All Points Blog

Quote of the Week

(Adena Schutzberg) — 2008-05-09T08:06:57Z

"You could say that the city is showing common sense in not trying to take a useless step."

Professor Ralph Stein, who tracks Homeland Security issues at Pace University, on New York City's decision not to blur images of the area in Google Maps. He made the comment in yet another Google Maps censorship story this time at WCBS-TV. In addition to this statement, the TV station provided another valuable statement:

"Google uses images from a state database, which is why Westchester was able to censor them. Yahoo! Images come from a private sector company."

Global Wildlife Disease News Map Version 2

(Adena Schutzberg) — 2008-05-09T07:21:41Z

USGS and partners launched Global Wildlife Disease News Map Version 2 back in March; version 1 was out last December. To be clear this is a news map (Google Map mashup), not a map of disease, but a map of news on disease. So, when you "turn on" avian flu, you get a hit in Ohio. Strange, I thought, didn't hear about that. Of course not! The article in the local paper was about how cows tested negative.

Even though I read the title with "news" in it several times, I kept thinking this was a map of spread. The other disappointment is that all news is tagged with point markers color coded to geographic level. Different colored "tears" mean: Place, County, Administrative Unit, Country, Continent. While I know creating meaningful polygons is a challenge, I found this confusing. I'd prefer they not symbolize for geographic level and let users explore that when they mouse over, more like MetaCarta's GeoSearch News.

Details of how the app works are here. In the works: search by date range, user generated filters (queries I guess), more historic data, extraction of text.

Google Maps Organizes More of Google's (not the world's) Information

(Adena Schutzberg) — 2008-05-09T06:00:00Z

Now there's more to find when searching on Google Maps - including images (Panoramio not Picassa), user generated maps (MyMaps), videos (YouTube). The limitation, reports VentureBeat, is that only documents from Google properties are included.

Microsoft Offer Citizen Services Platform Free to Municipal Govs; Soon VE templates

(Adena Schutzberg) — 2008-05-09T06:00:00Z

The Citizen Services Platform allows local government to create Web-based electronic government services. It's available to local and regional governments without fee, but they need to run"a Microsoft computing environment" for it to work.

For now it comes with:

E-Councilor templateA Windows Live Agent that allows messenger communication with a virtual government worker to ask questions.

Web TV template Allows government and citizen video hosting in Web 2.0 style.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 templates A set of 40 templates to customize scenarios that address site and system administration needs.

Local government communications template Sample portal with intranet and extranet templates.

Role-based My Site template Designed for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the My Site functionality.

Agenda Management template Allows organizations to streamline processes.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM templates for municipal governments Vertical templates, including reference data models, predefined work flows and role-based user experiences.

The interesting part: "a possible template incorporating Virtual Earth to give people localized, neighborhood-oriented services or access to information based on their geographical position."

- GCN

Final Day for Canadian Gov on MDA Sale to Alliant

(Adena Schutzberg) — 2008-05-08T09:15:27Z

Just about a month ago Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice rejected the proposed $1.3 billion sale of MDA's space and information systems divisions (maker of the Radarsat-2 satellite) to Alliant Techsystems Inc. The reason: there was no "net benefit" for the country.

Alliant had 30 days to respond and convince official otherwise. Today's the end of that period and it looks like the decision will stand. Alliant announces year end earnings today. It's expected charges related to the failed purchase will be applied to Q4 earnings.

- CBC

Consumer Reports Gives Garmin 3 of Top Five Satnavs

(Adena Schutzberg) — 2008-05-08T09:00:41Z

Rounding out the top five scoring units were the Garmin Nuvi 760 ($600), Garmin Nuvi 660 ($500), TomTom Go 920T, ($650), Garmin Nuvi 350 ($350), and Magellan Maestro 4250 ($400).

- Kansas City InfoZine

The OEMing of LBS

(Adena Schutzberg) — 2008-05-08T08:36:05Z

Wow, it's getting deep as everyone wants to brand location-based services. This article (in GovTech) on a AAA/Motorola app drove it home to me.

