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.

Today we announced that CrisisCommons is receiving $1.2 million in grant funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, through the Woodrow Wilson Center, to spend the next two years providing support between the volunteer technology community and crisis response and development organizations.

Over the last year of supporting numerous local CrisisCamps in developing mobile, data, analysis, mapping and other tools supporting the response to the Haiti earthquake, Pakistan floods, Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill, and other regional crisis events we’ve learned a lot of lessons. In particular, there is consistently a “crisis crowd” that seeks to provide aid and assistance through expertise, information sharing, and technology development. However, organizations have difficulty in conveying their needs, or adopting solutions that fit appropriate security, quality, and usability metrics.

Through this support, CrisisCommons will be building out technology infrastructure support, in coordination with the Oregon State Open Source Lab, that will host projects and CrisisCamps. Research fellows will be made available to develop analysis and recommendations in event response and development that will help shape the future of volunteer technology community response and adoption in crisis events. And members of response organizations will be convened with the many open-source projects to collaborate, share experiences, needs, and develop better partnerships that will hopefully positively impact how crisis response occurs.

The community has been amazing, and the response to each and every event and camp unique and compelling – it’s just the beginning. We couldn’t have hoped for a better outcome from a completely emergent and very organic phenomenon. Thank you!

Read more about the grant on the CrisisCommons blog.

In 2000 I cancelled my phone landline because I was carrying a cellular phone that antiquated my physically fixed, low-tech, voicemail-less and (at the time) expensive land-line. Amongst my friends they considered an interesting, but quirky idea to only have a cellphone. Today one in four households in the US are strictly wireless.

So back to media. Why should I pay a 200% cost to view media on a fixed schedule – even though I have a cable DVR for an additional $15/month that still adheres to an antiquated idea of recording only when a program is shown. I have the ability to access on demand, mobile, high-quality media when and where I choose to watch it, free of time constraints.

In addressing this potential, the concept of carrying forward the “rental” model, in both price and usage restrictions, is laughable. If I can’t sell or lend the media, why not just stream it to me on demand and ensure that your licensing costs are met on volume.

Of course, my options on what I can subscribe to are limited. Through NetFlix I can watch movies and some television series – Hulu has another set of programs and Hulu Plus will make older archives more available through more devices. But as we approach the Fall season and popular US based sports start – ESPN allows me to watch some sporting events online – but will they start charging? Will home cooking shows, or other nice networks start their own online subscriptions – each for $10 per month?

We could quickly end up paying much more in á la carte programming if we pay per subscription – something that “cable packages” tried to address by bundling together stations at a discount price. However they suffered from the choice to toss in the lesser watched channels to encourage the edge customers or beef up station count numbers for advertising.

So while we’re entering a time of on-demand, individualized stations we have the liklihood of higher overall costs. I already pay much more in internet access across all of my devices than I ever did for cable alone. But the improved access and enjoyment of that media will allow me to choose and indicate the value of accessing that media – when and how I choose to.

Schuyler has been writing up his experiences but due to connectivity and the large amount of work, they’ve been utilizing Twitter: @schulyer and @buckley_tom, continuing to keep the world up to date on their progress, safety, and insights. They have even managed to get out video discussing the use of OpenStreetMap by UN OCHA and other reconstruction efforts.

The USB Drives and USB Sticks that we sent down have seemed to be incredibly useful. The ability to utilize dynamic information and map interfaces in an offline, or semi-disconnected environment is empowering, while also allowing people to still print their maps with the data. We’re now working on deploying these same tools to Afghanistan and other areas that there has been a large amount of data gathered but not broadly distributed.

Tom and Schuyler head back to the U.S. tomorrow, but the job is far from done. Mikel’s Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (H.O.T.) is looking to deploy at the end of March to provide continue logistics support and begin training Haitians on building and utilizing the maps – much like the MapKibera project. Haiti has perhaps an excellent opportunity to leap-frog the use of open data and technology by empowering the government and people with tools they can use in reconstruction.

The platforms continue to evolve, incorporating lessons learned from user needs, to new data sources, and working in varied environments. We’ll continue to provide data and maps through GeoCommons that are usable by everyone, and distribute tools to anyone who needs them.

