Archives for August 2006

An observation… I noticed this morning that virtually every Geo newspub has picked up on some PR about Nokia’s purchase of German-based Gate5 – these guys are the developers of the smart2go travel guides – a mobile navigation solution. This is all cool but what I find somewhat odd is that we’ve pretty much never seen Gate5 mentioned on the “GIS” pubs prior to this eventhough they’ve been around for years. Now that Nokia has them it’s front page news.. weird. I guess it is great for all of us though as the acquisition means that navigation will now be making it to decks as they are shipped, bringing mobile navigation and directions to the finger tips of users. FYI, Gate5 are in fact regularly referenced on LBS focused publications and ezines. I recently mention them myself on lbszone.com and symbianone.com – they were even one of my first advertisers helping to get symbianone.com off the ground. For more on Gate5 see http://www.gate5.de/

From the mozilla wiki, firefox2 (beta) is expected to be available today – assuming no stop-ship items discovered. More details can be found in the status meeting minutes and obviously you can get more info at http://www.mozilla.org/

I love these kinds of gimicks… not! Check out this image I just received in some promotional effort by Prof Surv Mag. I get an email asking me to please take a survey and I can get a free Sweatshirt. Then i notice the little asterix next to the shirt and look below for more details. Then I see in something like 3 point text font the disclaimer – FIRST 50 RESPONDENTS – pretty much non-legible to the naked eye (I blew it up in an image enhancement app that I have in order to verify – see white area in image lower-left) Nice touch but personally, I’ll take The American Surveyor Mag ;0)

Recall I mentioned yesterday about the addition of geotagging to the flickr functionality.. well, apparently there’s been more than 1.4 million photos geotagged in the past 2 days alone… wow! Obviously this is a very desirable feature. HEre’s a reminder about the how to video – http://www.flickr.com/help/screencasts/vol1. Are you a flickr fan and in the Seattle area? How about attending the Seattle flickr meetup?

In support of FEMA’s hurricane Ernesto preparations, theNational Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has deployed its newest geospatialintelligence mobile system. The Domestic Mobile Integrated Geospatial-Intelligence System or DMIGS is aself-contained vehicle custom built on a fire truck chassis that allows NGAanalysts to drive to a crisis location and provide on-the-spot geospatialintelligence analysis and products. Accordingn to the NGA, they tailored this mobile system to support homeland security missionsincluding responding to natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes orother catastrophic events.

Kudos to map ransom for meeting his quota and getting all the ransom money he needed to free the DRGs. I’ll be curious to see how free and available these data will actually be. Our company actually purchased Colorado DRGs from them to help with the effort – way to go Marc! See http://ransom.redjar.org/ – I’d say that mapransom owes a bit thanks to James and all the geobloggers who help spread the word as there’s no way on Earth he could have done this in one day without that exposure. I’ll be curious to see how long in takes to archive the entire DRG collection as there are thousands of files to get onto the server. Also, I hate to be a sceptic but when you look at things this way, the GIS community just paid someone $1600 to have access to publicly available, free DRGs which are all available for free download via a number of mechanisms. Granted, people that paid, er… donated a small fee to get DVDs containing their DRGs got a relatively good deal but didn’t they just pay for free data? Isn’t the ransom project all about not having to pay for free data? Something else to consider, I was looking around the site for info about the developer, JAred… I stumbled onto this piece of info in the who am I section… “Although I’m an extreme GIS neophyte, I’m starting to get a hold of some of the quadzillion concepts and acronyms. “ So, once again, i hate to be a skeptic but the community just paid $1600 to this dude because he’s promised to make these data freely available. Of note… does anyone out there have the USGS DEMs that they purchased – obviously, since these data are also being held for ransom by several USGS biz partners! If anyone there has the DEMs and wants to make them available please let me know or contact Jared at ransom as I’m sure he’d try to get them archived as well.