Anything Geospatial from a GIS user for GISusers and Technology Professionals

Here’s a romantic idea for some Valentine’s Day fun if you happen to be a real techno geek… drive around looking for treasure with your sweetie! Another cool treasure hunt from the team at Waze (@waze on Twitter). Here’s the scoop… Waze’s `Valentine’s Treasure Hunt’ will feature `road goodies’ as well as virtual treasure chests that, when driven over, have the potential to reward users with a real-world prizes - Valentine’s `movie night for two’ gift cards or heart-shaped boxes of chocolate. The competition runs from February 8 to February 14, 2010 - More Details HERE

MagnetU gives people the power to match and make new connections with people who are right now close to them - from a very close distance of 1 meter up to potentially hundreds of meters away, whether for making new friends, finding love, date or just meet people who share the same interests. Take your social life out of home environment. Here’s how it works… After telling about yourself, simply define who you’d like to match with, for making new connections, sharing interests, finding love, date, friendship or any other fantasy. You can also adjust your personal MagnetU to find and meet social networking members (such as Facebook, ICQ, Twitter, Friendster) who are right now close to you in the club, street, pub, or any other place, thus taking your on-line social life to the street. An interesting concept, however, I’m not too sure how likely I am to actually be anyplace where there’s other users nearby! See http://www.buymagnetu.com

Building on the topic of social location and social check-in services (think foursquare, GoWalla) I’m convinced we need to see more participation from local businesses in order for this to succeed. I just imagined the following scenario, let’s say I’m off to Pebble Beach for a round of golf (ya, in my dreams!), then from the first T box i check-in via foursquare or similar service. The app knows what kind of mobile device I’m using so why not have a tip sent to me suggesting that I download a cool Augmented Reality app (see a video of this sample app) that will perhaps enhance my experience at the golf course! I suppose anyone can add such a tip as an official “Tip” to users that check-in… this would be useful!

On the topic of foursquare, an issue that seems to also be creeping up is the appearance of multiple occurrences of POIs… for example, a listing may be in the DB called “Loodles Coffee” and the mayor may have 50 check-ins, well, there’s nothing to stop a user from simply creating another POI called “Loodles Coffee and Art” etc… now we have multiple entries in the DB and users are confused as to which one they check in to. So far some the POI databases being used by services like foursquare are a little disappointing, often the app not recognizing where users are at the time of check-in and thus depending on the user creating the place. On the upside, a couple of new social services, PlacePop and PegShot are now on the scene and appear to offer much better default POI databases, often accurately identifying the place where the user wishes to check-in.

A great intro video from Loic showing the new Seesmic Twitter client for Android OS with cross-posting and much more… awesome stuff! (PS: take it from me, Seesmic is a company to watch!)

Looking for more social location check-in options for your iPhone? Enter PlacePop. The free app is now available via the iTunes shop and enables the standard, foursquare-like check-in (actually its more like GoWalla) along with a little more functionality. A first test run shows us that a simple account creation is required to get rolling, then when you make a stop at a local venue you can easily check-in and accrue reward points - users get bronze, silver, gold status based on number of check-ins.

I like the ability to add photos and notes with your check-in and additionally, all your places are stored in your account so users can easily review their history of stops. I would like to see a GeoRSS feed made available as well as an option for users to grab a widget to embed on their blog (down the road perhaps). Kudos to the developer for adding information on their site for business owners! In my mind the businesses need to get more involved to offer up rewards and bait for usage. A big kudos also on the app for easily recognizing places nearby and… they seem to be scraping a very good POI database! See http://www.placepop.com/

An interesting app for Blackberry users from Berryski… according to the developer, BerrySki is the first fully offline GPS ski maps App for BlackBerry. The app offers maps and data to skiiers in Europe and North America. Check it out at http://www.berryski.com/main/

An interesting new mashup called GeoCoded Art enables users to view art by geographic region. Select a region of interest (county, then area) and view thumbnails for a quick view or art from that region. Then you can view the work or art on a map (Google or Bing maps) enlarge the piece of art or optionally view all works by the artist… quite interesting and fun! See http://www.geocodedart.com

Looks like Twitter is rolling out the “local trends” feature to more users as I just spotted the option in my setup.. nice (I think!). Simply put, local trends enables me to set a location of interest to me and I’ll then have the ability to view trending topics that are originating from that region. Unfortunately my local area (Denver I guess) is not yet supported - I have no idea why only several cities are included… is it that tough to include more geographic areas?? Take a look on your right sidebar under your lists and look for the Local Trends tab… optionally, you can change your area of interest so you can follow trends in many places around the globe.

Very Cool… AnyGeo (that’s this blog!) has won a 2010 Golden Retrevo Award for outstanding achievements in the “GPS Units” space. See more details on the competition HERE and thanks for voting for us!

Here’s an event of interest for those of you that enjoy kicking back in your chair and enjoying webcasts (I know I do!). From ERDAS, In this webinar, you will experience the speed of ERDAS APOLLO firsthand, enabling you to clearly see that ERDAS APOLLO easily delivers terabytes of imagery over the internet faster than any competitive product. Join us for this webinar, and we will prove it. The event takes place Tuesday Feb 2, 2010 11 AM EDT - Register HERE