In general, the last week has involved a whirlwind of grassroots organization and development of numerous projects. This change of realtime engagement and response by volunteers and non-traditional organizations through internet has no doubt raised the hackles, or at least the concern, of traditional responders, agencies, and government. There are often voiced considerations of causing confusion, providing technology that will have no use, and lack of organization and hierarchy.

Even within these grassroots participants there are calls for centralization, and building chains of responsibility that are somewhat antithesis to the very mechanism by which the project started and how it acts. Many of these projects formulated from simple ideas, growth through passion, an aligned community, and freedom to explore ideas and vet these within the organization. Over time the best ideas crystalize and become part of the long term project and others spin out to new projects.

It’s about the Mindshare and Multiplied Resources

In the beginning of a Crisis response there is an intense desire for people to engage and provide some type of resource: money, time, guidance, knowledge, contacts. At the same time, there is the alternate side of organizations seeking these vast, and limited, resources. Aid agencies put out SMS shortcodes for donations, PayPal links, matching funds. First responders need time, physical labor, and fortitude. Technology projects seek knowledge, translation, testing, documentation, data, integration.

Perhaps uniquely, technology has the possibility of multiplying any individuals efforts. By providing code, or data, and aggregating that data out, my contribution can feed into numerous other projects – whereas time or money is nominally a single use resource. It can buy water, or work for an hour moving rubble, and that’s all that resource can do for that time.

So a perceived problem is in bifurcation and redundancy of efforts and confusion. This can largely be mitigated by open collaboration, and easily sharing data through interchanges. Projects like the People Finder is slowly converging on this type of solution through the use of PFIF exchange and common aggregation points with API’s.

We’re working on improving the CrisisCommons.org site and wiki in order to track active projects, aggregate similar efforts and point volunteers to project homes to join their individual communities.

Mashable and James, amongst many others, have excellent predictions that will and won’t happen in 2010. Generally they are good insight into trends in the geo and mobile space, although I will take up counterpoint to some of his suppositions on File Formats, Interfaces, OpenStreetMap and Augmented Reality.

File Formats and Interfaces

Geo is definitely becoming mainstream – everyone in my family has a PND, uses Google Maps, and are asking about various location sharing applications. In the next year we’ll see geo become part of the assumed infrastructure, like the timestamp on a post or article, the location will be embedded.

I don’t think TAG (Twitter, Apple Google), as James puts it, will be the only location sharing services. They, along with even more used Facebook, will definitely be the general public interface to location query and sharing – but just because of this reason alone they will have to be very generic, leaving room for specialized location based services to still thrive in niches. FourSquare offers ‘gaming’ or Flickr visual media, and others for music, drinking, sight-seeing, and house finding. They will leverage TAG, or at least TG.

Apple is like the Nintendo of consumer technology – more interested in providing an integrated, compelling experience, and privacy, before full open-ness and engaging with the developer or geek. They’ll still have API’s, but not something like OpenSocial, GeoRSS, or FireEagle integration.

The iPhone, and to lesser extent Android, have been revolutionizing mobile devices. They are truly providing windows into the rest of the web of data combined with the real world. It’s natural for geopatial tools to move into these interfaces, but like any good user experience it won’t be the same capabilities you find on a desktop or browser application. The utilities will be specialized for the small screens, finger inputs, and out-and-about tasks.

For file formats, the Shapefile, unfortunately, isn’t near EOL. Too many tools only speak shapefile, and there is numerous legacy data that is still only available in Shapefile. Sites like GeoCommons offer alternate formats for all the data, but that still won’t remove this basic format. Only when there is a truly open, license free, API to File GeoDatabases (FGDB), and every off the shelf tool can talk that API or Spatialite, will Shapefiles begin disappearing out.

GeoRSS and/or KML, on the other hand, will be in every service that does anything Geo. Looking at any iPhone App review that includes KML (or doesn’t) brings up this point. Near enough everyone has Google Earth on their desktop, and Google is making big pushes in the utilization of Google Earth Plugin for in-browser virtual globes.

Visualization Technologies

To date, we’ve been stuck with either Flash or JavaScript DOM magic (and yes, Silverlight is out there too) in order to do data and geospatial visualization in the browser. As I mentioned, Google has been pushing Google Earth Browser, but also more generally they released O3D, a modern incarnation of X3D, providing for more general capabilities for creating 3D browser experiences. VRML lives!