The Motorola MOTORAZR 2 V9m phone equipped with AAA Mobile, gives users turn-by-turn audio navigation and visual route maps. Powered by Networks in Motion, the AAA Mobile application is available on several GPS-enabled cell phones and smartphones via Verizon Wireless, Sprint and Alltel.

So, Motorola wants its name on a cool phone with a cool app. AAA wants its name on the app. NIM wants to be the technology provider. Oh, and NIM white labels deCarta's services. This is going way beyond the days of Intel inside!

Terraserver.com Sues Microsoft over TerraServer-usa.com

(Adena Schutzberg) — 2008-05-08T08:17:55Z

PCWorld carries the story.

In short:

Microsoft's TerraServer-USA satellite imagery project has been slapped with a trademark lawsuit from a small North Carolina company with a confusingly similar name.

Terraserver.com filed the suit on Friday in North Carolina federal court, seeking monetary damages and asking that Microsoft be stopped from using the TerraServer name.

Like the MapQuest/NavQuest suit (big guy sues little guy), I hope this one (little guy sues big guy) goes nowhere. The sad part, as Robert McMillan, who wrote the story suggested to me while we discussed the matter, Microsoft could just shut down Terraserver-usa.com, which would be a shame.

Ben Bernanke: Geographer

(Adena Schutzberg) — 2008-05-08T07:41:51Z

Actually, The Economist describes him as a cartographer, but I think geographer is more correct.

SOUNDING more like a cartographer than a central banker, Ben Bernanke this week showed off the Federal Reserves latest gizmo for tracking Americas property bust: maps that colour-code price declines, foreclosures and other gauges of housing distress for every county. His goal was to show that falling prices meant more foreclosures, and to urge lenders to write down the principal on troubled loans where the house is worth less than the value of the mortgage. His mapswhere hotter colours imply more troublealso make a starker point. The pain of Americas housing bust varies enormously by region. Hardest hit have been the bubble statesCalifornia, Nevada and Florida, and parts of the industrial Midwest. The biggest uncertainty hanging over the economy is how red will things get.

Update 2: Multimap Steps in for Live Maps in UK

(Adena Schutzberg) — 2008-05-07T13:42:00Z

Update 5/7/08: This from Matthew Gain, Citizenship and PR Manager, Online Services Group, UK
[Business Consultant to Microsoft Limited]

We recently announced the integration of Multimap into Live Search in the UK and will start to route users directly to the Multimap service from MSN UK and Live.com from 9th May.

Continue reading "Update 2: Multimap Steps in for Live Maps in UK"

CNN Exemplifies Problems with Static Web Services in Election Coverage

joe.francica@directionsmag.com (Joe Francica) — 2008-05-07T08:02:45Z

Yes, I too saw John King of CNN doing the "stretch and shrink" act on the touch screen last night and Paul Well's comments notwithstanding, I have a different take. What's going simply illustrates the problem that many users of web services, like Google Earth, are and will face when it comes down to wanting more than what it was designed to do.

First, King does a fantastic job and to the extent that CNN has the right statistics at his fingertips is quite good...for what it was intended to do. What is was NOT intended to do was get down into finer demographic detail and display additional political boundaries nor could it query the political districts for certain data that King so desperately wanted at his fingertips.

The CNN political geography map web service that they constructed becomes inadequate when situations like the one that occured last night for Lake County Indiana. Lake County had votes outstanding and was late in reporting results. Everyone is focused on this single county to give them the Clinton/Obama vote given the closeness of the primary election. And here's Mr. King manually drawing in the congressional districts with his finger to try to assess where he "expected" each candidate to have a better chance of pulling votes. It didn't work. The level of voting detail was not there for him to truly predict the results. What he was trying to do was to mark the congressional district boundaries and then overlay the satellite image to those boundaries to look as rural versus urban areas. Obama was pulling better statewide from the urban areas; Clinton from the rural, white communities.

