Four short links: 18 November 2009

Web Time Travel, UK Map Data Liberation, Streetview Mashups, 3D Retail

1. Memento: Time Travel for the Web -- clever versioning hack that uses HTTP's content negotiation to negotiate about the date!
2. Ordnance Survey Maps to Go Online -- The prime minister said that by April he hoped a consultation would be completed on the free provision of Ordnance Survey maps down to a scale of 1:10,000, (not the scale of a typical Landranger map set at 1:25,000). The online maps would be free to all, including commercial users who, previously, had to acquire expensive and restrictive licences at £5,000 per usage, a fee many entrepreneurs felt was too high. No word yet on license. (more details here)
3. Mapsicle -- open source Javascript library to create mashups and application on Google Streetview, from NZ developers Project X. It has been released by Google as part of the Maps Utility library.
4. Freedom of Creation Shop -- online store for 3D-printed objects. (via Makezine).

Google Shrinks Another Market With Free Turn-By-Turn Navigation

Google has announced a free turn-by-turn navigation system for Android 2.0 phones such as the Droid. Google Maps Navigation is only available in the US right now. Google's release of a navigation is huge, but not unexpected blow to Tomtom (owner of former US mapping data partner Tele Atlas (Radar post)), Nokia (owner of mapping data provider NAVTEQ), Garmin and other personal navigation devices (PNDs). That it is free will fundamentally change the industry (and sell a lot of Android 2.0 phones in the process). Assuming that Google Maps Navigation makes it onto the iPhone and Blackberry platforms it will become a race to the bottom for navigation apps in their respective app stores.

Google Maps Navigation has many impressive features aside from being free. As snipped from the main page:

• Search in plain English (watch video). No need to know the address. You can type a business name or even a kind of a business, just like you would on Google.
• Search by voice (watch video). Speak your destination instead of typing (English only): "Navigate to the de Young Museum in San Francisco".
• Traffic view (watch video). An on-screen indicator glows green, yellow, or red based on the current traffic conditions along your route. A single touch toggles a traffic view which shows the traffic ahead of you.
• Search along route (watch video). Search for any kind of business along your route, or turn on popular layers such as gas stations, restaurants, or parking.
• Satellite view (watch video). View your route overlaid on 3D satellite views with Google's high-resolution aerial imagery.
• Street View (watch video). Visualize turns overlaid on Google's Street View imagery. Navigation automatically switches to Street View as you approach your destination.
• Car dock mode (watch video). For certain devices, placing your phone in a car dock activates a special mode that makes it easy to use your device at arm's length.

The satellite view looks very sexy in this screenshot. Another advantage to this app is that Google is also making use of its business listings and (presumably) its web crawl data. In the video above MIchael is able to get directions to "the museum with the King Tut exhibit".

The use of streetview to show what turns will look like and how to find your final destination is also a real advantage. The app will sometimes know which side of the street your destination is.

This comes shortly after Google announced that it was going to be using its own mapping data in the US. This data has been derived from its own streetview trucks, satellite imagery and, increasingly, its users. Google now owns or has created almost every layer of its geostack in the US (it uses third-party satellite imagery). It's expected that they will roll out their own data across the globe. The question is hat will they do with this data? Will they continue to make it available only by their own services or will they actually release the data publicly for commercial and/or non-commercial use? Regardless of Google's ultimate decision it just became a tough day for all navigation companies out there.

Snow Leopard Is Location-Aware

Shortly after installing Snow Leopard I saw the first evidence of the new location services built into the operating system. I got the new version of Clarke, a Fire Eagle updater. After the install a window appeared that asked me if I wanted to share my location with an application. Finally!

So how is Apple doing it? The same they do on the iPhone. Apple is determining your location via Skyhook Wireless' wifi location service. It shares it via Core Location. Coca With Love has a great write-up on how to use the new features along with a sample app Where Is My Mac.

Apple is doing a good job of letting people know what sharing your location means. If you click on the help page (that purple question mark in the dialogue box) you get:

Some applications, such as System Preferences, use information about your current location to provide you with certain services and features. Your location is approximated using data from nearby Wi-Fi networks.
Information about your location is collected in a manner that doesn’t personally identify you. The information is not combined with other information about you, and is used only by the applications you authorize to obtain it. This feature is not available in all areas.
To authorize an application to use your location information, click OK. If you don’t want to authorize the use of location information, click Don’t Allow.

Unfortunately, Snow Leopard dos not give the user the ability to remove access to my location. Once i give an application permission there is no way that I can remove it. This needs to be a system setting. However, it is a step ahead of Windows 7's upcoming location features. At least the user is warned. Once you turn on location in Windows 7 any application can access that information at any time with no warning.

