Here’s a great montage from Google showing off the venues in South Africa for the World Cup soccer tourney… enjoy the experience in 3D via Google Earth and SketchUp… See the video here
Archives for June 9, 2010
Closing Remarks and Geo Industry Hot Topics Shared at GeoCortex UC closing
During today’s wrap-up session of the Geocortex Virtual user conference #Geocortex, CEO Steven-Myhill Jones ended the event with a short look ahead along with an interesting take on changes in the industry. According to Steve, the following techno-innovations stand out and are affecting the [Geo] industry:
- Excellent maps are available from the main page of the leading searchengines – apparently, some 25% or searches are location relevant.
- Web-based maps are now part of every day life – for a whole generation maps are not paper
- There’s much interest in open standards for data provisioning
- The mobile web will continue to grow in ubiquity (I can’t yell this one enough either!)
- We still don’t really get social networking as it relates to spatial and spatially-related decision making for “work” – how does it enable GISers to make better decisions?
- The cloud is materializing – GeoCortex started in 2000 envisioning SaaS for the GIS space
- Shipping boxes of software is from same era as buying CDs
- REST is the future (if your watching ESRI) but also, web ADF is not dead!
Some great topics to ponder not only for Geocortex users around the World but for all involved in the GIS space from the Latitude Geographics CEO – you can follow Steven on Twitter @SMyhillJones. Note, Geocortex Essentials at 3.0 is to incorporate major REST elements/enhancements and the release of 3.0 is to coincide with ESRI’s ArcGIS Server 10 release.
The Foursquare CEO, Dennis Crowley Mashable Media Summit Video
A short video captured at the Mashable Media Summit by Mashable. Crowley discusses foursquare, social media in general, and the merchant’s uptake of foursquare and rewards. Source: Mashable
Amazing to see Drivers Without Handsets!
I’m currently in a “no cell phone” part of the world here in BC, Canada where mobile devices are outlawed for drivers and all I can say is, what a huge difference! It’s amazing seeing cars with drivers that are paying attention to the road (for the most part) rather than trying to communicate over their smartphones. I contrast this with Colorado where there are loose laws in this area and observing drivers on their handsets is the norm rather than the exception. I’m particularly pleased to see drivers in school zones without cell phones, something I feel should be illegal to do everywhere!
Skype Video Calling on the Nokia N900
As much as Apple will likely refuse to believe this, 2 way mobile video calling has been around for quite some time… Nokia devices like the N95 have supported this functionality for years now, although 3G support for this feature is relatively immature. The MyNokia blog pointed me to this interesting video demo of a Skype video call on the N900 (Nokia’s next flagship device we assume). Like many Nokia apps, the Ui and usability does leave a little to be desired, however, for the savvy mobile user completing a video call is quite simple – I suspect that doing video calling over WiFi using the new iPhone 4 will be much easier and delivered via a UI that is very simple, in typical iPhone fashion. Enjoy the vid!
HP Expands To The Cloud, Enhances Mobile (Android) Offerings, partners with Mapquest
Pretty big news out of HP this week (although I darn near missed it!) as the company announces their cloud solutions enabling essentially, print from anywhere functionality – are you on the cloud bandwagon yet?? If not you need to be…
In their latest PR, HP discusses their vision for the future of printing which naturally, includes cloud enabled functionality and enhanced mobile print. – this supported by the HP ePrint platform. From HP – The HP ePrint platform harnesses the cloud to break down the barriers of distance and connectivity and allow people to send the files they want to print from their mobile devices.
Google Mobile Maps and Navigation 4.2 Supports 11 More Countries
Great news for Google nav users around the Globe as Google expands support for mobile navigation and enters into 11 more countries. With mobile nav R 4.2, Google reaches users in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland for Android devices 1.6 and higher. Recall, Google navigation is a free, GPS-enabled service that provides turn-by-turn voice guidance as a free feature of Google Maps. From Google’s mobile team… Google Maps Navigation (beta) with Search by voice is available in version 4.2 of Google Maps, on Android devices 1.6 and higher. To download Google Maps version 4.2, search for Google Maps in Android Market. (Source: Google Mobile blog)
More GIS Developers Rolling iPhone and Android mobile apps
The GIS community has been creating and rolling out fabulous web services (aka webmaps) for years now. So it’s no surprise to see many consultants and developers seeing an uptake in the demand to extend traditional webmapping and related GIS-enabled apps to the [enterprise] mobile space. Today I heard from another company, Cartegraph, who recently developed an interesting Geo-enabled service for the iPhone – enter YourGov. [Read more…] about More GIS Developers Rolling iPhone and Android mobile apps