More recently, there has been a resurgence in vector graphics that don’t rely on proprietary technologies or additional plugins. SVG and Canvas support is pretty widely supported except in the infamous Internet Explorer (which I hear is still being used even today). Examples such as ProtoVis, Cartagen and Tom Carden’s experiments definitely demonstrate that SVG is just on the cusp of being able to do a majority of compelling visualizations capabilities.

Another driver for alternative visualization platforms is the drive to mobile device integration. I don’t see Apple allowing Adobe onto the iPhone anytime soon, and even Android doesn’t have support. What types of visualization make sense is still a very open question – but whatever they are will be done with something like SVG.

Geo Data Skirmishes

James suggests that OpenStreetMap “won’t dominate”. While it won’t dominate, I disagree that it won’t continue to be extremely successful.

Google has recently moved to gathering their own data. They still have a long way to go, with many, many errors in roads, areas, addresses, and businesses and they’re using the crowd to help clean it up. Google is in fact proving the crowd-sourced model. It will be successful. Google is doing it with Google’s data, so there is no positive external benefit to that work – so to the industry it just looks like another data provider. However, with this proven model OpenStreetMap will succeed since any effort built into OSM has a positive benefit to anyone else.

However, there is a major difference in the trajectory OpenStreetMap is taking in the United States compared with Europe and other regions. In most other countries, the governments had very draconian licensing and as such OpenStreetMap was creating data from blank areas – starting from scratch, and building a community of volunteers along the way.

By contrast, in the US a vast majority of the data is free, and becoming more available everyday under the new administration. Therefore the US has a broad coverage of decent data without having first built the user community. So the difficulty here is both in building out community, as well as engaging companies that can do the same thing on their own while retaining proprietary rights to the data.

What’s fascinating, and what signals the ultimate long term success of OpenStreetMap, is that US state, local, and federal government agencies themselves are engaging with OpenStreetMap. They are investigating how to put their data directly into OSM, and possibly even re-incorporate updates and modifications back to their own infrastructures. Some are even considering using OSM toolset as their infrastructure. OpenStreetMap is going through some growing pains with respect to licensing, maintenance, and community – but all necessary steps in moving from a small cadre of hackers to a global, public project.

As we see an increase in open government, specifically driven by the US Administration’s directives, as well as other initiatives such as INSPIRE, this embrace and utilization of open platforms, and repositories, for sharing, federation, and syncronization of data will increase.

And as for augmented reality, it won’t be as big as you think… yet.

Putting aside the question about whether Apple purchased Placebase, it’s more interesting and worthwhile to consider why Apple is interested in pulling in and working with technologists like Jaron that obviously demonstrate the ability to pull together components and build a compelling, unique mapping stack.

Apple technology has increasingly added location capabilities. Address Book, Mail, and iCal all detect addresses and provide links to maps. iPhoto and Aperture understand coordinate tags and can provide maps as well. CoreLocation on the iPhone, and now in Snow Leopard, allow any developer to get the location of the device via a cascading order of geolocation: GPS, Wifi, IP, etc. Apple themselves developed the “Google Maps” iPhone application – just utilizing the Google API for tiles, location and routing.

More recently, Apple has provided for “lost iPhone” tracking via MobileMe. Enterprising uses and developers have used this for friend and family tracking services.

Looking forward, it’s clear that Apple sees the important potential of location to support and augment almost all of their applications and platforms. Like any good business, the less dependent a company can be on third-party’s for core functionality, the better. Therefore, it makes sense that Apple would investigate ways to own and control this key component.

And beyond pure business and strategy, there is a lot to gain by Apple controlling it’s own location and mapping stack. Apple obviously focuses on providing exquisitely crafted experiences. This should permeate through their maps as well. Look at the maps to your local Apple store for an example of how the cartography can fit into the look and feel of the Apple.com store interface. This same customization can exist throughout their product line. Maps applications and API can provide customized interfaces and styling.

And consider that Apple can also build out a MobileMe friend finding and family tracking service. There is now an inherent trust in Apple tools: easy to use, virus free, great for kids. These translate over to trust in sharing my location through my phone to my private family sharing portal.

So in the end, what this signals is a major shift to provide broad, consumer facing compelling geospatial technologies in a well executed interface. Apple is already responsible for enabling location-based services to cross the chasm, and is inducing the broad emergence of augmented reality. It makes perfect sense for them to ensure they control and can craft the entire experience. I’m personally glad they have someone as expert as Jaron on the team.

