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Four short links: 13 November 2009

By Nat Torkington
November 13, 2009

Open Source Enters The World of Atoms -- an academic statistical analysis of open design. We indicated that, in open design communities, tangible objects can be developed in very similar fashion to software; one could even say that people treat a design as source code to a physical object and change the object via changing the source. Why I...

Navigating the Future: Take Me to�Bob

By Brady Forrest
October 29, 2009

Google has just announced a free turn-by-turn navigation app for Android 2.0 in the US (Radar post). Google Maps Navigation relies on Google's own mapping for routing you. As with many navigation devices you can search Business Listings. However, they are also including data not traditionally available to navigators. In the promo video Google demonstrates that you can ask...

A Conversation with Dr. Walter Scott of DigitalGlobe

By Joshua-Michele Ross
October 17, 2009

Dr Walter Scott founded Digital Globe - a company you are likely not familiar with though you probably interact with their satellite imagery on a regular basis via Google Maps, Bing and others. It is only recently that mapping technology and production has been driven by mainly commercial interests especially in the area of satellite imagery. With this commercialization corporations...

Four short links: 16 October 2009

By Nat Torkington
October 16, 2009

Wiimote Audio Geotagging -- match audio with the map movement and annotations made with an IR pen and a Wiimote. Very cool! (and from New Zealand) San Francisco: Open For Data -- Two months after it launched, the project is already reaping rewards from San Francisco's huge community of programmers. Applications using the data include Routesy, which offers directions...

Four short links: 2 September 2009

By Nat Torkington
September 1, 2009

The Programming Language With The Happiest Users (Dolores Labs) -- you'll be surprised. Age before beauty! Judge It Now -- fast market opinions on design decisions. Compare to Optimal Sort. Usability tools hitting the mainstream web, so the time to learn what works shrinks and progress is faster. BlockChalk API -- These new interfaces enable developers to do nearly...

Burning Man Gets an API (and a Whole Lot More)

By Brady Forrest
August 26, 2009

An API! SMS! Foursquare! An iPhone app! They are all coming to Burning Man this year. Will the festival be the same? The annual tech-art festival in the Nevada desert, starts on Sunday. Normally the attendees leave their phones and laptop behind, but this year that may not be the case. As I ride from Seattle to Black Rock...

Where 2.0 2010 CFP is Now Open

By Brady Forrest
August 25, 2009

The CFP for the sixth annual Where 2.0 is now open. The three-day conference about location, mapping and geodata will be held from 3/30 to 4/1 in San Jose, CA. This year our focus will be on location-enabled platforms, mobile apps, user-generated geodata, sensors, and augmented reality. Here is more about the conference below, Mobile: The iPhone, Android, and...

Seeing the Future of Mapping in Crimespotting

By Brady Forrest
August 21, 2009

This week Stamen Design released San Francisco Crimespotting. It's a crime map and notification system that allows for time and crime trend analysis. SF Crimespotting has launched just over two years after the release Oakland Crimespotting (Radar post). Stamen had been waiting for crime data all this time and with the launch of DataSF they are able to use...

Four short links: 21 August 2009

By Nat Torkington
August 20, 2009

TwitterMood -- using Twitter as a giant mood sensor for the world (see also temporal correlations, via kellan on delicious). What Will Remain of Us -- The sea that brought trade to Dunwich was not entirely benevolent. The town was losing ground as early as 1086 when the Domesday Book, a survey of all holdings in England, was published;...

A Crowd-Sourced National Communications Census

By Carl Malamud
July 18, 2009

The FCC is charged with creating a National Broadband Plan in 2010. But how can we plan for the future is we don't know where we are? Here, we propose a crowd-sourced National Communications Census.

Recovery Mapping: ARRA Spending Across the US

By Brady Forrest
July 13, 2009

GIS is the killer app for data.gov -- @mikehogan paraphrasing Spatial Sustain To really understand economic and government data you need a map. This is especially important to remember right now with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) spending. There's a lot of data out there and it's when you see can see the relative concentration of funds...

Four short links: 6 July 2009

By Nat Torkington
July 3, 2009

Offline Mapping App for iPhone -- carry Open Street Maps maps with you even when you're not in 3G/wifi range. (via Elisabeth) My dentist used an in-office CAD & CNC mill to produce a new tooth for me today (Nat Friedman) -- hello, future! New version of Scratch released -- Scratch is an excellent way to teach kids how...

Four short links: 24 June 2009

By Nat Torkington
June 24, 2009

The Digital Open -- The Digital Open is an online technology community and competition for youth around the world, age 17 and under. Building a community of young open source hackers. Four Crowdsoucing Lessons from the Guardian's Spectacular Expenses Scandal Experiment -- Your workers are unpaid, so make it fun. How to lure them? By making it feel like...

