Microsoft simply has not the corporate image to attack iPod/iTunes. The iPod is a lifestyle product, not a technical product. First of all they should probably change their industrial design team: MS iPod parody. (via engadget)
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Monthly Archive for June, 2006
There are dozens of posts out there that cover very well the second day and all the talks of Where 2.0. So I’ll briefly sketch my personal highlights of today (as I did yesterday):
I really got impressed by the effort of NASA’s World Wind team to improve their product and their enthusiasm behind all their work. From an EULA point of view it’s quite clear that in a professional environment NASA’s World Wind is the only option to go (by now) if one would like to use globe applications:
- World wind has no use restriction,
- it’s 100% open source software,
- extendable due to their add-ons,
- direct integration of WMS (and soon WFS),
- supports GIS file formats like ESRI shapefiles.
Once the place names can be accessed via WFS and don’t have to be packed into the application itself, the download size (60 MB at the moment) will significantly decrease to probably only a few megabytes.
Support for more platforms should be achieved in fall 2006 as World Wind is currently ported to Java. Well, not only ported but reprogrammed as far as I understood today.
Apparently, for Autodesk did the concept of Open Source make sense, as they claimed that the revenue is made in other segments of the mapserver market than selling server software and they could meet user needs better by adopting Open Source development cycles for parts of their product portfolio.
There were only a few GIS talks at Where 2.0, but they made me wanna try some of the shown tools like OSSIM and GRASS (well, GRASS I tried once but had not the time to dig deep enough into it).
Pretty funny was the presentation of Donald Cooke from TeleAtlas! I definitely will get a copy of “Fun with GPS“.
Mr Jack Dangermond demonstrated the strategy of ESRI products: author, serve and publish. The audience saw a demo of ArcGIS Explorer (incl. Jabber chat), how data is edited in ArcGIS Desktop and published as WMS on the server. Quite impressing was the demo of ArcWeb SVG Map Viewer, which illustrated with a view clicks the power of the-next-big-thing-since-5-years SVG by changing to various projections, applying different styles and switching layers on/off without reloading (no, not even asynchronous!) anything. To me it became quite clear the ESRI isn’t heading at all into this Where 2.0 market, they clearly stick to their professional GIS business and concentrate in providing the technology to enable the back-end for services like Google maps (I don’t know if Google maps is using any ESRI technology at all…).
Check out this excellent Where 2.0 photoset at Flickr (btw, wasn’t Stewart Butterfield on the speakers list?) and the roundup written by the Where 2.0 co-chairs.
See you next year at Where 2.0, 19.6-20.6.2007, Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, CA.
It’s hard to wrap up a whole day at Where 2.0 since it was packed with interesting presentations.
My personal highlights of today were the panel discussion “Social Data Face-Off” and the presentation done by MetaCarta.
I think this was not the last discussion we heard about copyright of data provided by users. Though it was interesting to hear how this issue is handled by various services so far. Beside user data, how is “copied” data like place names and street names from background maps (provided Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, etc.). Is it legal to pinpoint “San Jose” above a Google Map, getting the coordinates out of the data set Google Map is based on, and name this point “San Jose”, the name which appears on the Google Map and was put there by a third party? Can we be sure that there is no copyright on this data as Di-Ann Eisnor from Platial said?
One way to avoid this kind of uncomfortable questions can be the use of OpenLayers by MetaCarta. They provide a free API to free geodata. If you can’t use Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps or any other available mapping API because of licensing reasons, you should give this BSD licensed API a try. Together with OpenStreetMap it can be a powerful package.
Another fantastic API released by MetaCarta is their GeoParser, which basically parses text for place names them and maps them. I have to try this with our data and studies.
Talks like those about the least cost path calculations doing in GRASS or the raster based demographic data offered a sneak peek into the GIS world for the audience, which is obviously not very familiar with GIS processing and methods. Hey, never forget that behind all those mashups it needs a lot of GIS work in order to build *only* the base-maps. On the other hand, coming from the traditional GIS world, I’m very excited about all this developments going on right now. The growing participative aspect of mapping and geographic information will sooner or later make its way into the world of spatial planning. I’m pretty sure about that.
As Ed Parsons already wrote, the announcement of Google Maps Enterprise solutions probably made some phones ring in certain GIS companies. A big player like Google entering the professional mapping market (additionally to their free geocoder!) will surely lead to some interesting developments.
Let’s start day #2.
USA was defeated by Czech Republic yesterday. Czechoslovakia are 2 separated countries for longer than a decade now. It was called Czechoslovakia during the era of Communism, that makes the difference. 98.5 KFOX should send some of its staff back to school.
Today I realized that the services I’m using from Google Labs are the results of the time which Google offers its employees to do something beside regular project work. 20% labor time to play around and develop new ideas. The concept seems to be working.
I just got back from the Where 2.0 warm-up at Googleplex, the Google’s Geo Developer Day.
It was really great to see the team behind Google Maps/Earth and to meet up with so many other people sharing the same geo-interests. Of course conferences intend to bring people together, to enable networking, but it was a very friendly atmosphere at Googleplex. Thank you Google team!
If Where 2.0 goes on like this first warm-up day did, it’ll be an amazing conference.
One of the best things today was actually to talk to a few people which I only know from certain blogs or websites.
Mike Pegg said in his talk that Eric Schmidt suggested him and Frank Taylor to put photos on their weblog, so that people know what they look like.
But, where would be the fun if we all would know what we look like.
