Wednesday, November 18. 2009

Bentley Announces New Center in Dublin

The new international Shared Services, Sales and Marketing Centre in Dublin will create 150 jobs. The investment is supported by IDA Ireland (the agency responsible for industrial development in Ireland).

- Silicon Republic

Seen During Geography Awareness Week II

The intro line for the new Turbo Tax: "Like GPS for taxes, TurboTax ® 2009 easily and accurately guides taxpayers step-by-step through their tax return, effortlessly getting them to their ultimate destination - the biggest tax refund possible. "

- press release

Fedex Senses a Need for Package Sensing

The new SenseAware platform is a "next generation information service that combines a GPS sensor device and a web-based collaboration platform." Due next spring, the "ride along" hardware can track: "precise temperature readings; a shipment's exact location; when a shipment is opened or if the contents have been exposed to light; as well as real-time alerts and analytics between trusted parties regarding the above signs of a shipment." The first market for the device? Health care and life sciences.

- press release

Ordnance Survey maps to go free online

That's the word from The Guardian, backers of the three year old Free Our Data campaign. Not that they didn't have help from outspoken proponents of making the Ordnance Survey data free(r) to use. Exactly how it will be done is not clear. What we do know:

In the new year Brown intends to publish 2,000 sets of data, possibly including all legislation, as well as road-traffic counts over the past eight years, property prices listed with the stamp-duty yield, motoring offences with types of offence and the numbers, by county, for the top six offences.

It is thought transport providers, such as train, tube and bus companies, will lose the right to demand a hefty fee from companies such as independent travel websites and firms devising programs for mobile phones, who want to publish such information....

The online maps would be free to all, including commercial users who, previously, had to acquire expensive and restrictive licences at £5,000 per usage, a fee many entrepreneurs felt was too high.

A team at Cambridge University, commissioned by the Treasury ran the numbers regarding moving to free; it found that making all OS data free would cost the government £12m and bring a net gain of £156m.

- The Guardian

Garmin Offers Process to Put Your Maps on its Devices

Essentially Custom Maps allows you to upload georeferenced JPGs onto your device. Per the press release:

The first step to creating Custom Maps is to save your existing map in JPG format, either by scanning a paper map or converting a digital file. The second step is to georeference your new map image, which can be done easily by using Google Earth to line up key landmarks with those depicted on the map. The final step is to save your Custom Maps to your Garmin device and you’re ready to go explore. To see these steps in further detail, to find and share maps with other users and to join discussions about Garmin Custom Maps, visit www.garmin.com/CustomMaps. Custom Maps should only be created from maps that are in the public domain, for which you hold the copyright, or that you have permission to use from the copyright holder. The original map’s accuracy in scale and illustration is also an important factor in creating quality Custom Maps.

FDA Grants 62K to Wisconsin for TIGER Agro-terrorism Tool

TIGER stands for Terrorist Incident GIS-Enhanced Response. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave the grant (one of four) to Food Safety Division, housed in the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, to encourage new ways to protect the nation’s food system from agro-terrorism. The team "will develop a computer program using licensing and inspection information to develop computer maps that track where contaminated food may have been distributed."

- WisBusiness.com