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Tags > geo
Four short links: 5 December 2011 - Spatial Search, Exposing Your Phone's Perfidity, School Unconference, and Wikipedia Viz
By Nat TorkingtonDecember 5, 2011
VP Trees -- a data structure for fast spatial searching. A form of nearest neighbour, useful for melodies (PDF) and image retrieval (PDF) and poetry. (via Reddit) iYou -- iTunes plugin to show you all the stuff your phone collects about you. Bar Camps in Primary Schools -- NZ teacher deploys bar camps among students. Great things happen. Realtime...
Strata Week: IBM puts Hadoop in the cloud - IBM taps the cloud to make Hadoop easier, Factual cleans geo data, Google gets transparent with gov data requests.
October 27, 2011
IBM targets businesses with a cloud-based Hadoop product, Factual tackles incomplete geo records, and Google embraces transparency by publishing and explaining the data requests it gets from governments.
Top Stories: October 17-21, 2011 - The joys of animated geo data, Angry Birds and the future of mobile testing, and a look inside The Guardian's creative process.
October 21, 2011
This week on O'Reilly: Andy Kirk explained why data, maps and animation work so well together, we discovered the connection between a game-playing robot and the future of mobile app testing, and we learned how The Guardian develops its data journalism.
Visualization deconstructed: Why animated geospatial data works - Inside animated geo visualizations.
October 19, 2011
When you plot geographic data onto the scenery of a map and then create a shifting window into that scene through the sequence of time, you create a deep, data-driven story.
Why indoor navigation is so hard - Your phone can get you to the museum, but it can't guide you to the T-Rex.
October 11, 2011
The mapping applications built into smartphones are fantastic ... until you arrive at your destination. Here, Nick Farina explains how indoor navigation apps can and should work.
Four short links: 11 October 2011 - Coaching, Geospatial Tracking, Eye-Tracking, and Networked Objects
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 11, 2011
Personal Best (New Yorker) -- excellent Atul Gawande column on coaching which has me wondering how to open up different aspects of my life to improvement. Interesting to me because, behind every continuous- or self-improvement technique are the questions: "do you want to get better?" and "if so, how far will you go in pursuit of that goal?". CyberTracker...
Strata Week: What happens when 200,000 hard drives work together? - IBM is building a massive 120-petabyte array and Infochimps releases a unified geo schema.
September 1, 2011
IBM takes data storage to a whole new level (120 petabytes, to be exact), Infochimps' new API tries to make life easier for geo developers, and the "Internet of people" keeps an eye on Hurricane Irene.
ePayments Week: Financial Times bets on its web app - Financial Times goes all-in on its web app, Flickr puts up fences, and daily deal fatigue sets in.
September 1, 2011
The Financial Times says subscriber data trumps Apple's reach, Flickr introduces geofencing to keep things private, and the cracks in the daily deal world start to show.
ePayments Week: The rise of location-triggered offers - Very local deals, iPhone users ready to spend, and Androids attract crapware
August 25, 2011
Placecast offers merchants a geofence to corral customers. Also, UK researcher YouGov says iPhone users are more willing to buy with their phones, and telecoms bury Androids with crapware.
Visualization of the Week: Mobile data redraws the map - SMS and mobile data reveal communication communities — some new, some old.
July 22, 2011
Researchers are looking at mobile phone data to see if our relationships and communications are restricted by geographic boundaries.
Four short links: 18 July 2011 - Organisational Warfare, RTFM, Timezone Shapefile, Microsoft Adventure
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 18, 2011
Organisational Warfare (Simon Wardley) -- notes on the commoditisation of software, with interesting analyses of the positions of some large players. On closer inspection, Salesforce seems to be doing more than just commoditisation with an ILC pattern, as can be clearly seen from Radian's 6 acquisition. They also seem to be operating a tower and moat strategy, i.e. creating...
ePayments Week: Can check-in services prove their value? - Teens yawn at check-ins, how the Skype deal helps Facebook, and thoughts on payment systems set free.
May 12, 2011
A recent survey questions whether the teen market has any interest in check-ins. Also, Facebook gets access to Skype through its investor Microsoft, and some thoughts on taking Facebook Credits and Apple's payment system beyond their walled gardens.
Snap to the graph, not the grid - Location coordinate data lacks important context.
By Tyler BellMay 3, 2011
Coordinate pairs are regular and orderly, but they are entirely ambiguous when used to represent more conceptual places like states, cities, stores and neighborhoods.
ePayments Week: What does the attention around tracking mean? - What do mobile users want in return for their location data?
