Tuesday, August 25. 2009

Bing Maps via WMS

Jeff Harrison at The Carbon Project let me know about a new beta offering from On Terra Systems that makes Bing Maps data available via a WMS. You can join the beta and test it out for free.

Monday, August 24. 2009

Yelp Mobile: Bing Maps on Blackberry, GMaps on iPhone

TechCrunch notes the launch of the Yelp Blackberry app (Yelp is a restaurant review service) and the difference in map platform. So, why go Bing when Google was used for the previous app on the other platform?

Per the article: "Yelp says that Bing was used because the search engine provided map tile access, which was essential for movable maps on the app."

Tuesday, August 11. 2009

SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP - with more maps

There's a lot that's new and available to all tomorrow in a Community Tech Preview (CTP) but one aspect is a new release of Report Builder (3.0). It offers charts and gages and supports "geospatial visualization" which the blog posts explains means "maps." The actual release is expected in the first half of 2010.

- Data Platform Insider/SQL Server News Blog

Podcast: Cloud Computing in Geospatial

Cloud computing is on everyone's list of buzz words this summer. What does the phrase mean? And what does it mean in the geospatial arena? We offer some definitions and ways to think about the new computing platform and look at what's happening now and may be ahead for geospatial technology practitioners.

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Missed any podcasts? Want to subscribe via iTunes, Yahoo, etc? Here's the index.

Monday, August 10. 2009

Quick: Move the Servers to Save on Taxes!

You can file this under "Geography Matters": cloud platform providers are getting savvy about chasing the best tax benefits. If they should end in one state, they can ship the servers to another with better incentives. To that end Microsoft is packing up the Windows Azure platform (Platform as a Service in cloud speak) and moving it out of Washington State since breaks on equipment are no longer available.

I guess Sun had it right when the started thinking about packaging computing power in shipping containers.

via Slashdot via reader Larry

The State of GIS in NZ

"We’re definitely seeing an upsurge in implementations, but I think that the bulk of the demand for these applications is yet to come. When mainstream solution partners have fully adopted GIS solutions as part of their offering, I think we’ll see the market surge in this area."

That's the word from Kevin Ackhurst, managing director of Microsoft New Zealand in Reseller News article touting MapIt, the enterprise app introduced at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference and the ESRI International User Conference. As for the uptake of MapIt by developers? "Ackhurst won’t say which local developers, other than [ESRI NZ Distributor] Eagle, are developing on top of Mapit and won’t provide numbers, saying it’s 'commercially sensitive.'"

The last sentence of the article, which I believe is sourced to Gartner (and maybe this research note?), seems to need some corrections as MapInfo has not been mentioned thus far and one would be hard pressed to compare Bentley's Geographics to MapInfo's products or MapIt:

While Google Maps continues to dominate the consumer end of GIS, current commercial competitors for MapInfo include Bentley Systems’ GeoGraphics, Smallworld Spatial Intelligence, Spatial Insights’ TrendMap, alongside open source GIS systems such as GRASS and a vast range of free products indexed by organisations such as OpenSourceGIS.