Wednesday, October 29. 2008

Putin to Post his Whereabouts on the Web

Only recently did his dog get a GLONAA-enabled tracking collar, but now Putin himself will be locatable. You'll be able to keep track, though apparently not via GLONASS-tracking on his website, expected to launch next year.

One of the features of Putin's website will be a timeline with a news ticker and interactive map displaying where the premier is working, the Russian regions and countries he will visit and the agenda for his trips. The website is due to be launched at the beginning of 2009.

- Novosti

Washington Post Launches "TimeSpace Election" for Final Week of Election Coverage

The TimeSpace app allows time (publishing) and subject filtering of content (video, tweets, articles, etc.) about the election from a variety of sources in and outside of the Post. The results are plopped down on a Google Map housed in a Flash/Flex app. Users are invited to share their own election coverage.

Frankly, the app sort of blew my mind - it's a bit overwhelming at first. The help, a several minute video was helpful, but I was really looking for a more traditional set of help.

I could not find a way to filter the content geographically - changing the extent of the map does not seem to limit the results in any way. Keying in locations in the text search box was not successful in my attempts. I keyed in "State College" (Palin spoke there last night) and "Virginia" (Obama was there yesterday) but found no results during yesterday and today's time range. Strange.

- Press Release

An "F" in Marketing Savvy

At GEOINT this afternoon, I approached the Zebra Imaging booth and marveled at the 3-D holographic displays. I wanted to grab a quick photo to use in this blog post but, WHOA..."Excuse me...no photos sir, came the voice." What was that? You're not selling this product? See the press badge? Do you want free publicity? Is it a secret? I know it's holographic but it's not invisible. So, I was handed some marketing literature which quickly made its way into the circular file. That was bad form...So, they still get the blog post but an "F" in marketing savvy. (no hyperlink either)

Netezza Appliance "Visited"

We've written before on the Netezza data warehouse appliance that supports the OGC simple feature specifications and hopes to offer clients exceedingly fast performance with high volumes of data (think terabytes). So,  on the exhibit floor of the GEOINT Symposium I got an up-close look at the basic device. If you've taken apart a deskside computer you'd recognize that it has the same basic components: a hard drive, processor and memory. What would be new is the "secret sauce," a silicon chip with the embedded proprietary logic to strip out certain extraneous bytes such as SQL statements and simply use the location-based data. This firmware approach to dealing with the complexities of massive amounts of data is amplied when these simple sleaves of hardware are rack mounted - 120 fold. The Netezza appliance is composed of 120 such devices described above in the company's Asymmetric Massively Parallel Processing architecture. According to their literature on Netezza Spatial "each intelligent node...is an independent computer optimized specifically to accelerate analytic query performance on large data volumes."

The argument about whether you replace an Oracle Spatial or ArcSDE may be a question for some but it may not be an either/or situation. Netezza will first process the data using the ETL functions of Safe's FME which loads the spatial data into its firmware so it can bypass a typical database but many users have found an approach that works in tandem.

Attendance At GEOINT Looks Robust; Exhibits "So So"

Attendance at GEOINT this year in Nashville at the Opryland Hotel looked very robust by looking at the opening session; I'd estimate about 2500 people. Exhibitor's however thought the traffic was light to moderate. My take was that most booths were busy but not overly crowded...not even Google.

Off Topic: Christian Science Monitor to Drop Print Daily in April

I have a few connections to the Christian Science Monitor. My high school history teacher was a Christian Scientist so I learned a bit about the mother church here in Boston. And like most kids in the region spent a good deal of time in the Mapparium, an "inside out" glass globe you could walk inside. (A must see when touring the city!) Only when I reach adulthood did I read the newspaper. I liked it so much I "borrowed" the Monitor part for my first publication, GIS Monitor.

Tuesday I heard that come April 2009 the daily version of the paper will be replaced by an online and e-mail version, leaving just a weekend print edition. It's not news that print papers are having a tough time. Even the New York Times is not in the clear, now holding a "sell" rating from at least one analyst. I applaud the folks behind the Monitor for re-organizing such that the content can remain, even if the print version goes away. I'm sure we'll lose some papers altogether as the economy and technology change; I just don't want to see papers of record, like CS Monitor and the Times disappear due to poor business decisions.

- Christian Science Monitor