April 28, 2011
The iPhone location story helped some mobile users understand that their phones know where they are. What will it mean for the carriers and services that use that data? Plus: Google and Facebook get into the deals business and mobile banking evolves.
ePayments Week: Where adds context to PayPal - Ebay buys Where, the White House wants identity protection, and researchers find interesting data about themselves on the iPhone.
April 21, 2011
EBay's purchase of a mobile advertising and check-in service adds another piece to its mobile payment puzzle. Also, the White House calls for an online identity ecosystem and two researchers discover caches of location data left unencrypted on their iPhones.
Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your moves - A hidden file in iOS 4 is regularly recording the position of devices.
April 20, 2011
Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan have discovered that iPhones and 3G iPads running iOS 4 are regularly recording the location of devices into a hidden file.
ePayments Week: Android's predicted ascendance - Android could soon own half the market, NFC Simm cards in China, and Quova challenges developers
April 14, 2011
Gartner says Android can take half the smartphone market by the end of 2012. Also, China's mobile customers can slip NFC SIMM cards into their handsets, and geolocation company Quova challenges developers.
3 big challenges in location development - Darian Shirazi on location's trickiest issues and how an open places database could work.
April 14, 2011
With the goal of indexing the entire web by location, Fwix founder Darian Shirazi has had to dig in deep to location-based development issues. In this interview, Shirazi discusses challenges he sees in location and how Fwix is addressing them.
Four short links: 8 April 2011 - Varnish Guide, Fields Revealed, Dev Leaderboard, and Map Documentary
By Nat TorkingtonApril 8, 2011
A Practical Guide to Varnish -- Varnish is the http accelerator used by the discerning devops. Ferrofluid Sculptures (New Scientist) -- hypnotic video of an iron-based fluid that is moulded by magnetic fields, which I include for no good reason than it is pretty pretty science. (via Courtney Johnston) Twisted Highscores List -- clever leaderboard for tickets, reviews, commits,...
ePayments Week: Tapping our hunger for Facebook Credits - Shoppers choose virtual currency, AmEx gets geolocation, and Isis plans for an NFC future.
April 7, 2011
IFeelGoods finds some shoppers choose virtual currency over the real stuff. Also, American Express teams with Foursquare for geolocated offers, Isis plans a tap-and-pay test in Utah, and Boku steps out of the gaming world to pay for real goods.
Four short links: 5 April 2011 - Big Maps, ssh VPN, Line Maps, and HTML5 Multiplayer Pacman
By Nat TorkingtonApril 5, 2011
The Big Map Blog -- awesome old maps, for the afficionado. (via Sacha Judd) sshuttle -- poor man's VPN built over ssh. (via Hacker News) Remembering LineDrive -- I, too, am bummed that LineDrive never became standard. And Maneesh, one of its cocreators. Check out his publications list! Websockets Pacman -- multiplayer Pacman, where players take the role of...
Geolocated images reveal a place's visual identity - Cartagr.am taps geolocation to create a unique mapping layer.
March 15, 2011
Cartagr.am uses Instagram's new API to create maps out of geolocated images. The resulting visualizations reveal a location's different sides.
Four short links: 8 February 2011 - Web Memory, Phones Read Cards, Military and Public Data, and NoSQL Merger
By Nat TorkingtonFebruary 8, 2011
Erase and Rewind -- the BBC are planning to close (delete) 172 websites on some kind of cost-cutting measure. i’m very saddened to see the BBC join the ranks of online services that don’t give a damn for posterity. As Simon Willison points out, the British Library will have archived some of the sites (and Internet Archive others, possibly)....
ePayments Week: How big a bite will Apple take? - Is iTunes PayPal on steroids? Also, walled gardens clamp down, and data geeks discuss privacy
February 3, 2011
In the latest ePayments Week: With contactless payments coming to an iPhone near you, analysts wonder whether Apple will share its 160 million iTunes customers.
Social data and geospatial mapping join the crisis response toolset - A new web app applies trend analysis to structured social media.
January 27, 2011
A new web app put to the test during Australia's recent flooding shows how crowdsourced social intelligence can be integrated into crisis response
The "dying craft" of data on discs - Urban Mapping's Ian White on the shift toward data as a service.
By David SimsJanuary 27, 2011
Urban Mapping CEO Ian White discusses the changing way that data is being sold, and the move to providing data as a service.
New geolocation app connects citizen first responders to heart attack victims - Connected citizens trained in CPR now have a new tool to help them save lives.
January 25, 2011
A new iPhone app will dispatch trained citizens to help others in cardiac arrest. The app is the latest evolution of the role of citizens as sensors, where resources and information are connected to those who need it most in the moment.
Big data faster: A conversation with Bradford Stephens - The founder of Drawn to Scale explains how his database platform does simple things quickly.
