What Nat at O’Reilly Learned working on Open Data

The big takeaway for me:

The best dinner parties are about the other people. Similarly, the best open source projects have great people, attract great people, and the source is simply what they’re working on: necessary but not sufficient. You can build it but they won’t come. All successful open source projects build communities of supportive engaged developers who identify with the project and keep it productive and useful.

You will want to read the whole thing.

via @timoreilly

Yahoo’s location-based social, augmented reality patent app

The patent app is titled Virtual Notes in a Reality Overlay and describes the idea of notes left at a location “for you” by your friends - combined with advertising and a few other things including ” social graph analysis, permissioning, expiration dates, contextual advertising and more. It’s not just text notes, it includes methods of augmented reality with photos, videos and more.”

Remember it was filed in July 2008, so much of this stuff, individually, already exists in some apps.

- ReadWrite Web

Update: Nokia Matches Google Maps Navigation with Free Phone-based Nav

Lots of excitement from Nokia: 1.4 million downloads of the freebie app since it was announced. The company boasts a download per second. Most popular countries to download: China, Italy, the UK, Germany and Spain.

- BBC

Also noteworthy, the response to a poll on Nokia Conversations about what users wanted from Ovi Maps in the future. (N=300):

40% - local guides
23.1%  - news and information
15 - other, like adding your own data
10.9% - LBS games
10.3 - event tickets

- poll
- article on poll

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Bricsys (Bricscad) Drops IntelliCAD

I’m sure lots of GIS folks tuned out of the IntelliCAD story some years ago, but the alternative CAD platform, IntelliCAD is still out there, under the auspices of the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium (ITC). Many third party developers developed on IntelliCAD to step aside from or add another platform, to their AutoCAD-based implementation. (There’s a decent history of ITC on its wikipedia page.) Carlson and Microsurvey are two companies from the survey space that build on IntelliCAD of which of which you may have heard.

Bricsys was one of the first into the IntelliCAD pool, one of the first members of the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium.

Based on a press release today, Bricsys, which develops Bricscad, an end-user and developer platform, have split with the ITC (though the company is still listed as a member on the website when I looked.) The new version of the software Version 10, is built on all Bricsys technology using the Open Design Alliance libraries (as best I understand). One of the key differentiators of moving to the ODA libraries over the ITC platform? The Bricsys software can be cross platform; Bricscad for Mac and Linux are expected later this year.

Bricsys is said to serve geospatial in the release, and lists nine third party apps (built on Bricscad) for geo.

ESRI and Bentley are members of ODA and use those same libraries.

- press release

DMTV#4: Will Your Personal GPS Protect You from Litigation?

It seems that eventually everyone will be carrying a GPS device. If so, will you ever need your location-aware mobile device to prove your whereabouts if you are the focus of litigation? From capturing the location of a car accident to something more sinister like being accused of a crime, information to prove your location may become more important and technology may be called upon to prove innocence or guilt. Editor in chief Joe Francica ponders the possibility and provides advice from a legal expert familiar with geospatial technology.