All Points Blog

ESRI Swaps Land to Allow Growth

(Adena Schutzberg) — Fri, 5 Sep 2008 07:27:30 -0500

ESRI had acquired land including a warehouse used by a charity, Joseph's Storehouse. The City of Redlands Redevelopment Agency, along with a task force and the two parties, helped arrange for a land swap.

Property One, LLC, an affiliate of ESRI, closed escrow on the Stuart Avenue property and, through the agreement, would exchange the property for the current Joseph's Storehouse building at 457 New York St.

The charity, which feeds and clothes those in need, will now have more room and the city is pleased to keep the community resource.

- Redlands Daily Facts

E9 million in funding for "Intelligent City" Research

(Adena Schutzberg) — Fri, 5 Sep 2008 07:15:33 -0500

Professor Stewart Fotheringham from NUI Maynooth (Ireland) leads the project called StratAG Strategic Research in Advanced Geotechnologies. It focuses on research related to geospatial monitoring and early warning systems. The 9m is from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). Forty researchers are onboard in Ireland, along with industry partners including "ESRI, eSpatial, PMS and Navtech [sic]."

Fotheringham offers this vision of the future city:

Picture a person walking down the street with a hand-held device, which they point at each building. As they pass the cinema, the device will tell them whats on; as they pass a restaurant, the device gives them the menu; as they pass an office block, the device tells them what firms are located in the block, their line of business and contact numbers.

- Silicon Republic

Glonass Update

(Adena Schutzberg) — Fri, 5 Sep 2008 07:00:05 -0500

The head of the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) announced that the number of satellites in the Glonass constellation will jump from the current 16 to 30 by 2011. That includes six to be launched by the end of this year. Glonass will have strong coverage at the poles, something key for mining natural resources in those areas.

- Novosti

GPS Business News: Magellan Exec Exodus, Marketshare Drop

(Adena Schutzberg) — Fri, 5 Sep 2008 06:00:00 -0500

GPS Business News put the pieces together including:

- CEO Nelson Chan left.
- Christian Bubenheim, who was vice president Product Marketing, left.
- Clay Babcock, who was Senior Director, Product Planning left.
- The Magellan booth at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin was cancelled.

Marketshare is down and there's no growth in Europe. The last big Magellan professional campaign I recall was for its MobileMapper mobile data collector.

I'll add another measure of health: the last corporate press release was from April of this year.

Another Geo Company Goes Cloud

(Adena Schutzberg) — Fri, 5 Sep 2008 06:00:00 -0500

The press release from 3Tera is about their global cloud solution. The geo "example" is EveryTrail, a post your trail route and pics app. One of my students reviewed it earlier this semester; that's the only reason I'd heard of it.

"The nature of our application, a Web 2.0 platform where users from all over the world are uploading GPS data and photos to share with others, will greatly benefit from a global cloud solution," said Joost Schreve, founder and CEO, EveryTrail, Inc. "With users and trips from over 160 countries, we find it extremely beneficial to be able to run in multiple locations without having to deal with infrastructure and hardware configurations. AppLogic technology and 3Tera's business model of working with leading datacenter operators has given us the ability to access world-class computing infrastructure. It really removed barriers for our company."

Follow TV Character's Thoughts/Locations via Whrrl

(Adena Schutzberg) — Fri, 5 Sep 2008 06:00:00 -0500

The new marketing deal for Whrrl involves updates via Whrrl for characters on Entourage, an HBO TV show. I guess if the locations in the show were somehow important to me this might be interesting, but this doesn't sound like something that'd prompt me to sign up. That said, this is clever.

The current challenge to such network, offers Venture Beat, is that these location-based networks don't have enough participants to make them interesting. "Fake ones" are a way to up the ante.

Movie Segments on Your Cell: Order based on Location

(Adena Schutzberg) — Fri, 5 Sep 2008 06:00:00 -0500

This makes no sense to me, but I guess we are still in the "solution in search of a problem" mode for LBS. Here's the deal: Everyone gets the last short episode first. The rest are delivered in an order based on location. Does that sound fun or interesting?

The film, Nine Lives, cost of $25,000, and is a collaboration between Singapore's Nanyang Technological University's (NTU) School of Art, Design and Media undergraduates, and its computer engineering undergraduates who developed the GPS apps.

- Straits Times

Will CNN Need to Beef Up their Maps?

joe.francica@directionsmag.com (Joe Francica) — Thu, 4 Sep 2008 11:24:41 -0500

So far the results of our poll on Map Hawk as to what's next for CNN on using their "wall telestrator" is that they will have to beef up their maps to go at least to the zip code level. There is only one day left to vote in the poll. Go to the Map Hawk Blog to vote.

Off Topic: 9 Days from Auditions to Performance

(Adena Schutzberg) — Thu, 4 Sep 2008 07:45:23 -0500

Many readers know I have a Masters in Geography from Penn State. Only a few know that as part of that degree I explored the geographic problem of the Penn State Blue Band, the well regarded marching band famous for among other things writing PSU and LIONS across the field at Beaver Stadium.