As more devices become location aware, social uses will continue to evolve beyond just who and what, to WHEN. Adding the temporal dimension creates new opportunities for social interaction. Learn about ways to leverage and use technology to add features at the intersection of temporal, social, and location.

The panel is quite a great group – from the inceptive MapQuest that led the way in internet mapping, to the more modern social location networks of Brightkite and the recent Twitter announced location support.

We’re now carrying the equivalent of super-computers in our pockets that have near ubiquitous connectivity, location, media capturing, and sensors. We can easily lookup businesses, cabs, and directions. But what else is next? Is it really just people checking for the closest coffee shop or hotest hookup?

Or do people want to ask “The Big Here” questions: to inquire about their location and context – the history, environment, perception, and culture that surrounds them or guides them through place. Will we have tricorders, or will mobile devices be relegated to toy devices and glorified media viewers?

This panel includes the foremost implementers and leaders in the field that are building real tools that are used by thousands and millions of people around the world. What have we learned, and where are the next steps leading us?

SXSW panels work by people voting. So please vote up the panel. Last year I moderated one of the only location-based panels, but fortunately this year there is a much wider aspect of geospatial discussions and presentations. So while you’re at it, check out the other good panels.

The geocoder was built as part of our FGDC CAP Grant to help GeoEnable Government Tabular Data and utilizes the free and open TIGER/Line street data as well as various address parsing and metaphone components for US level address parsing. Also, not everyone can call to a web-service, abide by the terms of service, or be limited by the speed and amount of geocoding queries.

The reason we’re open-sourcing it because primarily an open-source geocoder has been a sorely missing piece of the open-source geospatial stack. You have storage, analysis, rendering, geolocation, and even routing – but not geocoding, at least not in an active project way. GeoCoder::US has been around for a long-time and well built, in Perl, and despite it’s long-standing solid service at geocoder.us, it didn’t fit our needs.

So instead we worked closely with Schuyler Erle, one of the original developers of GeoCoder::US, to rebuild it in a modular way (in fact he finished it once and promptly rebuilt it again), and also in a popular, modern language, Ruby(that we happen to use as well).

We’re also hoping to engage the community in building out the Geocoder. Right now it has components for the United States – but we hope that others will add components for their countries. OpenStreetMap is coming along very well with adding both ranged, and even parcel level, address data. So a good first task would be to build out an OpenStreetMap data importer.

Feel free to check out the code on GitHub – fork it, let us know what you’re working on, any issues you run into, and how we can make the best, and open-source, geocoder out there. Look forward to more detailed posts on how we built it and how we’re using it in GeoCommons and GeoIQ.

Whether you were already serving your country, or are responding to the President’s call, share how you are delivering on change in your community.Whether it is an hour per month helping those struggling in the current economy, tutoring kids in your neighborhood every day, or anything else, we want to highlight what Americans are doing to strengthen our country.

This is very interesting on several levels. Foremost is the use of government provided (TIGER/Line) and crowd-sourced data (OpenStreetMap) in an official US Government Site. This is definitely an indicator that what were cutting edge tools have reached a critical mass to provide broad usability and appeal. Open Source? check

Looking underneath the hood, the data is provided via a KML feed (), so you can pull the data out and upload or map it however you want. Open Data? check

The site itself, Delivering on Change, is asking citizens to contribute stories and media about their personal engagement with change. This is an incredibly exciting step to ask for people to contribute to national storytelling and character. Citizen-sourced data? check

The new US administration is continually doing amazing, and open, initiatives. There is incredible excitement around Recovery.gov as a testbed for the next generation of transparency and embrace of technology and open data feeds.

Small next steps

My thoughts on interesting applications wouldn’t be complete without pointing out a couple of suggestions. While many defend the default OpenLayers controls – I personally think that implementors should take that next step and apply minor customization to better integrate the look and feel of the map controls into their site. I’ve talked before about how easy it is to change some CSS to replace the controls. Perhaps even just a darker blue background to match the White House blue in the logo. Customized?

Another, less highlighted but very important for Government sites is the integration of accessibility controls. OpenLayers supports map navigation using keyboard inputs – which provides for alternative interfaces to navigate the map. It’s not clear if this is official “508 compliant”, but at least demonstrates the potential. Accessible?

