Monday, December 15. 2008

Two NZ Firms Learn to Live with Google's StreetView

Computerworld New Zealand sounds a bit skeptical of the positive spin of two local companies as they work around Streetview:

Local online mapping service providers are putting on a brave face, welcoming the launch of Google’s Street View and saying it creates an awareness of spatial information that can only be good for business.

ProjectX shut down its Smaps a few weeks ago and its Trade Me real estate site now uses StreetView. But it's other property ZoomIn, a sort of StreetView with value add from user generated content, is getting more hits. Says the chief executive:
"We can’t compete against Google, but we can provide extra value and services for local businesses."

Terralink’s street level images are focused on the business-to-business space. It's Streetcam "incorporates a number of data sets, such as GPS, geometry and imagery," something far beyond "just pictures."

CBR Offers "Rare" Interview with Dangermond

CBR (Computer Business Review) offers a "business-y" interview. I'm not sure why the author describes it as rare; Dangermond has always been generous with his time for journalists. There are some statements worthy of note (below), but the responses tend to confirm what those who've been working with ESRI already know (unlikely to buy or become a public company, is not consumer focused, but rather professionally focused, focused on Windows).

The interesting statements:

"Microsoft, with the acquisition of Navteq, and Nokia will play into that space [mapping technologies] as well as larger players."
[That's an error; Nokia acquired NAVTEQ.]

"ESRI is philosophically very supportive of the open source movement and we have engineered our tools so they live inside an open source sandwich."
[I'm not sure what an open source sandwich is, but certainly ESRI and many other proprietary solutions work with open source. ESRI and others build their solutions on some open source code, too.]

"I don’t think we do [face much competition from open source]. It’s a political movement as well as a technical effort. People who buy our products don’t typically want to buy open source because they want to acquire total integrated support for their mission critical applications."
[Open source software has no license or royalty fee.]

Magellan Sells off Consumer GPS Division to MiTAC

Rich Owings wrote to share the news from his GPS Tracklog blog. The products from that line include Magellan RoadMate, Maestro and Triton. MiTAC, based in Taiwan is the company behind the Mio line of GPS receivers. The short press release is here.

Vodafone Publication Takes on "Using the world as our interface"

Sascha let me know about an article from the online Receiver publication by Anne Galloway from Vodafone takes on location and activism.

It turns out, there was a whole set of articles on location/space/place/annotation:

Over the coming weeks receiver will show you how we came to use the world itself as our interface. Contributors to receiver's "Space is the place" edition are: Sean Gorman, Jonathan Raper, Kazys Varnelis, Andrew Grill, Michael DiBernardo, Jonathan Follett, Anne Galloway, Arno Scharl, Martijn de Waal, and Dan Simmons.