Anything Geospatial

GIS, Maps, Geo and Location Technology by @gletham

Archives for December 1, 2010

@Waze Boasts 2.2 Million Wazers And Growing…

by

It seems Waze (@waze) is catching on, so much that the company is now boasting more than 2.2 million Wazers according to latest reports on the Waze Blog. Looking at the growth chart on their blog, one immediately sees the familiar hockey stick growth pattern that you expect from such rapid uptake… impressive! The company reports that users are spending roughly 300 minutes a month wazing (an avg) , helping the crowd-sourcing community of Waze users to contribute over 250 million kilometers to date – these data being given back to the user community in the form of updated routes and data along with drive times, ETAs, and traffic reports… nice! With this kind of growth it’s no wonder Waze has been short-listed in the popular Mashable Awards in the LBS category – mashable.com/awards/

Filed Under: LBS

Geo Data in The Cloud from the viaEuropa

by

A new service from an old colleague and friend from Europa Technologies – enter via Europa (http://www.viaeuropa.uk.com/). viaEuropa is a new online service from Europa Technologies for the delivery of high quality digital maps direct to your app. The service uses Europa Technologies’ years of expertise in map tile rendering to deliver high quality map tiles directly to your web mapping application or desktop GIS. The hosted service is an example of Data as a Service (DaaS) and uses cloud computing to provide a scalable level of performance as the number of users grows. The service is availabel in several flavors including: the viaEuropa hosted service; viaEuropa Open – free access to maps created from OS OpenData; and viaEuropa Plus, available to any organisation and includes licensing for commercial use. From the developers… “viaEuropa is compatible with virtually any source of digital map data including OS OpenData”

The viaEuropa hosted service uses a web tile service to deliver pre-rendered map tiles to your application. APIs and applications supported at launch include:

* MapInfo Professional 10.5+
* MapInfo ProViewer 10.5+
* ESRI ArcGIS Desktop
* ESRI Web Mapping APIs
* Google Maps API (Premier)* Bing Maps API
* OpenLayers
* Oracle MapViewer
* OS OpenSpace®

See details in the official announcement

Yellowbrick live Map GPS update of yachts via Google Maps

by

A fabulous live web service using the Google maps API and GPS technology to track yachts in the 25th ARC Grand Canaria to Saint Lucia race. The app enables users to track the progreess of all the yachts in real time. Toggle on/off the various divisions to show the class of choice. Viewing one class turns off all others, then, clicking on a boat icon will reveal the path they have sailed – awesome! Mouse over the location icon to reveal coordinates and other relevant information like time, date and location stamp, heading, and distance to finish. See the service at http://live.adventuretracking.com/arc2010 – the application has been developed by YellowBrick, see http://www.yellowbrick-tracking.com/

yellowbrick live Map update of yachts
Originally uploaded by GISuser.com GIS and Social, Mobile Tech Images

@WHERE 4.0 with pre-checkin updated for iPhone and Android mobile

by

WHERE (see @where on Twitter) is boasting their latest update to their cool, social, location-aware mobile service. At R 4.0 WHERE is now boasting some interesting pre-checkin functionality, this courtesy of a built-in recommendation engine. The idea is that users are encouraged to save their favorite places once they checkin, thus, over time, the application become more intelligent about the users’ habits and preferences.

Recommendations are also provided thanks to suggestions from thousands of local guides who’ve shared their experiences. the latest update is available for Androad and iPhone users and the company also notes that Blackerry and othger platforms (Win mob perhaps) are coming – see details on the update in this announcement – see also where.com

WHERE 4.0 just updated for iPhone
Originally uploaded by GISuser.com GIS and Social, Mobile Tech Images

Norad Santa Takes Flight @NoradSanta

by

The team from Colorado Springs has kicked off this year’s Norad Tracks Santa project and http://www.noradsanta.org is now live.  Follow the countdown to Santa, grab the mobile app (Google) for use on Christmas eve, watch some fun videos, and follow the team on various social media outlets… enjoy!



Cash, Charge, or Just Gimme Your Location – Visa Protects You via LBS

by

Interesting stuff from Visa (Europe) as the company, according to Gartner, will employ mobile location detection technology to help protect customers against fraud – seems like a good idea! Here’s what the Gartner blog shared on the story… “The way they work is by tracking user locations via their mobile phones and comparing that to other transactions the user is conducting. For example, if a user’s phone is in England, but the user is simultaneously withdrawing cash from an ATM machine in Germany, that is cause for suspicion and will raise an alert.” Furthermore, regarding mobile protection, they also predicted among other things that by YE15, at least 15% of all payment card transactions will be validated using mobile location and profile information.

My Take – Personally, I think its fabulous… imagine using a service, we can say Google Latitude for example, where I’m sharing my current location (perhaps it’s Vancouver Canada), then a credit card transaction is attempting to validate card usage that’s taking place someplace else, perhaps thousands of miles away… why not? Services like Gowalla and foursquare are already heavily used by people in commercial outlets. Makes sense to me that if I check-in to Starbucks in downtown Denver that any credit card transaction attempted within a reasonable time and distance from that local could potentially be flagged as fraud based on geographic logic. See also this article on FastCompany for more on the topic

Filed Under: gis

Copyright Spatial Media LLC 2003 - 2016