January 6, 2011
Bradford Stephens, founder of of Drawn to Scale, discusses big data systems that work in "user time."
Four short links: 16 December 2010 - Compressing Graphs, Authentication Usability, Extreme Design, and Rails Geo
By Nat TorkingtonDecember 16, 2010
On Compressing Social Networks (PDF) -- paper looking at the theory and practice of compressing social network graphs. Our main innovation here is to come up with a quick and useful method for generating an ordering on the social network nodes so that nodes with lots of common neighbors are near each other in the ordering, a property which...
Four short links: 25 November 2010 - Twitter Mapped, Bibliographic Data Released, Babies Engadgeted, and Nat's Christmas Present Sorted
By Nat TorkingtonNovember 25, 2010
A Day in the Life of Twitter (Chris McDowall) -- all geo-tagged tweets from 24h of the Twitter firehose, displayed. Interesting things can be seen, such as Jakarta glowing as brightly as San Francisco. (via Chris's sciblogs post) British Library Release 3M Open Bibliographic Records) (OKFN) -- This dataset consists of the entire British National Bibliography, describing new books...
Four short links: 24 November 2010 - Android, Cellphone Photos, Long-Exposure iPhone Apps, and Open Street Map
By Nat TorkingtonNovember 24, 2010
What Android Is (Tim Bray) -- a good explanation of the different bits and their relationship. Cell Phone Photo Helped in Oil Spill (LA Times) -- a lone scientist working from a cell phone photo who saved the day by convincing the government that a cap it considered removing was actually working as designed. (via BoingBoing) Penki -- iPhone...
Four short links: 23 November 2010 - AppEngine Gripes, LIDAR Hacking, Web Stripping, and Map Storytelling
By Nat TorkingtonNovember 23, 2010
Goodbye App Engine -- clear explanation of the reasons why Google AppEngine isn't the right thing to build your startup on. Don't read the comments unless you want to lose faith in humanity. (via Michael Koziarski on Twitter) Neato Robotics XV-11 Tear-down -- the start of hackable LIDAR, which would enable cheap and easy 3D mapping, via a Roomba-like...
Update on WEAVE government data visualization software
By Andy OramNovember 18, 2010
WEAVE is a visualization tool for public data, to be released in March or shortly before. This blog compares it to other efforts and summarizes some work on upcoming features.
Where the semantic web stumbled, linked data will succeed - Linked data allows for deep and serendipitous consumer experiences.
November 15, 2010
Linked data can be realized without the purity of semantic annotation, but a focus on consumers gives it a better shot at adoption. It begs the question: Why invest in difficult technologies if consumer outcomes can be realized with current tools and knowledge?
Four short links: 28 October 2010 - Computational Thinking, Timelines in Javascript, Info as Magazine, and Necessity Shortages
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 28, 2010
Exploring Computational Thinking (Google) -- educational materials to help teachers get students thinking about recognizing patterns, decomposing problems, and so on. TimeMap -- Javascript library to display time series datasets on a map. Feedly -- RSS feeds + twitter + other sites into a single magazine format. Attention and Information -- what appears to us as “too much information”...
Four short links: 22 October 2010 - Image Remapping, Internet Futures, Ebook Reader, and Open Cloud Computing
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 22, 2010
Historical Images Remapped -- Sydney's Powerhouse Museum released historical images from their collections, and a historical photo site Sepiatown geolocated and oriented them so they can be viewed side-by-side with current Google Street View images of the same place. And then contributed the refined metadata back to the museum. A great example of your users helping to improve your...
Welcome Laurel Ruma to Where 2.0 - Where 2.0 2011 welcomes a new co-chair.
October 21, 2010
Laurel Ruma and Brady Forest will co-chair Where 2.0 2011, running April 19-21, 2011 in Santa Clara, Calif.
Where 2.0 2011 call for proposals is open - A look at the topics, sessions and workshops planned for the next Where 2.0 conference.
October 14, 2010
Google and other companies are jockeying for position in the location space, which makes the next Where 2.0 particularly intriguing. Here's a look at the planned topics, sessions and workshops -- and a reminder to get your proposals in before the Oct. 25 deadline.
Toward a local syzygy: aligning deals, check-ins and places - Check-ins are only the beginning. Here's what lies ahead for local.
September 2, 2010
The check-in is hardly the apogee of the local consumer experience. It works, for now, but it won't be the long-term solution for customer/business relationships and physical point of presence. So what will replace it? Here's a look at the local sector's near-term future.