Currently Snow Leopard is only using it to determine your timezone. You can imagine in the future further integration with services like MobileMe (Find My iPhone gets a sibling Find My Mac). In time there will be updates to the Mac line with hardware GPSs. Just as location has become oxygen for iPhone developers (according to Skyhook's research there are over 3,000 location-aware apps in the App Store) it will start to be added to many Mac apps -- I suspect Evernote, Omnifocus and the Twitter client du jour will be among the first to match their iPhone clients.

Four short links: 17 September 2009

Involuntarily Opened Geodata, Sense Organ, Doc Vis, 3D Open Source Bodies

1. Wikileaks Now Holds UK Postcode Database -- the UK does not have open geodata in the way that we know it. A state-owned enterprise, Ordnance Survey, is responsible for maintaining all sorts of baseline data and they charge (through the nose) for that data. This is the release of 1,841,177 post codes, geographic boundaries, and more. Postcodes in the UK are far more useful than US ZIP codes--they identify a handful of houses, rather than a few thousand houses.
2. My New Sense Organ -- a strap with buzzers and a compass, so you always have physical reminder of orientation. For people like me who can get lost putting on pants in the morning, this would be a godsend. (via Slashdot)
3. Saving is Obsolete -- EtherPad adds a Wave-like replay feature to help you see the history of a document.
4. Open Source 3D People -- incredible software to design realistic 3D faces and bodies. (via glynmoody on Twitter)

Four short links: 14 September 2009

NoSQL, Gov 2.0 Videos, Linux Conf, Geodata Grump

1. WTF Is A Supercolumn? -- Cassandra is a NoSQL database, a triplestore that scales superwell. Because it's not the usual relational thing we're accustomed to, the language can be a barrier to learning: ColumnFamily, SuperColumns, and more. This post explains what's what, with examples. (via joshua on Delicious)
2. Gov 2.0 Summit Videos -- When I grow up, I want to be Clay Shirky, Tom Steinberg, and Carl Malamud. Some videos are up, others coming up soon--stay tuned for Carl's, which received the only standing O of the show. [updated with link to Carl's talk when it was released]
3. linux.conf.au Schedule Posted -- bring the thunda down unda in 2010. The schedule was just released.
4. Transport for London Does Not Like the Ordnance Survey -- an Official Information Request yielded the Transport for London response to an Ordnance Survey "strategy consultation". The OS should appoint an independent body to review their licence documents and pay them based on the number of words deleted. Sound advice too--OS have crippled the geospatial industry in the UK by charging for their (admittedly finely-detailed) data. (via mattb on delicious)

Four short links: 10 September 2009

Hacktivism, Gov 2.0 Futures, Local Geodata, Cassandra Terminology

1. A Political Startup (Aaron Swartz) -- inside account of his grassroots activism efforts, with clever strategies he used to get the outcomes he wanted. A couple months later, frustrated that Norm Coleman wouldn’t drop his spurious legal challenges against Al Franken being named a Senator, we started NormDollar.com. We asked people to donate a dollar each day Norm Coleman didn’t drop out of the race, money we’d spend electing progressive candidates. It was featured on Hardball and throughout the political press. We also videotaped Norm’s donors’ reactions when we told them about the program. But my favorite was when we presented Norm with a big novelty check for him to sign, representing all the money he’d raised for progressives. Now we had money too.
2. What Gov 2.0 Is Making Me Think (Quinn Norton) -- two short and razor sharp observations on Gov 2.0. Like stages of grief, we need to figure out the stages of internet integration for institutions. I suspect grief is in there.
3. Northland Regional Council Maps in Koordinates -- a staggeringly clueful act by local government in New Zealand, releasing a pile of imagery and map layers under CC-BY license. As we hear about national governments' Gov 2.0 efforts, it's worth remembering many more local governments there are--with less money, a different revenue model, and no easy way to reach them all.
4. Ten Second iPhone Tethering -- just did this, and it is awesome. The "download" link takes you to a list of countries, which takes you to a list of telcos, which downloads a config file that gives your phone an "okay to tether" network config for that telco. Some report losing ability to MMS, which I for one won't notice! (via many, including Engadget)

Four short links: 17 August 2009

1. How Twitter Works in Theory (Kevin Marks) -- very nice summary about the conceptual properties of Twitter that let it work. Both Google and Twitter have little boxes for you to type into, but on Google you're looking for information, and expecting a machine response, whereas on Twitter you're declaring an emotion and expecting a human response. This is what leads to unintentionally ironic newspaper columns bemoaning public banality, because they miss that while you don't care what random strangers feel about their lunch, you do if its your friend on holiday in Pompeii.
2. Army To Test Wiki-Style Changes to The 7 Manuals -- In early July the Army will conduct a 90-day online test using seven existing manuals that every soldier, from private to general officer, will have the opportunity to read and modify in a “wiki”-style environment. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. MobWrite -- converts forms and web applications into collaborative environments. Create a simple single-user system, add one line of JavaScript, and instantly get a collaborative system. (via Simon Willison)
4. Open Data Standards Don't Apply To The Military -- It’s that last particular point that should be the most disturbing to the administration. Apparently all geospatial data being developed and utilized by the USAFA would be unusable without a sole software vendor. This causes concern over broader interoperability with other agencies and organizations, access to important national information, and archivability and retrievability. Expose of the single-source "standard" vendor lockin in US military geosoftware and geodata. (via johnmscott on Twitter)

