Thursday, December 18. 2008

iPhone GPS App Sold for $70,000

The app, Where To, which turns the iPhone into more of a GPS, from developer Tap Tap Tap made about $200,000 in its first three months at the App Store. Then the developers put it up for sale. Another Apple developer recently acquired it and replace it on the store - it sells for $2.99.

The Tap Tap Tap folks detail the sale on their blog.

- LA Times Blog

Technology Guardian Top Sites Fueled by Location

Per the article:

The explosion in location-based services is driven by the growing number of mobile phones, such as Apple's iPhone and a number of RIM's BlackBerry smartphones, which have built-in Global Positioning System (GPS) chips, able to report their position with an accuracy of a few metres. Given that and the user's willingness to volunteer their location, people can let friends know where they are - or find new ones in the area.

The top 100 listing identifies four sites - Dopplr.com, Qype.com, Loopt.com and Brightkite.com - which hold notable potential for location-based work. A key to their development has been the growth in map products online - another area that the Guardian's technology writers identified as a key area of expansion, as Google and Microsoft vie to provide programming hooks called APIs, which mean the GPS data can be transformed into a "pushpin" on a map display - known as a "mashup" of the two pieces of data, from the GPS and the map. Google's mapping service, which in December 2006 had only had such coding for six months, is now in widespread use.

Interestingly, the geo sites that make the list of 100 total sites are broken into two categories: location and maps. They might also appear in games, social networks, reminders, search, visualization...it's so tough to put a horizontal technology into a vertical box!

Rand McNally Serves up Maps for Kindle

First off, the Kindle is Amazon's e-book reader. Some love it (Oprah does!), others hate it. I've yet to see one in the wild myself, but hear about it quite on tech podcasts. Among the texts that can be downloaded wirelessly are books, magazines, newspapers, etc. You can even put audio on it.

Yesterday Rand McNally announced its first set of maps for the device (press release). The prices are good - $1.99 each for Northern and Southern California and Washington State. More are planned for 2009. The challenge, as Gizmodo points out, why put non-updatable maps, even digital ones on such a device? If Rand McNally comes up with an update mechanism, perhaps this will be more interesting, but PNDs and cell phones are way out ahead of the Kindle. In particular, people know what they are!

Obama: "I want an Interior Department that very frankly cleans up its act"

These were president-elect Obama's words on announcing Senator Ken Salazar as the next Interior Secretary. I was a bit taken back by the frankness of his remarks but approvingly so. But will another politician such as Salazar fight the good fight for effectiveness in the name of the American taxpayer? Mr. Obama's stated first priority of his administration is for better energy policy and that sits squarely in the hands of the Interior Sectretary. I don't know Senator Salazar's background other than what has been written about his efforts to curtail oil shale development but support offshore drilling.

But given the mission of Interior and in particular the USGS, we will see better management at Survey? Will the new GIO for Interior drive geospatial technology to be more consolidated between the other agencies like BLM, MMS, BIA and the others in to a more unified geospatial data model ala the efforts of the FGDC and the mission Geospatial Line of Business (GLoB)? Will Salazar keep a GIO in place?

I'm sure Obama was referring to some of the mismanagement issues of the MMS but what do you think he meant? I'd like to hear your opinion on what's next for Interior. We've reported on some of the recent developments at the USGS, like the recently updated website of the National Map. What say you on how the new Interior Sectretary can "clean up the act" of the department?

Depiction Launches

The product/company called Depiction has been in stealth mode for a few months. I tried the beta of what the CEO Mike Geertsen calls a "new category of 'what-if' mapping software" but could not get it to install a month or so ago.

You can read the press release here. It focuses quite a bit on the $89 price tag. I want to focus on what makes it different from other data integration/scenario mapping tools I've seen. Here's my list:

Continue reading "Depiction Launches"

UMapper Update: Use Text or Website to Populate Map via MetaCarta Engine

I wrote about Umapper earlier this year in this post. Now an update: instead of loading in point locations one at a time, it's possible to paste a block or text or a URL for a webpage and have the MetaCarta public API extract locations and post them on one of several background maps (Google, VE, OpenStreetMap).

Some notes:

- It's a one time process, so if the webpage updates, the map does not. For changing data - use GeoRSS.
- The location "text" is all that's associated with the symbol on the map.
- I had trouble running it in Safari.

Still, a nice addition! More on the Umapper blog.