Wednesday, May 21. 2008

Johns Hopkins Research Maps Affected Cyclone Nargis (Burma) Regions

Researchers at Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health, in conjunction with others at CIESEN (Columbia University), Lehman College, and the City University of New York (CUNY) have released a report, using GIS, to show that 3.2 million Burmese where affected by Cyclone Nargis.

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Pitney Bowes MapInfo, Group 1 Bet on Integrating Customers & Technology

Here in "Sin City" there are discussions that will hopefully lead to a more "heavenly" host of ideas as this first, combined meeting of the user groups from MapInfo and Group 1 customers gets underway. MapWorld '08 is the first conference held jointly with those users from Group 1 Software since Pitney Bowes (PB) acquired MapInfo last year.

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Quote of the Week

"The Web is my friend."

- Vincent Virga, author, with the Library of Congress, of Cartographia, in his talk at the NYS Geospatial Summit. He noted he could not have written the book without the Web. Also noteworthy: it was my post about his appearance on NPR's Talk of the Nation that prompted the committee to invite him. Run, don't walk, if you have a chance to hear him speak.

Tales from the LBS Deadpool...

I was enjoying dinner last night with some other geospatial folks at a reception preceding tomorrow's New York State Geospatial Summit. The topic turned to Where 2.0 and the really great ideas there and how alas, perhaps 1 in 20 had a shot of "making it."

It made reading the tale of the death of Meetro, one of early location-based social network tools rather sad. But, it's a valuable read for anyone with startup fever.

TomTom May Head Down Dash Path - and quickly

Tele Atlas CEO Alain De Taeye spoke at the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in Paris on Wednesday noting that once the TomTom Tele Atlas deal closes the company will jump into new offerings, including some powered by data gathered by users.

The idea is to tap into data collected by TomTom users and push it into Tele Atlas mapping products and TomTom services. How soon? Six months suggested De Taeye. In particular:

TomTom has gathered extensive data on maps and driving conditions -- its users submit about 10,000 corrections to maps every day, and a large number of drivers have also allowed the company to gather anonymous statistical data from their devices.
...
[It] would also make new products possible in areas such as real estate and urban planning.

TomTom has amassed 1 trillion data points, the equivalent of driving every road in Europe and the United States a thousand times.

This data can make routing more accurate and also opens new opportunities for Tele Atlas' geographical information services business. A buyer may for instance use it to learn what traffic around a property is like throughout the week.

Not a big surprise here; the trick will be integrating the two companies' technologies.

- Reuters