Waze: Make Your Own Maps in Realtime

Waze (blog) is using mobile phones as sensors to collect data. The Israeli-based start-up (though now with offices in SF) is relying on users to create its maps, to report realtime traffic and to teach it how to route from place A to place B. Along their drives the user gobbles points for every action. Use the app and gain recognition within the Waze community. The company is doing all of this through its free turn-by-turn navigation apps (sorry, iPhone and Android only for now). This is exactly what I've expected to see from the Tele Atlas/Tomtom and NAVTEQ/Nokia acquisitions, but that hasn't happened yet in either case.

Whenever you use the Waze mobile app you are contributing to their data store and their community. You can use the app to find an address, a business or to store favorite locations. The map view will display traffic conditions. Upon selecting a destination Waze will give you directions. Right now those directions are not necessarily going to be very good. So they ask that you leave the app on and just drive to your location - Waze will learn your secrets to generate a better route next time. As you drive to a destination you will get relevant alerts (hazards, speed traps) and be given points based on your distance.

The map above was generated with just one week of driving data in SF. The base maps are all from the TIGER data set, but that set is old and not always kept up-to-date. Here is the same view on Google Maps.

This is a Portland part of the map as seen on the Waze site in an admin interface. Though Waze uses TIGER data (Radar post) and mobile data as its base it still needs human input. Any place you see a 6 that is a road that needs to be verified on the website. Sometimes you can just add the direction (like in the pink spots) other times the fixes need to be more advanced. Waze has promoted several community members to be area managers. These super users can approve changes and fixes to the map. On the Waze website you can watch a realtime stream of alerts from users. The Live Map shows cars driving around in cities.

One of the first questions that many geo geeks ask of Waze is what about whether they could use OpenStreetMap's data. CEO Noam Bardin is wary of the OSMs licensing and would rather start from scratch. Waze definitely intends commercialize their maps and does not want to have any issues with that. He views the two projects as fundamentally different. He wants Waze to be a realtime mapping data source that includes road closures and traffic (whether or not OSM participants would agree that they aren't realtime is another story). The choice to not use OSM data is not difficult in the US where TIGER data provides a great free resource for geo apps. However Waze intends to go to Europe, where each country has different rules governing their geodata (one of the reasons OSM began their). When Waze does go to Europe they will have to consider using OSM data and they hope that the licensing is compatible by then (or they may have to use a more costly service like Tele Atlas or NAVTEQ).

Waze is sure to raise some privacy-oriented eyebrows. However, the company is currently storing all traces anonymously, so similar Google and Loopt they are quickly dropping identifiable data and not storing history. This is another fundamental difference between OSM and Waze. OSM is being created by volunteers. Waze's maps are being created by users who are trading their location in return for a service (routing, search and traffic). Waze will be storing aggregate information about its users. On your Dashboard page there are stats on your usage (miles driven, alerts) and (coming soon) data (times) on your daily commute.

As mentioned Waze plans on making revenue off of the maps. As Bardin says in an email: "Waze plans on making revenue off the data set it is building - real time maps, traffic and road information. In the very near future Waze will be releasing an API which will be free for non commercial use and will work out a revenue share for commercial applications."

There are many companies that are aimed at the realtime market. These companies are collecting people's thoughts, tweets, actions and environmental data. Waze is the first that is trying to draw a map in realtime and publish it out to the web. By offering a valuable (and improving) mobile service in exchange for data Waze has the opportunity to create a new type of map. I expect Waze to get some competition from Tele Atlas/Tomtom and NAVTEQ/Nokia. However, those multi-billion dollar acquisitions with their huge hardware base have not made moves this bold. I expect them to pay a lot of attention to (and learn from) Waze's progress.

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Playnice: The Unofficial Latitude for the iPhone

Last week Google launched Latitude for the iPhone as a web app. They were held back from releasing a native app by Apple's overbearing application approval process. However, this doesn't matter that much as all location apps are currently hamstrung by Apple's lack of background location updates. Luckily for iPhone customers there are developers out there trying to solve this problem.

