Siemens Enterprise Communications got contracted to build the new NATO geographic information system, based on Oracle and ESRI products. Quite an ambitious project, but what makes me even more wonder is that I’ve never heard of Siemens acting on such a geo industry scale before. [via heise]
Read/WriteWeb offers an interesting review – as most of their articles – about Yahoo! Travel, referring to the Web 3.0 framework.
What I’m missing in that framework is the user’s share in the big C standing for the commerce.
Let’s take Yahoo! Travel and Flickr as example:
Most Flickr users pay Yahoo! for a Flickr pro account ($25/year), get a great platform in return and have fun participating and sharing photos. In the meantime, as result of millions excited users, Flickr has grown to one of the largest and best documented photo databases ever. Of course Yahoo! seeks for ways to leverage that database in other parts of its business. Like Yahoo! Travel for instance, where Flickr user photos can be viewed to illustrate travel destinations.
Now the problem I see is that especially pro users wont be happy about the fact that their pictures show up on Yahoo! Travel right next to tourism ads and the entire revenue goes exclusively to Yahoo!. Even if Yahoo! has, according to Flickr user agreements, the right to do so and doesn’t care if a “© All rights reserved” stands next to the user photo. It’s just bad karma.
I think in the long term a solution about that issue – commercializing user generated content – must be found. Otherwise why should a paying Flickr pro user provide Yahoo! with free photos for other Yahoo! divisions than Flickr?
Anyone remember the discussions about user content when YouTube was acquired by Google? Some users got slightly upset seeing Google paying billions of dollars for basically user content…
I knew this FON thing would work out some day!
Say hi to the nerdiest pool in Vienna: Badeschiff is covered by a FON hotspot, and possibly a few other open wifis, but it’s definitely the ace of all FON hotspots in this city.
Meteorologist forecast a hot and dry summer 2007. My office, located right next to Badeschiff, isn’t equipped with air condition and it’s getting unbearable hot inside during summer months. Instead of investing in air condition, waste more energy and pollute our environment my company should shift our workplaces to the pool if temperatures inside are too high for serious work.
Hey, I mean answering emails and doing other administrative tasks should be possible in lying position under a parasol, no problem. And who knows: maybe our clients are excited about meetings at the pool too?
What’s Yahoo! Local in the US or GoYellow in Germany is Herold in Austria. The Austria based company, specialized in Yellow Pages, business and marketing data (and locally famous for privacy violations), released a new mapping service for Austria: Herold Karte & Route.
Worth mentioning is the excellent high resolution imagery (by GlobeExplorer) in bigger cities, better than any other online imagery I’ve seen so far for this region, and in addition it seems quite up-to-date. At least I could get a glimpse at the roofs of some rather new (finished by the end of last year) residential zones in Vienna. Whereas in rural areas only rough imagery is available.
Other interface parts and features are similar to maps from Google, Yahoo, Virtual Earth, etc., nothing innovative like Ask City but proven usable: place search, business search, directions search.
Overall a well done, fast and useful application, and, since global players tend to ignore small countries, the only countrywide map-based search product.
Ed Parsons, former Ordnance Survey CTO, joined Google as Geospatial Technologist for EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). A brilliant move and Ed is surely a tremendous asset to Google.
It’s important for Google to have someone with his visions on board and bring traditional geospatial industry and neogeography closer together.
Congratulations!
While it’s good to see that the European Commission cares about consumer rights, I don’t understand why they worry so much about entertainment industry (cf. Times). As if there weren’t other problems in the EU than varying music prices. Besides, I doubt Apple came up with the idea of separate iTMS for each European country by itself.
What’s next? Cars are in UK more expensive than in Spain too, and they even have the steering-wheel on the wrong side!
Why does it feel like searching for porn when looking up business literature?
Maybe because of unlucky one-to-one English-German title translations.
The English title is simple and expresses perfectly the author’s theory. The German translation is simple too, but sounds pretty much like an adult movie.
Just had a quick look at 8apps, well at the screencasts since it’s an invitation-only beta. Turning Web 2.0, mostly fun, applications into business tools looks interesting and, from my point of view, definitely has potential to ease and improve certain work flows.
The only concern that came to my mind was about the storage. Companies won’t be very happy if employees start working with sensible business information on company-external servers. (seen in the nonsmoking area)
I didn’t know Flickr’s Camera Finder yet: browse photos by and compare any camera model used on Flickr.
Besides of being a very interesting camera guide – see what photos can be done each camera or discover some unknown potentials of your existing equipment – photo businesses will be happy about Camera Finder since they got almost a continuous photo market monitoring tool which makes any market research kind of obsolete.
My personal feature request: a Lens Finder – find, browse and compare photos taken with different lenses.
