MAPPS vs. United States Trial Postponed until 2/9

The trial regarding the Brooks Act originally set for 2/2/07 (this Friday) has been postponed until 2/9/07.

- conversation with John Pallatiello of MAPPS

NPR: GIS Helps Activist Locate Grocery Stores in Philly

Day to Day highlights the work of Duane Perry, who founded an organization in Philadelphia called the Food Trust, dedicated to helping city residents gain access to nutritious, affordable, food and Amy Hillier, professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, but back back in the day a GIS grad student. Their work plotting the nature of Philadelphia’s residents and the stores avaialble helped pave the way for state grants to put stores where there were none. Audio will be available at 4 pm EST.

Geology/Geography Merge at Bowling Green

A new school will be launched at Bowling Green State University in Ohio from the merging of the departments of geology and geography and the Center for Environmental Studies. The School of Earth, Environment and Society. The final paper work should be completed in May.

The new organization may help grow GIS:

both the geography and geology departments offer a course in Geographic Information System, a computer system used for managing and analyzing different types of geographic data.

With the new school, students can take a single GIS course. This also provides the possibility of higher level GIS courses to be developed based off of the initial course.

- BG News

New at LBS360.NET

Posted today at LBS360.NET, Directions Media’s publication about location-based services:

Why LBS Applications Fail

Street Smarts: Improving Location-based Services with Intelligent Reverse Geocoding

Interested? We have a feed of articles from LBS360.NET or you can subscribe to e-mail newsletters.

Social Software’s need More Social Networks

Buddyping is like any one of dozens of other social software’s I no longer keep track of.  There are a couple differences though – one, it’s mobile; and two, it runs across and has access to all 4 networks in the UK.  At last October’s LBS World Forum, Phil Derry of Trackaphone Ltd educated the audience on how all UK carriers got together to sort out premium wholesale location access for any developer to get access to.  He noted that the US, while far advanced when it came to positioning, lacked the attitude to cooperate to offer location wholesale so that applications can extend and operate across networks.  Buddyping is the only example of a social software application I’m aware of that can serve all users across networks.  One would think that in order for a social software app to be successful and reach the masses it must run on all networks, but today networks in the US aren’t that open.  US carriers differentiate from their competitors by protecting their offerings with app exclusives that only run on their network.  That’s not very social.  If Myspace, facebook, LinkedIn, or some other social software provider hopes to be able to accomplish the same as buddyping did with context additons through Location, they better help networks (i.e. the carriers who run them) become more social with incentives to do so…   

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