How you can help

So do you want to help make Change, especially with mapping data and technology? Come join us at the Washington, DC mapping party – currently planned for June 20 + 21, 2009 somewhere in DC (details coming soon). Or join a mapping party near you.

Each of these projects evolves the platform, adding new customization capabilities, more input types, browser support, and more. These modifications may be happening in rapid succession without the main Ushahidi development team even being aware of these changes. And the system may even be running in a remote area with little connectivity.

Traditionally, this has meant that a deployment would download a copy of the current release version, or maybe a development snapshot if there was some emminent new feature that was very useful, and then go off, make modifications – probably on a live server, and maybe email these changes back way after the event in hopes that some of the changes are accepted back into the platform. Updates to the main code base wouldn’t be easily applied to these heavily modified derivatives – so essentially every deploy is a fork of the code.

How Git can save the day

Fortunately, Ushahidi chose Git as the code repository server, although the installation instructions still suggest that you download the code. Git is meant to support just this kind of distributed workflow and collaboration.

If you’re not familiar with Git, I highly recommend checking out Git Internals. But to summarize, it is a versioning control system that is fast, efficient, has local indexes (stored in a local .git directory) and can reference any number of remote indexes to share commits, branches, and files. Where in traditional systems there is an ‘official’ host repository – in Git all repositories are equal and can quickly connect and syncronize.

What this means in a system like Usahidi is that any deployment would first just get a local clone of the official Ushahidi repository to their local system and setup and get running. If they make changes to this code they can just do a commit into their local index. In order to share this code with other developers on this same deployment they could just provide them with the Git link to this repository, or make a branch and add a deployment specific “remote” index that multiple developers could all push into.

Along the way as new code is released in the Ushahidi repository, these deployments could merge in these changes to their local branches without losing their local modifications. And conversely, local modifications could be merged and pushed back into the Ushahidi master index very easily.

Moving sideways

Now lets think about some really powerful uses of the Git architecture. Since the entire index is stored locally in a .git folder – it is easy to put an Ushahidi deploy on a USB stick or archived folder, send it around, make modifications in the field and continue to commit these changes to a local repository even while offline. Then when connectivity is restored, or the USB stick can be brought back to a networked computer, the modifications that had been made, and tracked, could be pushed back to a deployment or Ushahidi instance.

And with arbitrary remote indexes – individual deployments could share code and modifications between themselves without having to go through an Ushahidi instance. Local networks around an incident, culture, language, or feature set could easily collaborate and iterate the code. Imagine if in Gaza, the Al Jazeera instance could have shared code to other local organizations running similar systems.

I think there are even more potential applications of Git to distributed architectures that would be useful for document and database sharing that occur in fast paced situations. However, Git itself will have to work on some of the usability and interface design issues that make it a difficult tool for novice users.

Like any over-committed technologist who participates in multiple organizations, projects, hobbies, and just life in general – it’s easy to obsess on finding the best task tracking tool. I used to be a dedicated user of iGTD, but somewhere in the upcoming iGTD2 release the developer ceased releases and progress disappeared. Since then, I’ve considered Things, OmniFocus, and even simpler mechanisms like TaskPaper or hosting my own with Tracks.

None of these options really clicked with the way I wanted to organize my projects and tasks. In addition, their ability to syncronize between computers, or mobile access was limited. At best it required MobileMe account, very expensive iPhone clients and still syncronized to a single machine instance.

When Remember the Milk released their free iPhone client (requires Pro version) I went back and checked the progress of this project. I was very impressed with how far it had come from merely a simple web task to a very simple, and incredibly flexible, web-based task manager. The most powerful capability here is that my task list is decentralized and can by accessed, queried, synced, and viewed transparently and independent of interface.

RtM has embraced and followed through on the paradigm of bringing the tool closer to the user, rather than forcing the user to come to the tool. Look over the very long list of official services, GMail gadget, mobile clients for iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, & plain mobile browser. I can input new items via Twitter (which means via SMS or any Twitter client is now a task manager), Email, or even Quicksilver. Putting tasks into Remember the Milk is as easy as the thought that created the todo and I can easily flow it out of my head and into a safe tracking system. I even made a Fluid app of RememberTheMilk.com which gives me a Desktop-like app.