It served as an example of what happens to the expectations of users who believe that a static, web service will do just fine until there is a need to drill into the details. We saw this happen to products like MapPoint 2000 when just simple thematic mapping quickly becomes inadequate when you try to do more advanced analysis and ask questions that it was never designed to accept. The same is true for the CNN Touch Screen. It doesn't have all the boundary data like congressional district maps or precinct maps (which I am sure will be needed eventually). And while the satellite maps are nice it, seemed like Mr. King was a little ill-prepared to describe the geography other than being able to point to rural vs. urban areas and found himself not knowing some of the geography (like the I90 toll road for which he was grasping). He really needed another overlay of the road network and additional POI data.

So, I continue to revel in the CNN coverage just because the maps are now a highlight of the evening..and yet there is so much more that could be done. Linking to live vote counts by precinct? You know it's coming.

Salesforce.com: User Interface as a Service?

(Adena Schutzberg) — 2008-05-07T07:51:40Z

That's it's latest offering. Mashable explores it and it's a bit more than that - more like Yahoo! Pipes to me. If you want a map on your app you add a single tag to create it an pop it onto the dashboard.

Most interesting is Adam Ostrow's take on Salesforce.com, an actual company that makes actual money, in contrast to the many, well free toys.

Is it just me, or do the announcements we hear from Salesforce seem to just make a lot more sense than a lot of the tie-ups we hear about on the consumer side of the Web? Last month, the company announced a deal with Google to launch Salesforce for Google Apps, and from what Ive seen in my brief tour of Visualforce, were about to see a lot of really useful applications being cranked out by developers in the Salesforce community. It certainly adds more credence to the theory that Facebook apps are just for fun.

Too much mapping/doodling in CNN election coverage?

(Adena Schutzberg) — 2008-05-07T07:43:00Z

Blogger Paul Wells (writing in a blog at Macleans) thinks CNN has overused its touch screen mapping driven by John King, the geospatial person of the year (Brian Timoney gets credit for that determination and he's quite correct).

CNN is giving one-quarter of its screen to the actual primary-night coverage and three-quarters to John King randomly doodling on the touch-screen. For, like, the last half-hour. Anderson Cooper and some talking head are doing the talking-head thing, tucked over on the left side of the screen, and King is randomly doing his Tom-Cruise-in-Minority-Report shtick, scrunching the map down with his thumb and forefinger, shifting county maps back and forth, scribbling with the Glowing Green Finger. On most of the screen. A month after CNN put the touch-screen on the map (and vice versa), they have now fetishized it past irrelevance and into annoyance.

Now theyve taken the actual people whose actual voices are doing the actual analysis offscreen altogether, so we can watch nothing but John King doodling distracetedly on his gigabyte Etch-A-Sketch. He doesnt even seem to realize hes on camera.

"People": TomTom Acquisition a Go; Expect Announcement on May 14

(Adena Schutzberg) — 2008-05-07T07:38:18Z

Bloomberg actually cited "wo people with direct knowledge of the case" on the matter:

The European Commission will clear the 2.9 billion-euro ($4.5 billion) purchase on May 14, a week before the regulator's May 21 deadline to rule on the transaction, said the people, who requested anonymity because the decision isn't public.

That'd be next Wednesday. TomTom of course said nothing.

The Challenges to LBS Social Networking

(Adena Schutzberg) — 2008-05-07T07:13:12Z

Caroline McCarty at c|net offers up a great primer on the challenges facing location-enabled social networking by looking primarily at newcomer (in private beta) Brightkite, old hat Loopt, and older and Google-owned but rarely heard-from Dodgeball.

Key challenges:

- open the network to all or just some - should the app run on all phones, even ancient ones with no GPS and just texting capabilities? should the app be free? should the app be restricted to certain carriers? should you do a private beta and potential limit networks at startup?

- managing privacy and lists of friends - how do you keep annoying messages out of your "inbox"?

- where do you launch/grow such apps? business-y Web 2.0 (Brightkite was launched there) or social SXSW (South by Southwest, an arts, tech gathering) where Twitter took hold in 2007

Definitely worth a read if you are trying to figure out this space!