Another story about a mainstream publication (Newsday) using Google’s APIs to help tell a story. This mashup has stories, audio, photos, and a Google Earth tool that lets users plot firehouses, or download a pdf with data on LI fire districts. See http://business.lihistory.com/firefighters/index.html
Archives for December 2005
Faneuil Media Provides Google Mashups to New York Times and Forbes
Faneuil Media has carved out a nice niche with the development of some innovative web services, most noteworthy, a couple of google map mashups for The New York Times and Forbes. NY Times has published a traffic route alternative mashup – see http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20051220_STRIKE_MAP.html?8dpc and Forbes first used the company to publish a cool gas price mashup – see http://www.forbes.com/home/energyspecial/2005/11/15/energy-gasoline-costsl_cx_1116energy_map.html. Faneuil MEdia is a company developed by 2 savvy professionals from NYU. See http://faneuilmedia.com/
NORAD Tracks Santa Using Radar for 50 Years Now via NoradSanta
Using the North Warning System, a system of 47 radar system installations across Canada’s North, NORAD will once again track the movements of Santa Claus as he sets out on his journey across the Globe on Christmas eve. NORAD uses four high-tech systems to track Santa – radar, satellites, Santa Cams and jet fighter aircraft. This year NORAD celebrates 50 years of tracking Santa… congrats to the Colorado Springs-based NORAD crew and volunteers at Cheyenne Mountain and Peterson Air Force Bases on doing a fantastic job! Note: the site is published in 6 languages for all to enjoy. For more on this see the article at http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/7696/ of jump directly to www.noradsanta.com
How about a Google Earth Earth Contest
It’s billed by the creator as… “The world’s first Earth Contest offers exciting new online gaming experience” For users who are interested in more advanced game play (or simply become addicted to Earth Contest) the BIG GAME, scheduled to launch at midnight January 2006, is a completely virtual world with thousands more locations to discover. To win, players must solve mysteries, complete puzzles, and travel around the globe to defeat The GameMaster. For more information on the Earth Contest experience, please visit www.earthcontest.com.
Measured wave data now in public domain
This came in the form of a data tip from a CDN listserv… The measured data sets obtained in the scope of the NATO TU-WAVES Project (1994-2002) from Directional Waverider Buoys deployed at five locations along the Turkish coast (Mediterranean: Alanya & Dalaman; Aegean: Bozcaada,; Black Sea: Sinop & Hopa, and at Gelendzhik (Black Sea coast of Russian Federation) are made public at the MEDCOAST’s web page (www.medcoast.org.tr). The wave data presented as time series graphs of significant wave height, mean wave period and mean wave direction can be downloaded and used free of charge. The only request is to acknowledge Prof. Dr. Erdal Ozhan of the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, who was the Director of the NATO TU-WAVES Project, for providing the data, and the NATO Science for Stability Program for supporting the NATO TU-WAVES Project, whenever the data is utilized.
Voip in the enterprise – a tip
Lately I’ve been checking into the merits of Voip, in particular services offered by vonage, skype and the like. I recently came across an interesting white paper that covers off the advantage of Voip services for the enterprise… This paper details how to protect your valuable assets and securely implement VoIP. Details on the whitepaper can be found at http://symbiandevzone.tradepub.com/free/w_lu12/
Gogole Earth for Mac OS
Some thought it was out, however, it appears it was too good to be true! This blogger got a tip and grabbed the download (see http://www.uneasysilence.com/archive/2005/12/4764/), however, since then the file has been pulled from the Google download site (http://earth.google.com/downloads.html) … Apparently it requires Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or later and speculation has it that this was simply a leak and we’ll be waiting a few weeks for it to officially come.
Google Mashup serves up Washington State Topography Maps / NED
I recently came accross an interesting mashup Called the Google Maps Topography Viewer. This hack uses the USGS NED dataset and provides direct jumps to popular places in Washington State like Mt Rainier, Seattle, etc… Optionally, users can view their own data by going to http://www.simplespatial.com/gmaps/ and specifying an image (TIF, JPG etc… ). Pretty cool and loads of possibilities here. See See http://www.simplespatial.com/ned/
Google Ramps up operations Down under
According to news from AustralianIT, Google is looking for 15 graduates to work in the Sydney headquarters of Google Maps, in addition to the 12 software engineers already working there. Google acquired four-man Sydney company Where2 LLC last year and has used the Australian-developed technology as the base for its popular Google Maps offering. Details at http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,17565944%5E15318%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html
GPS-Geocaching GLOSSARY
From Boise, Idaho, a GPS-Geocaching GLOSSARY. This is a decent primer to some terms that any would-be geocacher will need to be familiar with. See http://www.boiseweekly.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A156502