Thursday, July 9. 2009

How Google Maps uses the W3C Geolocation API and Google Location Services

There's a lot of excitement (sample) about browsers (notably Firefox and Chrome, but actually any implementation that include Google Gears) implementing the W3C Geolocation API. Why? In the past few days Google announced that Google Maps (desktop) can now take advantage of it. All good. My concern: all this discussion may be "fuzzing up" what the API does and does not do.

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Two Geospatial Visionaries to Lead Social Data Mining Company

The company is called smartRealmTM; it describes itself as providing tech that "extracts critical targeted information from social media and web content, fuses it with enterprise data, and delivers real-time tailored insights that enable organizations to make informed decisions and take effective actions." Today it announced that Barry Glick, co-founder and development lead for MapQuest (back in the day) has been appointed CEO.

The underlying tech comes from Image Matters LLC, via a corporate spin-out. Dr. Yaser Bishr, who I know from his work with OGC on geospatial-semantic technologies, left his position as CTO at Image Matters (itself a geo brain trust) to serve as smartRelam's Executive VP.

- press release

Skyhook's Morgan: Screen Size Challenges GPS Signals, Turn by Turn too Expensive

Rafe Needleman interviewed Skyhook's CEO Ted Morgan on the current state of things location, including FireFox going with Google's toolkit and not Skyhook's (not unexpected), the price of turn by turn directions in phones (too high), the need for location brokers like Fire Eagle (too early to know) and how the larger the screen in a device, the poorer the reception.

Furthermore, the bigger the screen of a device, the worse the GPS reception gets. Morgan says, "The bigger screens drown out the GPS signals." Although when I pressed him as to why, and he claimed to not be technical enough to fully understand it.

#ESRIUC Award Winners

Dr. Henk J. Scholten will receive ESRI Lifetime Achievement Award next week. The award recognizes Dr. Scholten's accomplishments as "one of the first adopters of GIS in the world and a prolific author of books on spatial analysis," his prominence in the field, and his research work as scientific director of the Spinlab, the Spatial Information Laboratory at the Free University of Amsterdam.

- PhysOrg

Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley will receive the President’s Award. Maryland apps including GreenPrint, BayStat, and recovery.maryland.gov are built on ESRI technology.

- The Bay

Linked Geodata: OSM Gets Linkable

On Wednesday the team behind Linked Geodata announced the first public version of the project's data and services. You'll have to bear with me because this is clearly a project aimed at developers (I am not one) and I'm trying to tease out what this is and how it might be used.

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