Four short links: 2 Sep 2010 - Science Blogs, AppEngine Community, Kickstarter for Good, Manmade Geography
September 2, 2010
Guardian Science Blogs -- the latest in a series of science blog aggregators. Nobody is too sure what benefits a blog umbrella like Discovery or Nature (or the Guardian) offers bloggers. Regardless of this, the content is fantastic. v2ex: A Community Running on AppEngine -- no hosting costs, massive scalability. Raising Money for Vanuatu Arts Center -- a Kickstarter...
Four short links: 1 September 2010 - Faces in R, Open Source Web Analytics, Small File Store, Building Mapper
September 1, 2010
R Library for Chernoff Faces -- faces represent the rows of a data matrix by faces. plot.faces plots faces into a scatterplot. Interesting emotional way to visualize data, which was used to good effect (though not with this library) by BERG in Schooloscope. (via the tutorial at Flowing Data) Piwik -- GPLed web analytics package. Pomegranate -- a data...
Opensource and Javascript: Polymaps Used To Make PrettyMaps
By Brady ForrestAugust 20, 2010
SimpleGeo, geo cloud services and data provider, and Stamen, creators of many beautiful data visualizations, have teamed up to release Polymaps. Polymaps is an opensource Javascript mapping framework. It's been on Github for a while, but they are finally announcing it. Out of the gate, Stamen has also launched a great example application, PrettyMaps, combining Natural Earth, OSM and...
Four short links: 19 August 2010 - Satellite-based Forecasting, Design Book, Submarine Cable Map, Brain Science
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 19, 2010
New Big Brother: Market-Moving Satellite Images -- using satellite images of Wal-Mart and Target parking lots to predict quarterly returns. (via Hacker News) Form and Code -- beautiful book on the intersection of code, design, architecture, form, and function. One of the authors is Casey Reas who was also one of the people behind Processing. (via RandomEtc on Twitter)...
Four short links: 18 August 2010 - Place Context, iPod Hardware, Mobile Cognitive Surplus, and Music Hacking APIs
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 18, 2010
BBC Dimensions -- brilliant work, a fun site that lets you overlay familiar plcaes with famous and notable things so you can get a better sense of how large they are. Example: the Colossus of Rhodes straddling O'Reilly HQ, the Library of Alexandria vs the Google campus, and New Orleans Mardi Gras began at the headquarters of Fred Phelps's...
Stepping it up with Transit Score
By Brady ForrestAugust 16, 2010
Where you live has a huge impact on how much you drive. If your neighborhood has easy access to public transportation or there are a lot of amenities nearby, you can walk more and drive less (thus saving money while getting a little exercise). Front Seat's Walk Score has become a well-known metric for determining a place's walkability (Radar...
Four short links: 13 August 2010 - Scientific Literacy, Load Balancing, Indoors Geolocation, and iPhone Security
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 13, 2010
The Myth of Scientific Literacy -- I'd love it if there was a simple course we could send our elected officials on which would guarantee future science policy would be reliably high quality. Being educated in science (or even "about science") isn't going to do it. It's social connections that will. We need to keep our elected officials honest,...
Waze: Using groups and gaming to get geodata
August 10, 2010
Waze, the company behind the free turn-by-turn navigation app of the same name, is upping its game with their latest release. It has long made referred to itself as a community mapping app, but there was no really way to be a part of a community within the app -- until now. Today's release is going to add Groups to the Waze iPhone and Android apps.
Four short links: 22 July 2010 - Subjective Analytics, Great Maps, Open Web Analytics, and Locative Gaming Tool
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 22, 2010
Boomerang -- a piece of javascript that you add to your web pages, where it measures the performance of your website from your end user's point of view. It has the ability to send this data back to your server for further analysis. With boomerang, you find out exactly how fast your users think your site is. From Yahoo!....
Four short links: 16 July 2010 - GPL Debate, Storage Costs, Social Software, Vodafone's Open Source
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 16, 2010
GPL WordPress Theme Angst -- a podcaster brought together Matt Mullenweg (creator of WordPress), and Chris Pearson (creator of the Thesis theme). Chris doesn't believe WordPress's GPL should be inherited by themes. Matt does, and the SFLC and others agree. The conversation is interesting because (a) they and the podcaster do a great job of keeping it civil and...
Four short links: 12 July 2010 - Machine Learning Toolkit, Map Politics, Borg Newspaper, and Ambient Displays
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 12, 2010
Shogun: A Large Scale Machine Learning Toolbox -- open source (GPL v3), C++ with interfaces to MatLab, R, Octave, and Python. Emphasis for this toolkit is on SVM and "large scale kernel methods". The Agnostic Cartographer (Washington Monthly) -- land and sea are easy to measure compared to the trouble you get into when you put names on them....
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