain battery power - fast! Apple can either throw hardware at the problem (a reason why I believe Sarantel is undervalued), or they can try to figure it out with a combination of mobile software, cellular networks, and mobile hardware. Steve Cheney summarized the later nicely in a recent post. Either way, there's no getting around the science of this problem with a cool app. I have a sneaking suspicion check-in start-ups and others betting on background iPhone location plays will learn all over again what others painfully learned six years ago with the i58sr, despite the current state of the lithium-ion art.