Before and After Shots of Google's Iran Maps

By Brady Forrest
June 22, 2009

There many places in the world where it is not possible for larger companies to map them. These can be for economic reasons as is the case for Black Rock City (the temporary 40,000 person home for Burning Man). Or for political reasons as is the case for Iran and countries such as China. As I mentioned the other...

Want a Map of Tehran? Use Open Street Map or Google

By Brady Forrest
June 17, 2009

All eyes are on Tehran right now. As the center of the Iranian election protests the city has become increasingly important to websites this week. To keep their site up-to-date with this latest crisis area Flickr switched out the Yahoo road Map with Open Street Map. When I heard about this I wondered how other major mapping sites faired....

What the iPhone 3GS and 3.0 OS Means for Geo Devs

By Brady Forrest
June 9, 2009

Yesterday's announcements around the iPhone 3GS and new 3.0 OS were significant to consumers and developers. Here are some of the changes that will make geo devs happy. Google Maps Views (Mapkit) - Developers can now take advantage of Google Maps within their apps. This means that you no longer have to building your own mapping system for your...

Four short links: 1 June 2009

By Nat Torkington
June 1, 2009

Spymaster -- a faux-spy game on Twitter: Each player becomes a master of a spy ring based upon their Twitter followers list. The more people that follow you and are playing characters in Spymaster, the more powerful your network will be. As a spymaster, you can perform tasks or attack other spymasters on Twitter. With each successful attempt, you...

Four short links: 27 May 2009

By Nat Torkington
May 27, 2009

uzbl -- lightweight WebKit-based web browser controlled with vim-like keystrokes, controllable through a FIFO for scripting, and all the "features" (bookmarking, history, changing URL) happen through external scripts. For the hardcore. (via joshua on delicious) A Conversation With Eric Rodenbeck About Usefully Cool Design and Engineering (Jon Udell) -- if we could only distil Stamen down to their barest...

Four short links: 18 May 2009

By Nat Torkington
May 18, 2009

Scientists Without Borders -- "Mobilizing Science, Improving Lives". mobilize and coordinate science-based activities that improve quality of life in the developing world. The research community, aid agencies, NGOs, public-private partnerships, and a wide variety of other institutions are already promoting areas such as global health, agricultural progress, and environmental well-being, but current communication gaps restrict their power. Organizations and...

That Was Fast: Mapme.at Uses Latitude API

By Brady Forrest
May 6, 2009

Yesterday location-sharing startup Mapme.at took advantage of the Latitude API (Radar post) to get their users' location. Now you can share your Latitude-enhanced location with your Mapme friends, track your location and update Yahoo's FireEagle (which in turn can update many other services). To use the new method Mapme users have to enable the Latitude blog badge and then...

Google's Sneaky Launch of Latitude's Location-Sharing API

By Brady Forrest
May 6, 2009

Google has extended their location sharing service Latitude (Radar post) with the first set of Latitude Apps. One of them is a blog badge for sharing your location publicly on a website. The other updates your GTalk status for sharing your location to your IM network. Both have to be turned on explicitly and allow you to share your...

Swine Flu Tracker

By Brady Forrest
May 5, 2009

Rhiza Labs has launched Flu Tracker to enable people to clearly track the progress of H1N1 Swine Flu. On the site you can see news stories about the flu and maps based on the data of Henry L Niman. The maps show the number of Suspected, Confirmed and Fatal Cases by country: They also show the data by state...

Jack Dangermond Interview 3 of 3: The Geoweb

By Brady Forrest
May 1, 2009

Jack Dangermond is the founder and CEO of ESRI. ESRI's software is used by every level of government around the world. You can see ESRI's influence in online mapping tools from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and FortiusOne. I had the opportunity to interview him over the phone on April 20, 2009. In this portion of the interview we discuss the history...

Where Week 2009

By Brady Forrest
April 29, 2009

Where Week, five days when geohackers across the world descend on Silicon Valley, is coming up. WhereCamp, the unconference put on by Where 2.0 attendees has been scheduled. This year it will happen at SocialText in Palo Alto on Friday May 22nd and Saturday May 23rd 2009. There will be unconference sessions during the day and a hackfest in...

Jack Dangermond Interview 2 of 3: Sharing Government GIS Data

By Brady Forrest
April 29, 2009

Jack Dangermond Interview 1 of 3: Web Mapping

By Brady Forrest
April 29, 2009

Locavore's Open Data

By Brady Forrest
April 23, 2009

Buster McLeod is taking an "open data" policy towards his latest project, Locavore the iPhone app, by revealing the first month's stats. Locavore is a great app that helps you eat locally by showing you what produce is in season near you and what farmer's markets you can buy it at. It's a well-designed app that I look forward...

