It’s a little difficult to keep up with everything while I’m traveling. Pleasantly I noticed in my inbox that an announcement from O’Reilly went out that included my name.

Brady Forrest and I collaborated on producing a business-oriented analysis of the phenomenal growth around geospatial technology. The report, Where2.0: The State of the Geospatial Web covers various aspects of providers and potential opportunities in a variety of domains that are affected by the emergence of many factors.

Some of these topics include: the impact of open and user-contributed geographic data on traditional data vendors and subsequent tools that rely on the availability, coverage, and quality of this data; highly-connected mobile devices, now often with developer available interfaces for location sharing and high-bandwidth internet connections; models for location-based advertising; and next generation applications such as games, augmented & immersive reality; as well as many more.

It was definitely interesting writing the report from a more practical and business perspective. My background has been in pushing and developing new technologies. I found it eminently useful to think of it from a reverse perspective on evaluating the percolating usefulness across markets and uses. It is valuable for both business development as well as application development to connect.

In addition to the discussion and analysis of the current state of the geospatial web, the report includes a fairly broad directory of companies, applications, and organizations in Where2.0 across the multiple domains. It also includes in-depth profiles of some of the major players.

The report is primarily for businesses that are interested in starting up, or entering, the geo- space and want to get a view of the landscape. It should also be useful for existing organizations that want to understand how the various technologies, acquisitions, and developments may affect their current market.

You can get a discount by using this link.

The report was originally written this Spring and originally announced at Where2.0. We’ve been continuously updating the report with new information such as the completion of the TeleAtlas/TomTom and NAVTEQ/Nokia mergers and the implications as well as the iPhone 3G with built-in GPS and Core Location API. The GeoWeb is a fast-moving space, so it’s definitely difficult to attempt to grasp for a quick snapshot. We hope to update it more in the future as Where2.0 evolves.

Things have started settling down over the recent quick succession of the largest navigation data providers being purchased. The common question that has been asked is “Why didn’t Google buy NAVTEQ?”

The answer seems simple enough - Google wouldn’t want to be saddled with NAVTEQ’s customers and history and infrastructure. It’s not just about the data, NAVTEQ was a business in and of it’s own right. Nokia buying NAVTEQ means they now have a direct line to sell both data and electronics devices to these customers. Not something Google would be interested in. But how does Google deal with increased pricing or even lock-out from data providers in the future?

What people are really asking is “Why didn’t Google buy a data company?” But they have. At least, they’re investing in data. Google is ‘crowdsourcing’ in India (though seems more like ‘outsourcing’ with a prettier moniker). They’re also paying users everywhere to map businesses. This gets Google what they want in the end — data.

Ed Parsons says it fairly plainly:

what will be interesting in the future will be the relative contribution made by “Cloud” collected data

OpenStreetMap providers 100%, free, verified coverage in the Netherlands. Imagine that, there is now little to no reason to buy raw data in the Netherlands anymore. Value now comes from building great services on top of that data. Now carry forward a year or two when OSM has coverage of the other countries in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Google/Yahoo/Microsoft win - they have all the data they want and can then bundle this into their web services, mobile devices, etc. without having to track usages, licenses, or derivative works. Everyone wins.

And Google has demonstrated excellent ability in working with governments and institutions to free their data. Look at Google Transit.

My only concern is their past history in leveraging this data out of the institution but keeping it privately inside Google - only released under approved TOS and API’s. Hopefully in the future they’ll release this data - at least in it’s original form - back to the public.

And there still is a market for NOKTEQ or Tele/Tomlas - or even newcomers like CloudMade that will take all this free and available data, package it, verify it, and deliver it to customers that value things like SLA’s.

A revolution like this happened before. There were skeptics, and winners - yet few doubters remain. The same will happen with open-data.

I am working on a large project with a good potential future and am seeking a couple of developers and a designer. If you want to work on a cutting edge, dynamic, fun & interesting application with the possibility of a broader future, then let me know. There is a prototype done, but I am looking for some help in getting the features all complete and ready for public roll-out.

More specifically, the application is a server/desktop/mobile hybrid, and deals with a lot of items that have come across this blog. Think along the lines of Plazes, Platial, MobilePlay, Mologogo, and my own Travelogue.

There are 2 developer spots:

• Ruby/Rails, web development
• J2ME/Python for mobiles

The designer should be versed in web design methods, CSS/XHTML, User interface for desktop and mobile apps (or willing to quickly learn).

If you’re interested in finding out more and helping out, please email me at software@highearthorbit.com. Please include references to some other projects, code, or designs that you’ve worked on.

(By the way, anyone from any country/time-zone/culture is welcome, despite the “Uncle Sam” personage. I just felt he embodied the message: “We want you!”)

While doing a little Christmas and deal perusing, somehow in my “webpage-peripheral” vision I noticed a change to the Amazon layout. They are now sporting, of all things, tags. Supposedly the idea being you can tag items by people you are shopping for. Perhaps, ala del.icio.us you could tag tobuy or toshoparoundfor.

After you fill in a tag, you can then view all of your tags, or other users who also used the same tag. What’s particularly hilarious, is I could tag something “Sue”, perhaps for my great aunt Sue (no, I don’t have an Aunt Sue, work with me here). I can then go and view everything else other people have wanted to buy for their “Sue”.

What’s also eerie, something I found out while writing this post, is that you can view who first used the tag. Which lead me to a new area of Amazon.com (to me at least) which allows you to view and search by people. I can then go and search by all the “Bob Katz” of the world and see their wishlists, hometowns, profiles, etc.

Rev Dan Cat (of ) put out a great idea - geotagging Amazon items. However, what, for example, is a geolocated blender? Perhaps where the item is coming from, manufactured, or best used? I could see trying to “buy local”. Maybe user comments could be geolocated, as I may tend to agree more with people’s opinions from the great island nation of Tuvalu then someone from Wisconsin.

Mike Zornek recently announced that he is leaving the comfortable world of gainful employment and joining the world of hopefully beneficial self-employment. This quickly leads one to all sorts of questions you may not have thought about as a developer where the questions were: what compiler, what language, user interface (bah - users); where now the questions are: how do I bill, fixed-price vs. t&m (time and materials), what the heck are Accounts payable?

I’m currently using WRTimeTracker (http://products.wrconsulting.com/wrtimetracker/en/) installed on my server host for tracking my hours. I want a web-based tracker since I’m very often working in odd places on different machines. It works alright for the time being, but lacks in some features and is really targeted to be used with their windows clients.

As a developer, it seems rather straight-forward to evaluate my own needs and desires for a time-tracking/billing system and develop this in one of the myriad languages that I say I know. I have one on my ‘todo’ list for learning Rails. My goal is to enter in my activities/projects/clients and ‘expected time to completion’. Then I can track the actual hours and later compare how good my estimates were on certain tasks. You could also put in categories of a task and later review things like ‘average time to build a website’. Later, I could write a small REST API and a Dashboard widget to be able to upload hours from my desktop or cellphone (I said I work in odd places).

As for accounting, I’m just starting to dig into gnucash (http://www.gnucash.org/), which can run via X11 on a Mac, or via a linux server and again log in from a variety of locations.

Of course, none of these software packages remove the need to understand things like “double-entry accounting” or what Accounts Payable are. Ah, the fun of running your own business and learning all kinds of things you wouldn’t have otherwise.