News from CTIA

“Mobile carriers have stopped looking at location-based services as a possible premium service, according to a panel of wireless carriers at the CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment tradeshow in San Francisco.”
WhatPC?

“Last on the keynote lineup, Sean Maloney, executive vice president and general manager of Intel’s Mobility Group, joined with a Philips Electronics NV executive to demonstrate a software-defined GPS radio running on an Intel XScale processor. The software runs all the baseband functions of the radio, which normally operate in hardware, the Philips executive said. Philips expects the technology to start appearing in mobile phones next year and also to come soon in notebooks, he said. They demonstrated using the GPS to show where the device and friends’ devices were located on Google Maps.”
Computerworld

“Wherify, a cellphone maker that touts its products’ primary feature—the ability to track, using GPS, the location of any of its phones via a special Web page—but has nothing available for sale in the US.”
PC World

Google, CMU, NASA and Nat Geo

If you want too keep up on the projects involving these organizations (funding by Google and National Geographic) check out the Global Connection website. These folks put the Katrina imagery into Google Earth, added the National Geographic layer to Google Earth and are exploring gigapixel panoramic images. Google sure has a lot of friends. Thanks to reader Allan for the link.

E&P Interviews Adrian Holvarty

Holvarty is the “ChicagoCrime.org” guy who just joined the Washington Post to work on it online offerings. E&P is Editor and Publisher, the magazine for the newspaper industry. The article is a nice introduction to the “young mappers” as my colleague likes to call them.

O’Reilly Announces Google Map Hacks

The forthcoming book from O’Reilly will cover the now widely used API and get even more people involved with Web 2.0. It’s under development by Schuyler Erle and Rich Gibson, two of the authors of Mapping Hacks and is expected in January 2006.

Google and NASA Sitting in a Tree…

Google announced Wednesday that it will build a research center at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California and collaborate with the agency. While on the outside it’s a “memorandum of understanding” and NASA officials touting the agencies need for more tools to manage its data, from a geospatial perspective, the value may lie in data, as well as technology. Says an article from the Mercury News, “Google will also gain access to NASA’s space data and imagery. Google already uses satellite imagery in its Google Maps service and for its Google Earth software. Google could enhance the imagery with data about temperatures or crop patterns, said Peter Norvig, director of search quality at Google.” I thought most of that data was in the public domain?

Update 9/30: Some are accusing Google of trying to avoid taxes by building on federal land.