Wednesday, April 30. 2008

Tele Atlas Finalist for Social Responsibility Award

The data company is among five finalists for the New Hampshire Businesses for Social Responsibility's Cornerstone Award.

- Seacost Online

Tuesday, April 29. 2008

UK's Yotta Acquires US-based Mobile Video

The deal ran $4 million and opens the door to US growth for Yotta, a technology group Oxford Metrics plc. Yotta is leading the way in highway imaging in the UK. It aims to support highway departments and mapping organizations around the world. Who is Mobile Video?

Mobile Video, which was founded in 1986 and is based in Kansas City, Missouri, captures geospatial images of properties for tax administrators, GIS departments and the emergency services. It employs some 40 staff operating a fleet of 16 field vehicles across the US, and manages several contracts with local government agencies.

- M and A Deals

Candidates Tackle GIS in Race for Lake County (IN) Surveyor

The incumbent is pro GIS having invested in it quite a bit. The Gary Post-Tribune describes it as "a computer mapping system similar to Google Earth that can put large amounts of information into an interactive map."

Two others want to cut back on the GIS budget. One candidate wants "to "slash" spending on the GIS, and build it with free software, rather than the proprietary software used by the county's consultants."

Another wants the focus to be on flooding thus he said, "I don't think (GIS) should be a priority."

It says quite a lot about the state of geospatial that such issues should be raised to the public during a local election.

Where do search queries come from?

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land details a paper from Cornell and Yahoo titled Spatial Variation in Search Engine Queries. The idea is to map the "centroid" of search queries. What's the center of the search for the Red Sox? Other teams? Pretty much what you'd expect. Other queries, such as about hurricanes change at the storm moves. Interesting, but how's it useful? I guess it could be used as another "context" valuable to determine the type of query of its not clear.

Free (somewhat dated) ZIP Code Data

The ZIP code database contained in ‘zipcode.csv’ [zip file] contains 43204 ZIP
codes for the continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico,
and American Samoa. The database is in comma separated value format,
with columns for ZIP code, city, state, latitude, longitude, timezone
(offset from GMT), and daylight savings time flag (1 if DST is observed
in this ZIP code and 0 if not).

...
The database and this README are copyright 2004 CivicSpace Labs, Inc.,
and are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
license, which requires that all updates must be released under the same
license.

It's about four years old, but free is free!

- Mapping Hacks

Galileo Giove-B Safely in Orbit

The satellite is the second experimental satellite in the constellation. The EU is going forward with the GPS competitor and B will take over for "A" launched in 2005, as it hits and of life.

- UPI