Sorting and fulfilling tasks follows the common GTD methodology. In addition, you can setup locations and attach tasks to these locations. Like other mobile task managers, with the iPhone app you can then lookup nearby tasks or at a specific location.

Remember the Milk even has an API, although you need to sign up for it and verify you’re using it only for non-commercial use or explain what your commercial use is. I’m thinking I need to do some integration of tasks with my home automation system as well as task completion trending.

I think that Tracks is still a good option. It’s open-source and written in Rails – so it’s easy to extend and modify. Building on Twitter or Mobile interfaces would be straight-forward and mean that I could have complete control and privacy of my items. Maybe I should put that on my “todo” list: d rtm Extend Tracks with RTM functionality

Note: Kumbuku Maziwa means “Remember the Milk” in Swahili. This was the first phrase I learned as a way to move beyond “hello” while we were hiking for several hours in the Ngong Hills outside Nairobi. The locals thought I was super-silly for asking how to say Kumbuku Maziwa, but now I’ll never forget the phrase.

my designated voting location was closed for repairs with no signs…

Buffalo, NY (link)

police were waiting to ticket me and challenge my ability to vote due to incorrect license plates

Kings Beach, CA (link)

I was sworn at by a poll worker to stop “bitchin’ and complainin’”

Tulsa, OK (link)

…everyone was in a good spirit, and the electoral officials did a wonderful job handling such a large crowd. My hats off to them…

New York City, NY (link)

Very organized and quick. Fie on computer voting machines – paper works great!

South Lyon, MI (link)

My First day voting, and went very smoothly … I’ll remember this day for the rest of my life…

Irvington, NJ (link)

Thank you Team!

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.

Remote traveling, environmentally harsh environments, lots of lugging laptops around conferences and squeezing them into airplane fold-down tables has made me look long and hard at the large selection of sub-sub-notebooks (call them $100-laptop-spinnoffs or Eee-pc clonse) that are based on the new Intel Atom processor, SSD’s, and overall small form factor.

However, despite their allure – especially the very well executed Aspire One, I just couldn’t actually find myself picking one up. Fortunately, Rui very eloquently summarized both the excellence of the Aspire One, but also why someone like me probably shouldn’t get one.

“I think that running Linux on a netbook is, ultimately, a waste of time …. the hardware is perfectly capable and there isn’t much software that I can’t get working – but because running Linux on a netbook inevitably leads to tinkering with stuff under the hood and I, for one, despite being perfectly able and willing to mess around with things, want no truck with that notion – it is precisely why I stopped using generic PCs at home nearly six years ago. … It’s fun and all, but I’d rather have an OS X-like environment where someone has gone to the trouble of polishing all the rough edges for me – it’s one of those instances where “freedom of choice” is the dumb thing to aim for. Even though Acer have done a stellar job of piecing together a coherent environment, there’s too much cruft lurking just underneath the veneer, and all sorts of things started getting on my nerves.”

You should definitely read the entire review. He covers the entire unit very well.

So Thanks – so instead I’ll be doing like him and pulling out an old iBook to take around with me. The nice thing is, if I lose the laptop or it gets stolen, I won’t really be that upset.

“In the end, it boiled down to how much time I really need to be at a computer these days, and whether or not I wanted the hassle of maintaining another one.”

Considering I’ve been continuously traveling for the last year and half – and thoroughly enjoying living off a single laptop computer (with frequent backups) – I don’t think I need to go back to the life of half-a-dozen+ computers/servers humming around my house in various states of configuration. Perhaps I’m just getting crufty.

However, what’s particularly neat about the application is that UrbanSpoon has been recording these “shakes” by location (inherent in the API call obviously) and created a great visualization showing the locations around the US over a day of “shaking”.

The heatmap essentially shows the evolving enquiry of people looking for a place to eat. There isn’t an actual time display or timeline slider to investigate – but I imagine there are interesting trends during meals, and particularly after normal eating times when people don’t have a plans on where to eat. In addition, a timezone lag that would show shaking progressing east to west.

Context mining of mobile devices, combined with geographic location – and especially via inferred geographic information instead of directly volunteered information can yield interesting trends on ambient behaviors. Imagine if UrbanSpoon could also collect the number of people in the group by detecting other repeatedly seen nearby bluetooth/wifi devices, previous meals of the day, and the ultimate destination and distance to the chosen restaurant.

