Friday, December 18. 2009

NAVTEQ Spoofs Self in Santa's Navigational Needs Press Release

For many of you not in the geospatial publishing business, be aware that the increase in press announcements about location, GIS, geospatial, geo this, geo that, has increased substantially over the past few years. One perpetrator of this tsunami of news is NAVTEQ. Almost daily we hear from NAVTEQ about new data features or a new country added to their database of streetcenterline files. All good, really. But they are a loquacious group to be sure.

Well, they must understand how they have come to offer up corporate news because they've done a great job of spoofing themselves in this latest press release about how "Santa Claus Partners with NAVTEQ to Ensure A Smooth Christmas Eve."

Kudos to the folks at NAVTEQ for making this PR a "must read" for the press. Can't wait to see Santa's "in-sleigh" navigation system.

Former Mapquester/Yahoo Law Joins AlikeList

It's a new social startup where Mark Law will serve as the lead for product development. He was vice president of Product Management at MapQuest and led development of MapQuest Local. Before that he did product management for Yahoo! Maps channels and location platforms and services.

About AlikeList, which also got $5 million in Series A funding: "AlikeList was founded in 2008 to enable users to list, discover, and share local businesses that they trust. This social-local service lets users endorse and refer the businesses they like to help people find trusted local businesses. For more information, visit http://www.alikelist.com."

- press release

An Election Data Browser for Afghanistan Elections

Eric Gundersen of DevelopmentSeed details the value of opening up raw data via open source in " Opening Afghanistan's Election Data: An Open Source Data Browser."

Why should you read up on this project?

Open data and open source

Working with open source tools gave us the flexibility to build a highly custom solution for NDI and building on top of Managing News let us build it faster. In some ways this application serves as a living monitoring and evaluation report that shows the results of what a $300 million foreign donor funded election looks like. The "living" part is what is key here, since this M&E report is really about helping future projects in real time.

It is exciting to see how fast talk about open data can turn into real systems at USAID. This tool from NDI is one of the first large open data wins at USAID, but based on the chatter here in Washington, DC, it is just the beginning of a new trend

- DevelopmentSeed Blog