Archives for July 25, 2008

Protect your Nokia Smartphone

July 25, 2008 by gisuser

Here’s an excellent tip for any company that’s ever gone through the head-aches associated with having a corporate mobile device, notebook etc… lost or stolen – Yougetitback.com. The sales pitch… Yougetitback protects and helps recover mobile devices—such as phones, PDAs, cameras, iPods and laptops—while preserving the sensitive information they may contain. The company’s premium service will even replace the device, if it is not recovered. See more here

Yougetitback – Protect your iPhone, cell phone, laptop

July 25, 2008 by gisuser

Formats and tips for online media PR submission

July 25, 2008 by gisuser

Once again, a tip here for all you PR and marketing professionals on how to distribute and format your PR releases… simple really… think TXT. I receive tons of these every day and they come in all shapes, formats, and sizes. The really nasty things you want to stay away from when you send to online media outlets is PDF and even ZIP files. Once you have your properly formatted PR items be sure to remember some of the following tips:
– include the subject in the email subject line DONT EVER USE ALL CAPS!!!! – really, this one drives me nuts and when I haven’t had my coffee I often hit the delete key
– A word document is fine, particularly if you have images as well
– even if you have a Word doc, include a simple text copy in the body of the email
– images are cool (one or two max) if you have high res though, provide a simple link to where they can be retrieved on your server – don’t email 2MB worth of JPG files
– Don’t create a package of documents, images, corp background info etc… and ZIP it all up, editors really don’t want the full media package (although they may ask you for it)
– include a website url and email contact at the bottom of the release
– use a valid email address when sending – i.e. if I hit reply, it better reply to a real person and valid email address
These are but a few simple things that will help you distribute PR to online media outlets – oh, and make sure your news is actually news!

Adobe Acrobat 9 and Adobe Reader 9 and geospatial functionality

July 25, 2008 by gisuser

Recall that recently, with the release of Adobe Acrobat 9 and Adobe Reader 9 a new geospatial feature set was introduced. Over at the shredding the document blog a nice intro to all the geospatial functionality is given. Read on to learn how to find locations and coordinates, markup, and measure within Reader. The author goes on to list this added detail of functionality:

In Acrobat Pro Extended for Windows you can actually author PDF Map files. You can do this in a few ways.

Open a Tiff or Jpeg 2000 file that contains geospatial information in Acrobat Pro Extended. The resulting PDF file that is saved will retain this information.
From a Map image file (scanned or already in PDF/image format) if you know the map projection and some coordinate information you can use Acrobat’s Geospatial Registration tool to add coordinate information to the PDF.
Add Shape (SHP) files to a PDF file using the Import Layer functionality. This allows the PDF document author a way to create viewable layers on a map that can be turned on and off in the Layers Panel.

For more on R9 see here