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/
Archives for August 31, 2006
firefox2 expected today
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/
Public Geo data open letter translations wanted
Jo Walsh over at the free gis list has made a request for help to locate people to translate a document that will be used in a coming submission. About The public geo data open letter The goal of this letter is to ask the ministers of the 25 member states to publish their position on the 2 important amendments of the Parliament regarding exclusion rights of state collected geo data. See http://publicgeodata.org/Open_Letter_Third_Reading – the text is about 2/3 of an A4 page and would be about 10-15 minutes work.
A mashup developer tip – mapicons from TerraIMS
I just stumbled onto an interesting developer of mashups and much more at TerraIMS. These developers not only have some very cool mashups but they also have several innovative solutions including an Internet Map Server (IMS), and a very cool product called mapIcons – map marker visualization for Google™ Maps and Yahoo! Maps. mapicons includes a comprehensive library of high-quality PNG graphics files that can be used in any map ‘mashup’… how sweet is that? No more boring pushpins or simple bullets, balloons or dots for symbolizing your mashup. Check out the sample map gallery including the following mashups:
State of Oregon DMV locations
Recent earthquakes around the Globe
Oh, by the way, mapiconos is totally free!! See http://www.terraims.com/