Monday, June 11. 2007

Update: World Time Zone Watch: $13,000+

When I sat down for lunch with Michael Jones recently he seemed to have something on his mind. I figured it was about something I'd gotten wrong in covering Google, or maybe some news. Nope - he wanted to talk watches. The one below is no big deal, he explained. The epitome of geek geo-watches is the Tellurium Johannes Kepler Limited Edition. (99 made) Jones himself favors a perpetual calendar watch. (500 made)

What impressed me most, as he explained in detail the wonders of these devices, is that they are mechanical, not digital.

---original post 6/8/07

Yes, it's lovely, but few Dads or grads will get the watch which tells time on all 39 time zones.

via OhGizmo

Insight into GIS Professionals NewsIQ

I attended the New York State Geospaital Summit today (more on that in Directions Magazine on Thursday). During the course of the day I watched with care as the 150+ attendees listened to presentations and asked questions. Some tidbits:

- none had heard of GAMY (Google, Ask, Microsoft, Yahoo!)
- just a few had seen Google Street View
- one fellow had just learned of the MAPPS vs. U.S. lawsuit in the latest issue of ArcNews
- there's still concern about "Google et al." hiding sensitive data
- there's still confusion about licenses of mapping APIs

That confirms something I'd been thinking about lately: that while some of us hang on every new announcement, many of us in GIS are "heads down" at our jobs. Events like this one serve as a quick update, a chance to come up for air.

Coming Soon in Google Earth: Books

Yes, that's right, books are coming to Google Earth. Michael Jones offered up a preview at the New York State Geospatial Summit. Recall that Google has scanned in text of many out of copyright (and other) books and done character recognition to create text. Now, the company has taken it one step further and posted locations found in someo of those texts (the demo showed only publicly available ones if I recall correctly) to Google Earth. When you click on a placemark you jump to the book's page and to the exact page on which the location information was found. And you get a Google Map of all the places mentioned in the book.

Back on Google Earth, there's a timeline slider so that you can see books "pop up" as you move through time. And, if many books cite the same location (Chicago, say), Google Earth cleverly arranges a subset in an orderly circle around the city to avoid clutter.

I was jazzed to see this coming attaction in part because I'd shown off both Google Map View and Timeline earlier in the day. I'd suggested they are likely indicators of where things are going!