Where 2.0 Preview - DARPA's TIGR Project Helps Platoons Stay Alive

By James Turner
April 21, 2009

Soldiers on the ground need to know the territory they patrol like the back of their hand. Knowing where insurgents like to plant IEDs or that an important political leader lives in a certain house can prove the difference between success and failure. But what happens when a platoon transfers out of Baghdad and a brand new one moves in? All that experience used to go out the window. But thanks to TIGR, a map-based knowledge-base developed by DARPA, platoons can now document information they learn on patrol, as well as accessing the latest intelligence. In this interview, hear how TIGR was developed, how it is helping troops stay alive and perform their missions better, and what the realities of deploying a brand new technology into a war zone are.

A Telling Map of Job Losses

By Brady Forrest
April 16, 2009

Slate's Moneybox has an interactive map that shows job creation and loss throughout the US for the past two years. Watching it flow through each month's up and down definitely made the employment situation in the country clearer to me. Like any great visualization image and the legend make it very clear what's happening. Here's how Slate explains how...

Where 2.0 Preview - Building the SENSEable City

By James Turner
April 15, 2009

A lot of information we have about cities comes through direct and intentioned observation and study, but could a lot of the time and expense spent on this research be garnered just as well by mining the data that citizens generate in their day-to-day lives through cell phone traffic and internet usage? That's one of the questions that Andrea Vaccari, a research associate at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, is trying to find out. Andrea will be speaking at the Where 2.0 Conference in May on the research that the SENSEable City Project is doing.

O'Reilly Week in Review for April 13th, 2009

By James Turner
April 15, 2009

This week, we have interviews from Yahoo! and MIT, both previewing talks at Where 2.0. There's also a new podquiz, this week dealing with Microsoft's poor sense of direction, literally......

Where 2.0 Preview - Tyler Bell on Yahoo's Open Location Project

By James Turner
April 14, 2009

Location can be a vague concept to pin down. To a surveyor, location means latitude and longitude accurate to a few millimeters, while to a cab driver, a street address would be much more useful. If you're German, I can tell you that I live in the United States. To a Californian, I live in New Hampshire. And to someone from Manchester, I live in Derry. Unfortunately, the way that location is currently stored and presented online is both non-uniform and frequently at a level of precision inappropriate for the end-user. That's part of what Open Location is trying to fix. Tyler Bell, who took his doctorate from Oxford to Yahoo, is currently the product lead for the Yahoo Geo Technology Group. At O'Reilly's Where 2.0 Conference, he'll be discussing Open Location.

Tweenbots: Cute Beats Smart

By Brady Forrest
April 11, 2009

If you wanted to build a robot that could go from one end of Washington Square Park to the other without your help how would you do it? How expensive in time and money would it be? Would you build or buy a navigation system? Construct a sensing system to detect obstacles? Or would you decide to take a...

Becoming Location Aware: Where 2.0 Early Registration Ending 4/13

By Brady Forrest
April 10, 2009

Despite the downturn the geolocation space is still active. This year's Where 2.0 conference will be highlighting the companies, technologies and people that make the industry go. Where 2.0 is happening in San Jose at the Fairmount Hotel from 5/19-21(the first day is workshops; the next two are all mainstage talks). Early registration ends this Tuesday, 4/13. You can...

Where 2.0 Preview - Pelago's Jeff Holden on Creating Stories Out of Your Life

By James Turner
April 10, 2009

Tools like Twitter and Facebook have let people share in near real-time what they are doing. Now with a new generation of location aware mobile devices, you can tell your friends or the entire world where you're doing it. Jeff Holden's company, Pelago, is one of many trying to come up with a killer application that blends location, images, text and social networking to create a new kind of group awareness. Before starting Pelago, Jeff had a long career as the Senior Vice President of Consumer Websites for Amazon and before that, the Director of Supply Chain Optimization Systems. In this preview of his talk at Where 2.0, Jeff talks about creating stories through location-tagged information, distributing software through Apple's App Store, his work at Amazon, and the privacy implications of location becoming ubiquitous.

PhoneGap, the Mobile Platform Democratizer

By Brady Forrest
April 8, 2009

Phonegap is an opensource development framework for mobile platforms. It allows developers to build native apps in HTML and JavaScript. Currently PhoneGap works for the iPhone and Android, but Blackberry and other OSs are on the way. You can get PhoneGap from Github or Google Code. There are eighteen iPhone apps listed on the PhoneGap site. Though the apps...

Where 2.0 Preview: Eric Gunderson of Development Seed on the Promise of Open Data

By James Turner
April 3, 2009

When we think about how government uses geographic information, we tend to think about USGS maps or census data, very centralized and preplanned projects meant to produce a very specific set of products. But Development Seed believes that there are a lot more that could be done if these types of data could be mashed up easily with each other as well as with alternate sources such as social networks. Eric Gunderson, President of Development Seed, will speaking at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 Conference in June, and he recently took some time to speak to us about the potential benefits that open access to government data brings.

