Friday, August 21. 2009

AND Forming a Global Mapping Alliance to Compete with NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas

AND Chief Executive Maarten Oldenhof just returned from China and shared details of a planned alliance between AND, a Chinese and a Lebanese mapping company should be completed within two years. Odenhof did not name the companies, nor rule out other partners may be involved. The plan: join together to compete with NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas in the built-in car systems and smartphones markets.

Whether AND disappears or becomes the new company is unclear. It's stock was up 11% on the news, but analysts suggest the impact on NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas may be minimal, save lowering prices a bit. AND is flying high this year with stock prices almost tripling on news of an unnamed US company contract to use its Western Europe maps.

- Reuters

Tim O'Reilly's Vision for "Gov as Platform"... and Geo

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb details Tim O'Reilly's efforts to change government's relationship with technology. The goal: government as platform for innovation. Here's the money quote from O'Reiily after a session with some "geohackers":

This morning we did a call with the White House and some geohackers, talking about what's wrong with government geodata now and how could it be fixed. The government people said we need to translate this into real projects that will appeal to politicians. 'If you fix this kind of geodata then we'll be able to provide this service - street safety, education attainment, public policy objectives,' was what they wanted to hear from the hackers. It's really about social innovation, building better tools for us as a nation to use technology to focus on real problems.

Twitter to Add Location Info to Tweets

I guess we knew it was coming. There are numerous ways to automagically add "real time" location to tweets already via third party apps. Now, Biz Stone notes on the Twitter blog the capability will be added to the API, then to the end user interface. By default, it will be "off." The benefits to users? Find tweets locally or follow tweets from an event (concert) or area (earthquake). The benefits to Twitter? $$$ (someday...)

Any word on the technology/platforms that will provide location? No. Anything on the API itelsef? Yes. Twitter lead on the project @rsarver (who joined the company from Skyhook Wireless) posted about the additions to the API and notes data delivery via GeoRSS (nice to hear that!). Why GeoRSS? "We picked the standard because we like the flexibility and the types of geospatial data it can describe."

See also: Brady Forrest's Radar post on the announcement