USGS EarthNow Viewer Now Online

The USGS has created a viewer called EarthNow that takes recent passes of Landsat 5 and 7 satellites and displays a continuous swath over North America in near IR and sometimes natural color images. The swath playing now was acquired yesterday. The viewer displays the names of towns so that some reference points are established. A second, small map inset provides a display of the location of the swath as it moves from north to south along its path. Even though it is not a real-time image it is addicting because you want to keep watching the swath as it moves along its path.

RFID for Traffic Accident Detection

Telepathx is proposing using its RFID technology currently used to monitor bush fires in Australia for use in identifying and reporting on car crashes. The sensors create a wireless mesh and when hit report to their neighbors and ultimately to authorities. The sensor would be attached to utility poles and guard rails. Ideally, the more sensors that are activated, the “bigger” the crash. The solution is claimed to be relatively inexpensive. One problem: what if a car hits a car and neither hits the “street furniture?”

- RFID Update

“Bloggiest” neighborhoods in the U.S.

Reader Larry cites a BoingBoing post that references Outside.in which discusses the “bloggiest” neighborhoods in the U.S. While there’s no map, the general sense is that these are gentrified areas/neigborhoods. There are two of the around Boston in Newton and Watertown, which share a border.

Podcast: What We learned at Location Intelligence 2007

We focus in on two of the presentations at last week’s Location Intelligence Conference. One, by Yahoo’s Frazier Miller, director of product management for Yahoo Local, gave a surprising set of numbers about the potential size of teh local search marketplace. The second, from SiRF’s Kanwar Chadha, Founder and Vice President of Marketing, highlighted how we’ve barely begun to realize the scope of location in mobile devices.

The podcast is 14 minutes long (< 6 Mb) and was recorded on April 20, 2007.