User generated content means users care what happens to their content. They even might act like shareholders and want a vote or at least share their opinion. It’s a totally interesting aspect in business decision making processes – asking the crowd before the board.
I personally don’t care if Yahoo! is taken over by Microsoft or not. If the service is good and works for me, I use it, no matter what label is on it. [via Max]
A good new reason to give Ask another try as search bar default: unlike most other search engines, Ask released a tool, called AskEraser, which allows users to delete their search histories entirely from Ask servers.
User privacy as PR campaign: I’m not sure if this will help Ask a lot since the average search engine user is not aware or simply does not care about left online traces.
However, in terms of user interface and smart features Ask is already my favorite search engine. The problem is that Google still returns better search results and eventually that’s what counts in search engine business. Otherwise the Ask logo would already have been set as default on my upper right corner too… [via NYT]
Yesterday Switzerland, today Austria. Seems like somebody is preparing for Euro 2008.
Google released today a localized version of Google Maps Austria. Users are now able to search and find information about local businesses in Google Maps here too. Apparently Google doesn’t make too many efforts acquiring business data. As they claim, all the data is provided by business owners who want to be found on Google Maps and communities (crowdsourcing is the new buzzword). Quite efficient I assume.
However, there is still room for improvement left. I personally know much more Schnitzel-places in the center of Vienna than the Schnitzel search on Google Maps returns yet.
Google entering the neighborhood business search market will give the local yellow pages top dog Herold some hard times. They recently came up with a brand new mapping application, very well done with beautiful high resolution aerial imagery and based on their comprehensive business data. It will be interesting to follow further development on that issue, especially in regard to strong local community sites like Tupalo or Qype. [via futurezone]
If you think about applying for GALILEO contracts, you should have in mind that qualification is not as relevant as the location of your company’s headquarters. I would recommend to open up at least a P.O. box in every European country, because at the moment you can’t tell which national politician will win the game on GALILEO’s budget re-distribution.
Fact is, that the political statements around GALILEO become more absurd every day. An Overall success story of European project management!
Geograffiti has a hilarious set of photos taken at this year’s INTERGEO in Leipzig, featuring his 2 little friends and some INTERGEO celebrities. Well done coverage! At least more amusing than the usual marketing blahh…
Stefan Geens from Ogle Earth points out the possibly most important change in Google Earth’s EULA:
For a business entity user, the Software may be used by you and your employees for internal use…
First of all, this is excellent news for GIS professionals. Ok, but what exactly does “internal use” mean? Our IT staff is now allowed to install Google Earth by default on any business PC and Laptop. I’d assume our employees can then legally use Google Earth for preparing business trips for instance.
But how far does “internal use” go when it comes to enterprise GIS support?
Available tools like Arc2Earth make GIS result presentation in Google Earth very easy and convenient. Instead of setting up map servers, where employees explore GIS results in web browsers, an internal enterprise information strategy could shift to Google Earth as client and KML as data storage (cf. Brian Timoneys smart KML S3 solution). Would that be considered as “internal use” by Google?
Imagine the GIS department of the city of Vienna serving their data as KML to Google Earth clients on 12.000 internal workstations across the city administration. Basically it’s internal use, but I’d assume such an “internal use” would probably upset Google.
Clearly, I’m now allowed to run Google Earth on my business PC, but, as GIS professional, I’m still not sure if I can consider it as possible way to go for “internal” data dissemination strategies.
Especially after a day like this, with 20 responds following 5 different strategies as answer to a quite simple question, I really wonder how some large companies can possibly function.
Days like this definitely do show me the benefits of working in a small sized business.
…a comprehensive resource about WHERE to, from a tax saving point of view, ideally start up your start-up.
Bahamas or Cayman Islands together with a hurricane resistant mansion sound like an excellent combination for a future company address.
Today the EU and US announced their agreement on the GPS-Galileo common civil signal. So future (civil) devices will be able to communicate with GPS and/or Galileo satellites.
Interoperability usually is a good thing and especially in that case it’ll help Galileo to literally take off because GPS is widely adopted.
However, a few questions remain…
A strong driving force behind Galileo was to become independent from US-operated GPS. In an earlier agreement the US already ensured that Galileo can be regionally turned off for security reasons. Does the current new interoperability agreement have any effect on the earlier “US veto” agreement? What happened to the independence argument in this new agreement?
One of the main advantages of Galileo over GPS was its higher accuracy (it was said to be to function even indoor quite well). As far as I know positioning accuracy depends on frequency and signal interference (I’m no engineer, so correct me if I’m wrong). If GPS and Galileo use the same signal, what happened to that advantage? I would assume that GPS and Galileo achieve the same accuracy then.
To say future devices will, based on the agreed interoperability, support both systems is kind of a weak argument. I guess they would’ve done so anyways. Putting two chips in one device shouldn’t be a problem until 2012 (when Galileo is supposed to start).
Since private companies left and the financing of Galileo is very likely done by public funding, which somehow shows that the private sector doesn’t really trust in future Galileo business opportunities, the “supporting European LBS business” argument is slightly disappearing too.
So where is the point for Galileo? Or why should the EU not drop Galileo, license, build and operate it’s own GPS satellites instead and probably save a lot of tax money?