Friday, November 6. 2009

Podcast: A Hallway Conversation with Maarten Oldenhof

Adena Schutzberg interviewed Automotive Navigation Data (AND) CEO Maarten Odelhof about the state of commercial geodata, the licensing challenges and the role the community can play in keeping data up-to-date. This is the third in a series of interviews with geospatial insiders and outsiders.

Thursday, November 5. 2009

Tuscany's Open Source GIS Evolves

Officials of the Tuscany region (Italy) have published a new version of its GIS website built on SagaDB (Sistema di Accesso Georeferenziato alle Banche Dati).

The development effort began back in 2001and originally used GRASS. The latest version, released under GPL does't use it anymore. The solution supports "the creation of dynamic or pre-processed maps, where the graphic attributes can be processed by either the client or the server."

Why is app open source? "According to [dev team member Viviana] Cossi, the Tuscany regional administration decided to publish Sagabd as open source for two reasons. "Making it available as open source makes it easy to incorporate existing code into a project", she says. Secondly, the region as a matter of principle has a policy to select open source software wherever possible."

- eGov Monitor

Tuesday, November 3. 2009

Podcast: With Geodata, Developers, not Consumers Rule

If consumers think of geodata as a commodity, what does that say for its future? What are the key data relationships? And what, if anything, will differentiate one offering from another? Our editors ponder these questions in light of evidence that consumers know and care little about who makes, manages and updates basemaps.

Monday, November 2. 2009

Cloudmade Chairman/CEO on How Google is Blowing it With Mapping Devs

Sadly, Juha Christensen does not identify himself as Chairman/CEO in the post on his blog. Further, he didn't identify that it was an e-mail sent to partners; I learned that from Mike Arrington at TechCrunch, who reprinted it at his request.

His starting point:

Google betting on one-size-fits all model
Google is betting on building a horizontal, local search franchise. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but please read on, it gets clearer. Google is building a one-size-fits-all set of services around mapping, and will serve the masses with those. Think about Google Maps, Latitude or Earth. They are horizontal one-size-fits-all web apps with little or no segmentation. Everyone uses the same app.


Meanwhile, in the process of building out end-user applications rather than sticking to being a platform player, Google is causing considerable collateral damage. Its move into the territory normally occupied by mobile operators, OEMs and small, medium and large developers is turning the marketplace against itself. The honeymoon is over and the do-no-evil days have ended. Google has declared any monetizable pocket in tech a target, including the key franchises of Apple, Microsoft, the mobile operators and now also mobile application developers. The problem with Google’s approach is, the value is not in horizontal services, but in leveraging the democratizing effect of the app stores to use the 100,000+ vertical apps as a way to divide the market into tiny segments and let them flourish and gain traction.

Friday, October 30. 2009

OSM in Uganda

Just yesterday I noted AfricaGIS was held in the capital of Uganda, Kampala. Google had quite a presence in part because of new efforts to map the country. Today, there's word that OpenStreetMap is also active in country as part of a DevelopmentSeed effort. Locals are using QGIS for mapping and uploading data to OSM.

Ironic that the final line in Jonathan Bennett's report is: "Now imagine if some proprietary software company or mapping data provider had got involved?"

- ZDnet Blog

Thursday, October 22. 2009

FOSS4G Coverage II

Mateusz Loskot offers a video of Paul Ramsey's keynote offers a video of Paul Ramsey's keynote.

Mark From the Inside Looking In raves: the video "has been all the talk on Twitter. If you haven't seen it yet, you should do so."

Iki Maska rounds up some presentations on his blog: "A somewhat ordinary presentation by Ingres." "Raul Vera from Google on a subtle but profound shift in spatial paradigm, predicting that in mid 2011 the majority of location searches will be from mobile devices and this requires a different point of thought ("I'm lost!" is actually a very rare use case)."

The Map Guy(de) talks about the new FDO Toolbox.

Kate Lundy, Senator represented the Australian Capital Territory, offers the full text of her presentation at the conference.