The Revolution Will be Mapped

That’s the title of a Culture & Society article in a publication that “harnesses current academic research with real-time reporting to address pressing social concerns.” The article focusses on a couple that formed a GIS institute to take on social justice issue. The Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities is based in Orange County, N.C.,  and story highlights how GIS helped rectify injustices in Zanesville, Ohio and Mebane, NC among others.

While the article focuses on how GIS helps in such cases and related policy issues such as health, it suggests GIS in its infancy and still unknown to the public:

Still, GIS is in its relative infancy as a popular science, and public awareness of its attributes and capacity is relatively low. Although most people have been exposed on the Internet to such GIS-based products as Google Maps, few can identify the technology behind them. Sarah Elwood, a geography professor at the University of Washington who has spread the GIS gospel to community groups, often encounters a baseline ignorance of the concept. “You say ‘GIS’ and people say, ‘Oh, yeah, I have one of those in my car,’” Elwood says.

- Miller-McCune

Tour of ESRI’s New Building Q

Designed by Denmark-based Hvidt Arkitekter.

- Plusmood Blog

via @sathyaprasad

Update 2: TownMe: An LBS API

Update: The company behind TownMe, Mixer Labs, is also the company behind GeoAPI. Twitter just acquired Mixer Labs. The CEO of Mixer Labs, Elad Gil, who commented below, co-founded Google’s mobile group. He will now work for Twitter.

- Paid Content
- Twitter Blog

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Distmo Reports on Costs and Proliferation of GPS and LBS in Mobile

Distimo (never heard of them) released a report focusing on “location-based apps across the smartphone markets, looking at the costs and proliferation of GPS and location-based mobile software.” Teaser findings:

- More than half the navigation and maps, news and weather, and social apps are “premium” (fee-based).

- The iPhone has the most LBS apps, with the largest percentage of paid apps (over Blackberry and Android). Seventy-nine percent of Android LBS apps are free.

- BlackBerry has the biggest cost jump in LBS apps: the average application cost ($14.37) is almost twice that of the iPhone App Store ($7.34).

- PocketGamer and GigaOm shares more from the report titled “Apple App Store, BlackBerry App World & Android Market ” published with Skyhook, available here.

Adding TV reception to make PNDs more desirable

Israel-based Siano Mobile Silicon announced that Garmin, Mio, and Navigon will be using its mobile TV chip for new GPS devices. The plan is to offer free, advertising supported shows from terrestrial broadcast channels. The first regions to get this functionality:  Korea, Europe, China, and Brazil.

- GearLog