Monday, August 17. 2009

Yelp + Digg + Foursquare = GraffitiGeo

That's the equation from ReadWriteWeb and it sounds like a great short hand for the new GraffitiGeo which the site says will suffer from all the regular social media apps' problem: reaching critical mass. Mashable does like the "digg-like" voting but is looking toward the "augemented reality" version of GraffitiGeo where the information (mostly focussed on restaurant reviews) will appear as you "look through" your iPhone.

Because the app is location-based, it knows what's nearby. In the demo, they aim the app down the street from where they're standing and GraffitiGeo displays the ratings for all the restaurants on that block. If you're ever just wandering around looking for a place to eat, this could be a real timesaver.

Victoria Fires Report Offers Suggestions; Reporter Harps on LBS

The report about last summer's fires and the resulting deaths in Victoria, Australia came out yesterday. It includes many suggestions for future responses. (The Austrlalian)

But in an interview with Sky News Attorney-General Robert McClelland concedes that an LBS app to alert those in the line of fire is still far off. Sky News (I belive it's David Speers) is relentless in his questioning (Australia.to):

SPEERS: One of those areas for the Commonwealth Government is the idea of an early phone alert system. Now is this system going to be in place in time for the coming summer?

McCLELLAND: It will be switched on for trial in October, we're told and operational in November. At this stage it will, however, only be to billing addresses and households. It won't target the location of people where they actually are on their mobile phone.

SPEERS: Is that because of technology?

McCLELLAND: This is because of technology.

We're contributing to research to develop this capability in Australia. But at this stage, it will still be to billing addresses. A big advance, but not perfectly there yet.

SPEERS: So, for people who might be visiting fire prone areas, or danger areas, they're not going to receive any sort of alert on their mobile phone?

McCLELLAND: If they live outside the area, or their billing address is their place of work, they won't receive a targeted warning. I think there will be compensation for that by making the alerts more general this fire season, so that we can cover as wide an audience as possible. But that's still important work we're doing.

SPEERS: And you don't know how far off that might be, that location based alert?

McCLELLAND: The Victorian Government is in charge of calling for a Request for Information from the market – I think it's called, the technical phrase – as to who may be capable of providing that service. So we're waiting to see what comes in, in the next few weeks.

It's something to see a reporter advocate for geotechnology so aggressively.

Garmin, others exploring acquisitions of Britain's Raymarine

Raymarine makes fishfinders, autopilots, marine radar and GPS systems for leisure boats and has been struggling of late. The company confirmed it is in preliminary talks with Garmin and others about an acquisition. The news popped after a report that Garmin had approached the company with a takeover bid on Sunday. Raymarine's stock was up 96% on the news.

- Reuters

TomTom iPhone Apps Out - World Abuzz; TomTom Quiet

There were some 150 news articles about this weekend's roll out of the highly anticipated TomTom iPhone app in Australia, the UK and the U.S. The excitement is in part because this app unlike others, does not have a recurring monthly charge. In the U.S. it runs $100. TomTom has no mention of the app on its corporate website and its iPhone site was rather bare (with no link to the app in the App Store) as of 8:30 am EST. The video (advertisement) there still says "coming soon to the app store." This illustrates how corporate communications have changed!

For those interested here's Mashable's coverage with a video.

Does your state have a webpage for geospatial services like this?

I continue to be impressed by what my state (ok commonwealth) does with GIS. MassGIS is the Commonwealth's Office of Geographic and Environmental Information and like many other offices that have statewide GIS responsibilities is underfunded, under-respected and doesn't get out much. Still, they offer some great resources.

I just found this page today: MassGIS Geospatial Web Services Homepage. It's a developer guide for the Web services that MassGIS provides:

This is the home of the MassGIS geospatial web services project. This site contains information on accessing, using and developing against MassGIS-maintained “Web Map Service” and “Web Feature Service” services. Anyone may use these services.
...
This site is a guide to using our OGC web services to:

Fetch maps from our Web Map Server and display them on your website or in your application.
Perform spatial queries against our Web Feature Server and display the results on your website or in your application.
Build web-based applications which show maps and query them.
Integrate these web-based applications into your website.

In short, this site is a central location for learning how to make on-line maps about Massachusetts.

Game on at People's Map

To insure the upcoming 1:10,000 scale map of London is complete the people behind the People's Map (launch press release) are offering prizes for the person who locates a fictional tourist and the person who posts the most Points of Interest (POIs) between now and the end of September. To play, you need to sign up as an editor and contribute to the map.

While the press release on the contest mentions verifying POIs, but apparently there is no prize for that.