Today is Yuri’s night where the world celebrates the first human spaceflight on April 12, 1961. Over the past 50 years we have had varied successes and advancements in our space technology. I believe that today we are on the brink of a new space revolution.

The 1960’s was the birth of modern computing. The transistor radically changed the size and cost of building digital computers. At the time, there were only a few computers in the world, they were extremely large, complicated, and you were fortunate if you could get any time on a machine. It was difficult for people to imagine the broad availability of computing. They were for precise calculations of unique problems.

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
-Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

Clearly that has dramatically altered from room-sized, multi-ton hand built machines to ubiquitous, handheld devices with more power and connectivity than was ever imagined. This access to nearly unlimited computing power revolutionized commerce, communications, and inspired entrepreneurship from garage hackers to multi-billion dollar companies that are built on ideas and code.

I believe that we will see the same trajectory of the space industry. Satellites have been large, expensive, and limited to a few institutions that could fund, operate and utilize them for unique problems. But that’s changing.

We’re beginning to see the advent of hobby space engineering. Startup companies inspired by the X-Prize foundation brought the attention to the public. But the revolution is quietly and methodically moving forward as the components and capability for rapidly developing and deploying satellites dramatically decreases.

NASA is testing launching off the shelf commercial Android mobile phones into orbit called Phonesat. You can now buy books on how to build your own satellite platforms from O’Reilly. UpdateAnd the government and agencies are hosting open events for the technology and science communities to collaborate on fast paced, iterative solutions such as the SpaceAppChallenge.

There are still physical boundaries that make access to space difficult and expensive. When you need to throw something at 7.8 km per second, it is not going to be easy. Fortunately with the increase in commercial satellite activity there are opportunities to piggy back on other payloads. At $10-12k it is still expensive for a hobby. But consider that the first Apple Lisa computer cost $9,995, in 1985. That’s $22,600 in 2012 dollars.

There is a lot of childhood excitement and vision captured in our goals for the future of space. One day we will again walk on the Moon and likely on Mars and hopefully other bodies. In the meantime, I’m excited to see the new advent of an open and innovative space engineering culture.

Earlier this week FourSquare announced that they switched their website maps from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap data hosted by MapBox. In what has been a growing trend of broader adoption, FourSquare remarks the utility and success of OpenStreetMap. Additionally it’s another movement in the recent switch2osm campaign since Google began requiring paid licensing for high-usage of the once completely free Google Maps.

Currently the switch is only for the website, which I admit I have used less than a dozen times and the mobile application will still be using the native Google Maps libraries. There are a number of valid reasons for this, not least of which is that Google is not yet charging for mobile maps usage, though I imagine it only a matter of time before they do and also for developers to build comparable mobile mapping libraries for OpenStreetMap.

Value of the Basemap

There are several intriguing aspects of this announcement as well as the reaction. First is that the change of the basemap, while intriguing to the geospatial and data communities, is likely highly irrelevant to most FourSquare users. Would there have been much news had the switch been to Microsoft Bing maps? Probably not. The interest is clearly impacted by the community, and general good will, of the OpenStreetMap project. Each adoption by a major company further verifies its value, as well as solidifies its continuity as organizations build their own business with OpenStreetMap as a core component.

Second is that there have been a number of companies whose primary, or recent, goal has been to be a trusted provider of OpenStreetMap basemaps. CloudMade, started by one of the founders of OpenStreetMap Steve Coast, was created for exactly this purpose. Additionally MapQuest has been using OpenStreetMap as a tactic to increase adoption of their long-standing mapping platform as well as insure themselves against likely increasing commercial data provider costs. However it was an extremely recent technology, albeit from a longer established company, to be the one to provide the OpenStreetMap basemap for FourSquare.