O'Reilly Week in Review for March 23rd, 2009

By James Turner
March 25, 2009

This week's podcast features a chat with Brady Forrest, who organizes conferences for O'Reilly, about the upcoming Where conference, and what's happening with geo-aware technology in general. Brian Aker, MySQL guy for Sun, talks about the possibility of MySQL becoming...

Radar Roundup: Sensors

By Dylan Field
March 16, 2009

In his "Web Meets World" talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York last September, Tim O'Reilly described where he saw the web heading. "The next stage of Web 2.0 is going to be driven by sensors," he said. "We are moving out of the world in which people typing on keyboards are going to be driving collective intelligence applications." Like all transitions, the incorporation of data from the physical web onto existing platforms is gradual. We are just beginning to see applications surface and the best is still ahead of us. Below are a few observations, predictions and implementations of this emerging trend.

DIY City Releases DIY Traffic

By Brady Forrest
February 25, 2009

DIY City is a new tech movement aimed at empowering geeks to remake their cities. The site has forums where people can propose projects and then discuss the potential solutions. Since its launch in late 2008 many local chapters have sprung up (start one for you city!). Today DIY City is launching its first project, DIY Traffic. It uses...

Come to ETech; Experiment with Physical Computing and RFIDs

By Brady Forrest
February 10, 2009

RFID's are associated with credit cards, passports and inventory systems. However, they can also be used to add a proximity interaction to a service like entering a subway via a passkey (Jan Chipchase has several posts describing these interactions around the world). By linking yourself to an RFID tag you can let a device know who you are. If...

Google's Latitude Adds Location-Sharing to Mobile Phones

By Brady Forrest
February 4, 2009

Google has added location sharing to its suite of products. Google Latitude was launched as a Google Maps for Mobile (Symbian, Blackberry, Android, WinMo; the iPhone and iPod Touch will be coming soon) and as an iGoogle widget. It will allow you to share your location with a set group of friends. You can determine the level of your...

Everyblock's Dilemna: How Do You Open Source Your Entire Site and Survive?

By Brady Forrest
January 30, 2009

This morning Adrian Holovaty announced that he will be open sourcing Everyblock. Everyblock is a site that crawls local data sources, aggregates the data, and then surfaces them geographically. For instance I get an email everyday that alerts me to news, fire department activity, health notices and flickr photos taken within blocks of my house. Everyblock is available in...

ETech 2009 Schedule Posted; Early Registration Ends Monday

By Brady Forrest
January 22, 2009

ETech is a technologist's playground. We specifically design the conference to expose new ideas and learn from the people behind them. This year the focus is on how the way we live is changing -- through policy, technology and ideas. The proliferation of sensors, advances in materials and manufacturing, the changes in government and the financial market will all...

GeoData Explorations: Open Street Map's Growth

By Brady Forrest
December 18, 2008

Open Street Map (OSM), the open data mapping project, has grown a lot over the past year. It now has almost 80,000 users and 800 million data points. OSM's data is still freely available, but commercial services around it have sprung up. Cloudmade is a startup that recently moved from the UK to San Francisco to be closer to...

GeoData Explorations: Google's Ever-Expanding Geo Investment

By Brady Forrest
December 16, 2008

Google has been investing lots of money in geodata acquisition. Some of the money is being spent externally: they've inked an exclusive satellite imagery deal with GeoEye (Radar post) and a data sharing deal Tele Atlas (Radar post). And some is being spent internally with Mapmaker, Street View and the web. Over the past week Google has been sharing...

The State of Transit Routing

By Jim Stogdill
December 16, 2008

Mixed modal transit routing is coming, but it faces a different kind of data acquisition problem than street routing before it. The data isn't observable, and it's often proprietary.

Where 2.0 CFP Closes December 2nd

By Brady Forrest
December 1, 2008

The fifth Where 2.0 Call For Participation will be closing tomorrow (December 2nd). This year we're going to focus on location-aware technologies and their implications. The iPhone and Android have paved the way for a new breed of app and Where 2.0 will be focused on it. We won't be leaving mapping or geodata behind -- instead we'll look...

Where 2.0 2009 CFP Is Open

By Brady Forrest
November 14, 2008

The fifth Where 2.0 Call For Participation is now open. This year we're going to focus on location-ware technologies and their implications. The iPhone and Android have paved the way for a new breed of app and Where 2.0 will be focused on it. If you want to join us on stage submit your talk by December 2, 2008....

Your Search Activity Predicts Flu Outbreaks

By Brady Forrest
November 11, 2008

Google.org has released Flu Trends, an online reporting tool for flu-related search activity. It's long been theorized that Google's search data would be useful to predict epidemics. This is the first time they've released a tool like this to the public. As they say on the main page: We have found a close relationship between how many people search...

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