USGS Online Imagery Guidelines

The USGS has issued new guidelines for imagery aimed at helping data creators balance data sharing and security. I’ve contacted USGS for more information since I found none on the Web.

Update: Ogle Earth (this guy is in Sweden!) pointed to a Federal Geographic Data Committee final draft (pdf, 16 pages) that seems to be the ones in question. Where did it come from? Well I believe I saw this document described at a meeting of the National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC) in the past two years. Further, the guidelines are not specifically for imagery, nor for online issues.

Mapping and Copyrights in Singapore

An interesting court case in Singapore highlights several mapping issues. The plaintiff, Virtual Map, argued that a company had stolen its online maps without paying a license fee. Virtual Map licenses its data from the Singapore Land Authority and enhances it, thus putting its own copyright statement on the final product. The defendant, Suncool International Pte Ltd, argued that SLA should also be a plaintiff. The court disagreed. The defendant further argued that copying the maps from the website did not infringe the copyright. Again, the court disagreed. With all the free mapping data out there from commercial companies that own copyright, its amazing to me we don’t see such stories in the U.S.

More in Intel Wi-Fi Locating

Intel shared a bit more on its upcoming locating technology at its developer event this week. The technology is called Intel Precision Location Technology (PLT) and the company plans to offer it to the IEEE’s 802.11 standards team for incorporation into future WLAN products from other players. The system uses a special packet to determine the distance of the client between two access points.

There’s another description here.

Autodesk to Support Firefox for MapGuide

Ralph Grabowski tipped me off that Autodesk will include FireFox support for MapGuide in the next version. He points out, quite correctly, that is rather odd that the (insert small number here) of MapGuide users will get this support but the (insert huge immense number here) of DWF users will not. I’ll suggest that it’s possible some big corporate or government user is PAYING for this support.

Despite my raising the issue regularly with Autodesk, MapGuide continues to be an “invisible” product – no success stories about it, no press releases, no buzz…

Local Advertising: Bluetooth

In London advertisers aiming to promote the latest Coldplay album used TV screens to prompt those nearby to enable their Bluetooth devices to receive content about the band. The results were, well, really good by advertising standards. 87,000 turned their devices to discoverable. Of those13,000 people opted to receive the material. That’s a response rate of 15%, very high for traditional advertising. And, remember, this is location-based since Bluetooth only travels about 100 meters.