Development Seed’s MapBox is truly a compelling creation of technology and innovation. They have done extremely well adopting the best of breed software, and the development team that built it, with Mapnik. And they combined it with new technology to make it fast, and a differentiating and compelling story for developers by using Node.js. Technical details aside, the design and thought into the representation of OpenStreetMap clearly was a key differentiator in FourSquare using Mapbox to serve their OpenStreetMap tiles. And I’ll also add that Development Seed is a local DC and East Coast company – something I don’t doubt was interesting to the New York based FourSquare in pushing against the typical Silicon Valley technology scene.

Of course, in the end it is just a basemap. This is the background canvas that contains the actually valuable information that FourSquare has gathered and users engage with. The switch from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap does not in any way change the value or usage of the FourSquare application and community. Technically there is no real difference – it’s possible to restyle most any basemap today, and I imagine the switch from one provider to another was a relatively trivial code switch. FourSquare, or others, could just as easily switch to a new basemap if it was important to them as a business or their community.

More than a Basemap

What I am most excited about, and believe FourSquare has an almost unique potential to enable, is the adoption of OpenStreetMap as more than just the canvas for visualizing check-in’s and user activity. OpenStreetMap’s true value is that it is an open, editable, relational database of geographic data – where the basemap is merely one way to access the information. What makes OpenStreetMap the future of location data is that the information can only get better, more up to date more quickly, and better representative of unique and varied views of a person’s place.

Several years ago Dennis and I had a conversation just after the initial launch of FourSquare about the potential of using OpenStreetMap. At the beginning, FourSquare only worked in specific cities, and in his considering how to expand it everywhere the options were between having a blank database and having an OpenStreetMap populated dataset. Obviously the tremendous potential was having the then nascent community of FourSquare users using and updating OpenStreetMap data. Unfortunately for usability and I assume business reasons (e.g. build your own database that you can own) FourSquare didn’t adopt OpenStreetMap at that time.

However, imagine if FourSquare adopted just this technique. Leverage their millions of users to improve the OpenStreetMap database. OpenStreetMap itself suffers from the common platform issue of being everything to everyone. This is confusing for new users that want to contribute to know where to begin. They may just want to include the road in front of their house – or the park down the street and the great coffee shop they frequent. Unfortunately the interface for performing these activities often requires understanding of British terminology of places and an overwhelming choice of categories, tags, and drawing options.

FourSquare by contrast is forced to be simple and focused. Users are quickly engaging and disengaging with the application that should capture the data and reflect it to the user for verification. Because my activity is being tracked, FourSquare can know that I’m on foot in the US and in an urban area, so don’t start by showing me hiking trails, or highways but show me restaurant and relevant places of interest – allowing me to dive deeper if I want to but making it simple for the casual user to improve the data. I believe that only through simple and focused user applications will OpenStreetMap broadly enter into the common use and be able to reach the end tail of location data.

Of course, this assumes FourSquare, specifically the investors and board, don’t see their user collected place data as a key and protected dataset. There have been enough POI selling companies in a dying market. There are now businesses such as Factual, and still CloudMade, who are focused on making this data openly available – though themselves as brokers to the data.

Despite continuing to cross numerous impressive adoption hurdles and over seven years of development, OpenStreetMap is still a young project. Its adoption by FourSquare is indeed another momentous occasion that heralds optimism that it will continue to grow. And as companies like Development Seed, CloudMade, MapQuest and others adopt OpenStreetMap as a core to their business – providing not just services but truly engaging with the community and providing focused context and value, OpenStreetMap will only get better.

Today Google announced that they are enforcing free usage limits on the Google Maps API. Beyond the free limit of 25,000 views per day, sites will start having to pay $4 per 1,000 views. They will automatically charge your credit card based on these usage fees and it’s not clear if you can set a “cut-off” limit or if it will have the similar suprises as overseas cell charges.

I find this is a bit of a surprising action from Google. In 2005 they changed the mapping and geospatial web by providing a powerful, easy to use great API (eventually), and primarily free of charge slippy map platform. The term “GoogleMap” became synonymous with being able to pan and zoom through the entire world without any reloading of the page or poor user experience. Since then, there have been millions of sites that have used GoogleMaps to provide simple map views and location services. Assumedly this information has been of huge value to Google in understanding interest, spatial-context, and generally eyeballs to Google tools and content.