Open-source in the DoD isn’t new. In fact, there have been government reports that call for the DoD to issue an official strategy for utilizing open-source. The issue is particularly unclear in recent light of the US Government being declared a sovereign entity outside of copyright law.

The objective of the prospective official guidance would be to outline both the benefits of using open-source in defense as well as provide understanding on the effects to contractors and bids. It is vital that contracts are clear on the legal implications and responsibilities of providers.

So far, this has meant that solution providers are not necessarily willing to wade through the uncharted waters and instead deliver proprietary software. In addition, there was no impetus to use open-source, since by shipping proprietary software the effect is to lock-in the provider for decades.

In addition, there needs to be a defined mechanism for how accepted open-source software that comes inside various government offices, especially defense and intelligence organizations, be re-released to the community. Currently I’ve seen a number of open-source projects taken into agencies and essentially forked since the code will never be able to be released due to concerns of potential security leaks in the code itself.

In the open-source world, a government supported promotion of its use would have dramatic effects. Looking at the current state of commercial company support for projects such as Apache, Linux, Gnome, OSGeo and more demonstrate that there is clear benefit to be gained. If the government then pushes open-source there would a huge upsurge in the support of projects and communities.

Here’s to hoping the lobbyist groups don’t head this off before it makes it to the light of day.

There is quite an underlying question here about the importance of both crowd-sourcing as well as curated, or expert data and tools. I believe moving forward there will be a lot of effort mixing the differences as well as applications that allow for the proper use and understanding of the data and published maps.

One minor point that is disappointing about Business Week’s site is the lack of external links to the organizations or tools. The only links are to Business Week’s own internal listing for businesses. In fact, besides the Digg & del.icio.us taggings, I don’t think there is a single link on the article’s page that isn’t either an internal link to Business Week, or through one of their advertisements.

It’s a compelling tale of emergent behavior by a community to leverage the tools it has at hand to enact powerful change. Too often large tools are built to be the end-all-be-all solution to perceived problems and pain points. However, the actual tried and true method of cobbling together solutions from a variety of tools, each as appropriate, leads to agile toolsets and better communication.

On a very similar note, my talk for FOSS4G 2008 in Cape Town has been accepted. Rebuilding a City through Community Participation, Neogeography and GIS will present the technical details of utilizing open-data, open-source and closed-source GIS tools, loosely coupled systems, workshops and open discussion to build cartographic visualizations. As a developer I enjoy tech-talk, I find the application based presentations much more interesting.

The presentation will use the New Orleans mapping as the case study, and while I can’t convey the “in-the-field” experiences Alan, Francine, Karen, and the others living in the city can tell, I hope I can share the experiences to inspire other communities to employ similar tactics to engage their neighbors and government.

The project is still very much a work in progress, but it’s exciting for exactly the reasons Alan gave in his talk – people are already doing the effort and passion – just help them pull the pieces together to have a great impact.

What has been most amazing about the project is that there were emergent, self-induced projects that were actively addressing many areas of capturing information. They are using Flickr for geotagged photos of historic buildings, spreadsheets of demolition permits exported as KML, and key historic maps that outline the original city planning.

The project was selected as a finalist in the NetSquared challenge, which means they were given the opportunity to come out to San Jose to meet with the other 20 projects and discuss their ideas, goals, progress, and cooperations. While the conference itself will award three top-voted projects with funding, the point of the conference and discussion isn’t solely this monetary support.

In planning for the conference, the entire discussion occurred publicly on Alan’s Blog at http://thinknola.com/post/gis. Through open discussion, numerous other projects and individuals contacted Alan to share support, data sets, ideas and future collaborations. NetSquared served as a catalyst for focusing a specific set of projects, but the longer effect is that it has brought together people that will carry the project forward and make sure everyone succeeds.

As a prototype, I used Mapufacture to combine together Francine’s Flickr photos, planning documents of school rebuilding, and the 1924 Taylor’s planning map of New Orleans. It is just a simple demonstration of what is possible using a combination of Neogeography, GIS, and community participation. The next step will be to build better tools for basic analysis and discussion. In addition, the data is open and available for other people to download for their own visualizations, analysis and collaborations.

Prototype: http://mapsomething.com/demo/neworleans