Friday, November 20. 2009

Podcast: A Hallway Conversation with Jay Tilley, Senior VP, Sanborn

Adena Schutzberg interviewed Jay Tilley, Sanborn's Senior Vice President about why 3D data is important and how the industry is overcoming challenges such as cost, data fusion and the integration of real time data. Tilley also speaks to the future growth of 3D data development and its use in augmented reality applications. This interview is part of a series of interviews with geospatial insiders and outsiders.

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Computerworld on CloudMade

Actually, it was MacWorld (both IDG pubs) that caught up with Nick Black, CloudMade founder, to explore why the company and OSM can change the world.

- Computerworld

Seen During Geography Awareness Week IV

""The woman requested that the deputies Google Earth her house and keep it on satellite surveillance overnight," [Sgt] Dawes said."

- A Lake Forest (CA) resident called local police to as for a watch on her house after she heard noises, as reported in the OC Register.

SimpleGeo: AWS for Location

Former Digg Chief Architect Joe Stump and Social Thing founder Matt Galligan are now offering a private beta of SimpleGeo, a "new infrastructure for location based services."

Per TechCrunch:

SimpleGeo is akin to an ‘Amazon Web Services’ for location: developers looking to integrate location based services (LBS) can plug into some simple APIs and SimpleGeo will do most of the legwork for them.

This description from an earlier TechCrunch post is more clear:

SimpleGeo is ready-to-use location infrastructure. They currently have three products: a geo-spatial Context Engine, Storage Engine and a comprehensive SDK. The SimpleGeo Context Engine enables application developers to quickly and easily get relevant information about specific locales including (but not limited to) ZIP codes, real-time weather, and geo-tagged media. Additionally, the SimpleGeo Storage Engine makes it possible to store and query location data in a scalable fashion, as well as perform complicated geospatial operations effortlessly.

I'm thinking the back end may be an open source stack...

AOL Lays Off Workers, Puts Properties up Sale

AOL which will be sprung from Time Warner at the beginning of next month laid off 1/3 of its workers and reports indicate it's putting its ICQ messaging service and perhaps MapQuest up for sale. Among the possible buyer suggested for the mapping biz: Microsoft and Apple (though they did acquire Placebase recently). Some suggest dumping MapQuest may not be such a great idea if as CEO Tim Anderson suggested, local will be a focus. On the other hand, AOL did buy hyperlocal media company Patch and quickly swapped out Google Maps for OSM (APB coverage).

- GigaOm
- Barrons Blog
- Strategy Eye

Google Goes Deeper on Real Estate with Place Pages

Now Google offers a page for each real estate offerings. (Generic "Place Pages" were announced in Sept. [LatLong Blog].) Data is drawn from a variety of sources (multiple listings!), perhaps pushing Google more toward aggregator of than organizer of the world's information. The sample page for property in Seattle noted has three listing for the property (it's interesting to look at the posting dates) with much the same information. Two state there are 2.5 baths, the third 2.1 baths. (I can't explain that.) Here's a house for sale's page in my city.

Also worthy of note: The National Associations of REALTORS(R) is launching its national database (" the Realtors® Property ResourceTM, a parcel-centric information database covering all of the more than 147 million property parcels in the country as a resource for NAR members") next spring, based on some tech it acquired (press release).

The new feature was announced in the Google Australia blog where much of the Google real estate innovation seems to appear first.

I'm thinking this new feature may be tied into Google's parcel layer that appeared earlier this fall.

- Search Engine Watch