It wouldn’t be possible talking to someone, after a while asking “Are you related to Brian Timoney?” and getting the answer “Hey, I am Brian Timoney.” (the badge was turned around all the time so I couldn’t read the name on it…).
Apart from the social aspects at Googleplex, Google announced a few more things today:
- Google Earth version 4 as Universal Binary for Mac OS X, for some Linux distributions and they are still supporting Windows.
- a huge imagery update around the globe
- the release of KML 2.1
- KML integration within Google Maps
- Google Geocoder as part of the Google Maps API
Btw, all the presentations of today were done in Google Earth. A very nice way if you want to avoid usual presentation methods.
Looking forward to a great Where 2.0 conference tomorrow!
Update:
In the meanime the video of the initial presentations and talks is available on Google Video:
One thing I definitely admire here is the working integration. Well, in fact, there is no integration because people of different cultures – americans, chinese, europeans, latin americans – live here together since ever.
It seems so normal here to publish certain public information in english, chinese and spanish.
Hard to envision what would happen back in Vienna if the local authority dares to publish election information in turkish or serbian. Speeches of certain politicians would probably be full of phrases like “Loosing our nation and identity! We are going to be ruled by migrants!”, spreading fear and anger all over the city. Just have a look at what’s going on in Carinthia, the most southern federal state of austria and the discussion about the german/slovenian city signs (“Ortstafelstreit”). If the acceptance of minority rights wasn’t such a serious topic, I would call the behaviour of some locals down there simply childish.
We have an ongoing and almost endless discussion about integration of migrants to our society in Vienna. Basically the question is about if migrants should adopt our customs, should they live as we (“the natives”) do in this city. The most recent height, and probably the most ridiculous one, of this discussion was the initiative our beloved right-right-rightwing party to keep serving pork in elementary schools. Because of the fact that islamic people don’t eat pork and in some schools the percentage of islamic children is already very high, this party feared that pork would disappear from the menus of our schools.
In San Francisco you can observe so many and so different cultures living side by side for such a long time. No one had to give up his own culture or language. No one was forced to adopt another custom. They live in their community and it’s ok for everyone.
Nobody here is forced to eat burgers like this “Schnitzel for schools” initiative intends to do back in Vienna.
My arrival here in S.F. didn’t work out as intended. The plan was that after arriving at S.F. international airport that I take the BART to the city (Civic Center) and call my friend on the way to pick me up there at the station. Ok, so far so good.
The problem was that for some reason I couldn’t call the cell phone number from my (European) cell phone, every other number worked just fine. Unfortunately I only had his cell phone number saved on my phone. Because of the lack of coins in my pocket, the use of a public phone was no option either.
It was about midnight, I was standing there somewhere at Market St close to Civic Center. I remembered that Larkin St was crossing the street where my friend lives. My GPS helped me out to find Larkin and indicated the direction I had to go.
What I didn’t know at this point was that I’m going to cross a quite strange neighborhood of San Francisco. I went through the area between Market, Turk, Hyde, Larkin and O Farrrell, around midnight. It was, after the digital registration at Homeland and some terminals at JFK and SFO, the first thing I saw of the United States
Oh my god!
Shocking!
I made my way through poor, homeless with shopping carts, junkies, prostitutes and drug dealers. There were so many! I’ve never seen so many before!
They weren’t bothering, some were yelling at each other, not at me. So I didn’t get scared, but it was indeed a very strange situation. I didn’t know where to look at. I tried to avoid staring at them. I think I went through with my mouth open. It was so shocking!
Most of them were black. Of course. I guess I saw a major part of the social problems in the US. Black, poor and homeless.
Another day I went through this area by daylight. You see even more of them when sun is shining. Outside, sitting on the sidewalk. A guy in a wheelchair with only one foot left lighted his crack pipe right next to me. I suppose it was a crack pipe, a glass tube in his mouth and lighter in his hand.
Bloody hell! In which movie am I?
Walking through the financial district I took the picture above: a homeless sleeping on the sidewalk, not more than 10 meters away from some shiny Cadillacs and Lincolns.
Coming from Europe, growing up in a system where the public cares (in some countries more than in others) for the weakest of the society, all this seems very strange.
Door to door travel-time from my apartment in Vienna to my friends house in San Francisco: 24hrs 17min. What an exhausting trip!
Finally, after a very dense May, I’m ready to leave for vacations tomorrow. The next 23 days I’m going to spend in sunny California! My plan is to stay a week in San Francisco, 4 days in San Jose at the Where 2.0 conference (incl. the warm-up on monday at the Googleplex), a few days traveling along the coast between San Jose and Los Angeles and at the end another week in San Francisco. I’m pretty looking forward to leave tomorrow!
Recommendations for places worth visiting in that area are very welcome (I already checked Platial and Tagzania for nice S.F. spots…).
After everything I’ve been told, San Francisco must be an amazing town. I never had the chance to go there before, so I’m pretty curious about it – the city, the people and the atmosphere.
For the Where 2.0: I’m glad to see that the program advanced very much during the last weeks. The first chosen subtitle (“Where is the value?”) was, IMHO, a little poor. I guess the talks about Open Source in combination with free accessible APIs will be very interesting. Of course the topics around social networking, user added data and privacy will be a hot topic there.
Since my background is more GIS than mashup, it’s almost obligatory for me to carefully listen what Mr Jack Dangermond has to say at Where 2.0.
On Plazes I turned the tracking-feature on, so you can, if you want, watch my route here.