Google has also worked to monetize maps, often subtly through sponsored map markers, and other times more directly through in-map ads. Each of these decisions brought discussion and disent but it was difficult to argue with the fact that the tool was still free to use. Google has clearly put real value in content and engineering into Google Maps. The quality of geocoding, data availability and power of the API has always been extremely capable and arguably the best of breed.

Now, with a very direct pay requirement being imposed this will dramatically change the adoption of GoogleMaps. Developers will have to consider very carefully how they will afford the potential – and optimistically likely – fees that the service will require as it becomes successful.

Fortunately, there are still a few really good alternative options for developers of sites if they can’t afford the usage fees. MapQuest has really embraced the future of open by supporting and integrating OpenStreetMap into their sites. Microsoft Bing maps are very capable and there are many more – not least of which is a developer “rolling their own”.

This interesting change by Google also validates abstraction libraries such as Mapstraction. Mapstraction provides a common API where a developer can easily switch between map provider libraries without having to rewrite their code – something that would likely cost much more in the short term than paying for usage fees. On GeoCommons we use ModestMaps to be able to switch to any map data provider service.

I’m very interested to see the general developer reaction to this change.

Cross-posted from the GeoIQ Blog

Last Week I participated in a panel with spatial archival experts at the at the Society of American Archivists. Led by Butch Lazorchak of the Library of Congress, and also joined by Steve Morris from GeoMAPP, and John Faundeen from USGS, the panel was a full spectrum discussion of “Geospatial Data Preservation” ranging from the Library of Congress’ $10 million acquisition and access to the infamous Waldseemüller 1507 map Universalis Cosmographia of ‘America’ USGS’s environmental conditions for storing historic satellite imagery to GeoMAPP’s work in gathering time-stamped state geospatial data. Butch in particular provided an inspiring overview on what’s special about Spatial – density of data, representation vs data, and the difficulty in capturing interactivity of more modern digital maps.

The Archivists were a new community to me – people that are passionate about the capturing and storing of data – often until the end of time! But they also vary in their core missions – often diverging on the utility of the captured data and information. Very few seem to be really thinking about archives as a useful resource today and only focusing on the long-time storage and eventual access of the data by some unknown entity. As one member of GeoMAPP said: “All of the Archives are storing this superseded GIS data in dark archives and aren’t really providing access to the datasets and don’t have web mapping interfaces”

Clearly, we think a bit differently about archiving – choosing to focus foremost on access to data which will result in improved archiving of data, distribution, and analysis on utility and benefit. My presentation Maps as Narratives: Making Spatial Archives Accessible

focused on the concept that maps have been, and are increasingly a vital resource for people in their daily lives and work. By providing users tools to access and use historic and realtime data, we can then capture this data and provide it to other users and data repositories.

Particular to internet feeds, and social media we can’t easily predict what data will be useful. Neogeographers create visualizations of twitter streams, photos, foursquare checkin’s, friend locations. How do we know which of these are the modern correspondances of tomorrow’s US President or Global business leader? Through easy mechanisms for sharing data and maintaining links we can begin tracking this information in it’s varied forms, providing better insight and archiving of data for later reuse, whether it is tomorrow or in 100 years.

I was fortunate enough to be selected to attend the #NASATweetup to see the last launch of Space Shuttle Endeavor – STS-134. Along with 150 other lucky selected people including even @dens, the Obamas, Gabi Giffords, Seth Green, Levar Burton and numerous inspiring astronauts we’ll be at the countdown clock with a front row seat the second to last launch of the entire shuttle program.

Endeavor is carrying the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the International Space Station that will perform some inspiring science on measuring dark matter radiation. There’s also a host of spiders, aggressive bacteria and other science experiments that will be run on the iSS. I’ll have more photos and stories up soon.