Thursday, March 12. 2009

Garmin Lays off 141

The news came on Monday. The GPS company will cut 141 workers, about 5.6 percent of its 2510 workers in the Kansas City metropolitan area.

- Kansas City Business Journal

Save Animals in Tasmania: Upload Roadkill Hotspot Info to Your GPS

Researchers Alistair Hobday and Melinda Minstrell spent three years mapping road kill to determine "hot spots." But they went one step further by turning the dataset into one uploadable to GPS receivers. Those who drive in Tasmania are encouraged to add the data to their devices for warnings to slow down in the most dangerous areas. The team behind the dataset hopes to put it into rental car GPS devices across the state.

- National Geographic

Rural Provider Crowdsourcing Broadband Demand

RidgeviewTel, a company that has deployed 54 broadband networks in rural areas, is asking those in underserved areas to put themselves on it's weneedbroadband.com map. The idea is to funnel federal funds to these areas, and no doubt, to RidgeViewTel.

From the FAQ:

How does it work?
While we can’t tell you how the technology works (it’s our “secret recipe”), we can tell you that the more people that login and get mapped in your area increases your chances that a provider will invest in building out your area and community. It could be RidgeviewTel or it might be another carrier, but the more valid customer locations in a given area will increase the probability that some of those funds in the stimulus page come to you in the form of high speed connectivity.

- press release

Dangermond on Active Mashup, GIS and Terrorism

FutureGov has the latest interview with ESRI's Jack Dangermond. Along with a history of GIS from the 1970s today and the move from mainframe to Web, Dangermond speaks of "active mashup," a term new to me.

This [a federated system where departments develop and maintain their own data] clears the path for an “active mashup” – a collection of mapping applications and web services that are combined into a single mapping application. Taking advantage of a variety of pre-developed services and functions, agencies can dramatically decrease development costs and data costs for their applications. In addition, performance is greatly improved.

“Active mashup is part of the vision for server based enterprise system,” says Dangermond. “However, the mashup is not the cause; server architecture is the real enabling technology.”

Another great quote from Dangermond, this time on censoring map data to prevent terrorism:

Terrorists don’t need GIS to figure out how to bomb a building.

GovGuam to Get GIS

GovGuam is the government portal for the U.S. territory. Today the U.S. Department of Interior gave the portal $360,000 for GIS technology.

- Pacific News Center

Small Science - Milk Carton Satellite Doing what Failed OCO Planned

The $278 million NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory crashed last month before achieving orbit. But the tiny Canadian CanX-2 has been monitoring carbon for almost a year. The $300,000 Canadian satellite is an 8-pound, milk-carton-size microsatellite and it's looking like a smart investment.

- UPI
- Space Daily