I was in the band, as rookie and I must say, an alternate, back in 1987-88. So, as classes gear up across K-12, college and grad programs for fall I was delighted to read about how it all works. How the band goes from "nothing" to a "show" in 9 days. It involves band camp, weeding out those who don't make it, then lots of practice. And, yes, there is a quite a lot of geographical learning, too!

This article and the photos will bring back memories for band folks, band parents, and band fans from schools everywhere.

Journey: Virtual World Built on Real World

(Adena Schutzberg) — Thu, 4 Sep 2008 07:25:33 -0500

TechCrunch describes it this way: "Journeys, a mashup that hopes to appeal to these users by leveraging Flickr and Yahoo Maps APIs to create what it calls a virtual world based on real Earth." The problem is there seems to be no point to it, though to be fair it is labeled "alpha." Your avatar can travel and see the world (with limited info about some points of interest), but the commenters found it dull and computer intensive.

OSGEO: New York May Need A Kick

(Adena Schutzberg) — Thu, 4 Sep 2008 07:05:46 -0500

New York now has the New York City Open Source Solutions Lab. It's goal is "to show how open-source software can help local and state government agencies in New York state cope with tightening budgets and a difficult economic outlook."

It's a collaborative project of Linux vendor Red Hat Inc., the City University of New York and Intel Corp. Government IT staff can come and test apps and code at the facility in Manhattan at CUNY's Institute for Software Design and Development

Listed apps/tasks to be explored include: "Red Hat Linux, JBoss SOA applications and clustering, global file systems and virtualization systems." How about some GIS to with that?

- Computerworld

What to call apps with maps?

(Adena Schutzberg) — Thu, 4 Sep 2008 06:35:05 -0500

IT Business Canada profiles four mashups that it calls "Business Intelligence 2.0." It's another step in the "what do we call things with maps" question. In this case two of the mashups are geospatial: one is SpatialKey's implementation for Ogden Utah's police force. It's a dashboard, which makes me think BI, but really, it's what we used to call GIS. The second geo example cites the Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency. This mashup integrates MapInfo software and Cognos BI. The big deal: "Before, only 12 superusers had access to geographical tools. Now, all 300 of the agency's workers can access and manipulate BI data in geographical form, says Carl Richardson, BI project manager." That's what we used to call enterprise GIS, no?

While some want hard and fast definitions for our industry (geoweb anyone? what about Web GIS?), the trend is not going their way. Instead, outsiders, like analysts, journalists and marketers are trying to own terms. To complicate matters, the different players are not using the same terms. While this article calls Spatial Key BI, when I spoke with the SpatialKey folks (the company is called Universal Mind) the term Business Intelligence didn't come up. It didn't come up in discussions with the Ogden Police Chief either. The app is on the cover of Computerworld; it's a good thing someone blogged that as I can't recall the last time I saw the cover of a tech publication! The cover article (the same one noted here) is titled: Can Web 2.0 Save BI?

Oh, and a new term I learned about in the article: a bashup is a BI mashup.

Free vs. Fee Software Seminars

(Adena Schutzberg) — Thu, 4 Sep 2008 06:00:00 -0500

Storm72 on Twitter notes that ESRI is offering free ArcGIS 9.3 seminars but ArcGIS Server Seminars require a fee. The suggestion is that this is not a great way to promote use of Server. He's referring to the free seminars where you:

- See what the latest version of ArcGIS offers you
- Learn tips for being more productive with ArcGIS
- Get your questions answered by ESRI technical staff

and the fee ones that include two half day sessions for $165 (or a half day for $95) that cover:

ArcGIS Server 9.3: Tips & Tricks
ArcGIS Server 9.3: Creating Mashups Using the ArcGIS API for JavaScript

First off ESRI is a sponsor of Directions Media publications including our podcasts. Also I used to work there.

I'll just note that to me these are very different. The first is marketing focused: The goal is to get folks onto 9.3 (since everyone gets it via maintenance...). Autodesk and other companies offer these freebies all the time. I'm going to What's New in MapInfo 9.5 next week, which falls into the same category. You can, and are encouraged, to bring your whole crew from newbies to pros.

The ArcGIS Server Seminar to me sounds like training. It's NOT aimed at selling you Server, but on specific technical skills. That's training - and it's not for everyone. In fact, it sounds not that helpful to folks who have not already committed to Server. Perhaps terming it "Seminar" is causing confusion? Maybe it should be offered as "training?"

Perhaps someone from ESRI can provide their thoughts on the matter?

Updated Russian Interactive World Map

(Adena Schutzberg) — Thu, 4 Sep 2008 06:00:00 -0500

Yandex is a Russian search engine. Today the site added a new world map, which is described as "one of the most detailed online maps of the world." Cities over 50,000 are available to find via search and new detailed the map of Europe shows "virtually all European cities, towns and villages." It's very nice and Google Map-like, though all in Russian, so I was unable to test the search functionality.

- Hit Search

Popular Photography on "Google Earth - How They Do It!"

(Adena Schutzberg) — Thu, 4 Sep 2008 06:00:00 -0500

The article details how DigitalGlobe collects imagery and very little on how its imagery and that of others are knit together. Amusingly, NASA is listed among a long list of "companies" that provide data.