The Geography of Spam

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports that Florida is home to largest number of major spam players. Why? Same old story: good weather, laid back, and a tradition of being friendly to “dirty” businesses. Another interesting tidbit? Spam apparently dropped around the time of last year’s hurricanes.

AT&T Exec Offers Top 10 Predictions

Hossein Eslambolchi, CTO and CIO of AT&T, delivered a visionary keynote at Interop in Las Vegas in the form of a Top 10 List. The list is not rocket science, but highlights technologies/concepts that play with geospatial including wireless, collaboration and sensors.

Hotel Name Game

Hopefully, a more savvy search engine will solve the problem of the hotel with the name of a city in which it does not reside. Hotel namers are of course, trying to get more traffic in their hotels. Hotel rooms are more often booked online these days. Ergo, a name like the Crowne Plaza Beverly Hills might pop up in a search for Beverly Hills hotels. The hotel, however is in Los Angeles, a mile from 90210. Bottom line? Buyer beware! I use the mapping feature of Hotels.com to determine if a hotel is close enough to my destination.

Quicker 3D Models of Cities

Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley have a new way to quickly create a 3D model of a city. How quickly? A half hour of driving and 4 or so of data processing for a piece of downtown Berkeley. It’s photography plus laser data that underlies the process. It’s called “virtualised reality” by creator Avideh Zakhor. The US army funded much of the research so it will be the first user. In time the data models might be part of navigation systems.

Sensing Noise

Lightposts in Westminister (London) will soon be listening for noise. The idea is to alert authorities before the noise stops and before neighbors complain. I rather like the idea; the “kids” next door often party too late for me.