Nat Friedman has released playnice on Github, a piece of code that will let any MobileMe & iPhone customer update their Google Latitude account. The PHP script is designed to be run as a chron job for scheduled updates. To use it you must activate the Latitude gadget on iGoogle and turn on the Find My iPhone feature on your MobileMe subscription. Playnice uses Tyler Hall's Sosumi code from Github (Radar post) and there is no reason that similar code couldn't be written to update Loopt, Whrrl, Brightkite or any other location service hamstrung by the iPhone's lack of a location service. Since Latitude has only released a Read-only API (Radar post) the writing of your location to Latitude was done via screenscraping. [Disclosure: I was given a one-year subscription to MobileMe by Apple]

I find it silly that Google was asked not to release a native app. When you use Latitude for the iPhone in the browser it does detect your location and can display your friends' locations. It is almost the same as a native application.

On the other hand I have to marvel that they were able to release it in a browser and I view as a technical triumph. Getting the user's location from the browser was not possible 6 months ago. The fact that it is now possible to access location every modern mobile browser (Fennec, Opera, Safari, Android), desktop browser (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, IE8) plus Windows 7 and Snow Leopard is huge. Location and maps no longer demand a native app to be useable so perhaps Apple's application approval team is just ahead of the times and is purposefully trying to drive app developers to the browser.

[via Hacker News]

Four short links: 24 June 2009

Open Source Kids, Crowdsourcing Lessons, Flickr Secrets, Hadoop Spatial Joins

1. 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.
2. 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 a game. "Any time that you’re trying to get people to give you stuff, to do stuff for you, the most important thing is that people know that what they’re doing is having an effect," Willison said. "It’s kind of a fundamental tenet of social software. … If you’re not giving people the ‘I rock’ vibe, you’re not getting people to stick around." (via migurski on delicious)
3. 10+ Deploys/Day: Dev & Ops Cooperation at Flickr -- John Allspaw and Paul Hammond's talk from Velocity. You tell any mainstream company in the world "10 deploys/day" and you'll be met with disbelief.
4. Reproducing Spatial Joins using Hadoop and EC2 -- bit by bit the techniques for emulating important operations from trad databases are being discovered and shared in the new database scene. (via straup on delicious)

Before and After Shots of Google's Iran Maps

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 day Google greatly improved their map coverage of Iran via user contributions through their Mapmaker program. These user contributions were applied just a few weeks ago. Here are before and after screenshots of two Iranian cities. The before shot was taken on September 22, 2008; the after shots were taken on May 18, 2009.

Mashhad (Before and After)

Tabriz (Before and After)

Four short links: 18 June 2009

Weaker Copyright Good, YQL.gov, GeoSPARQL, Happiness

1. Harvard Study Finds Weaker Copyright Protection Has Benefited Society (Michael Geist) -- Given the increase in artistic production along with the greater public access conclude that "weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society." This is consistent with the authors' view that weaker copyright is "uambiguously desirable if it does not lessen the incentives of artists and entertainment companies to produce new works." (read the original paper)
2. Using Public Data for Good With the Power of YQL -- The first part is a new batch of YQL tables providing data on the U.S. government, earthquake data, and the non-profit micro-lender Kiva. The second part is an incredibly easy way to render YQL queries on websites. After all, what good is data that no one can see?
3. GeoSPARQL -- RDF meets geo goodness. SELECT ?s ?p ?o WHERE { ?s gn:name "Dallas" . ?s ?p ?o } (via the geowanking mailing list)
4. How To Be Happy in Business -- this Venn diagram makes me happy. (via Ned Batchedler)

Mapumental: Time & Scenicness in Maps

MySociety has given us a sneak peak at Mapumental, a map app that lets you pivot on travel-time, "scenicness", and house-price in the London area. Just enter a postal code and if you're looking for a home in the area Mapumental should be very helpful to you. It is an update to a previous foray into temporal maps (you can try it out on the embed in a Radar post of mine).

The map has a slider to control each of the dimensions. The time slider lets you choose how long you want to commute to get to the desired postal code by 9AM. This is a big change from the original map, which let you . The scenic slider lets you determine how nice of a place you want to live in. The housing price map The map above is quite depressing. It shows the areas you could live that will take you less than an hour and a half to get to work, has housing available for 750K GBP and is just barely scenic at level 3. Your options open up a lot if you ignore scenicness for this zipcode.

To make a useful and useable map with this many controls and data points is difficult. The base maps come from Open Street Map. The travel data (rail, bus, ferry) comes from Traveline (National Public Transport Data Repository); it's all based on a Tuesday in October, 2008. The map tiles, sliders and overall UI was inspired built by Stamen Design. MySociety's travel-time maps were pioneered by Chris Lightfoot.

The most unique dataset included in Mapumental is "scenicness". The data was gathered by user votes in the web app Scenic Or Not. As Tom told me, "We have 173,816 1*1 km squares voted on at least 3 times each, by different people. We're 80% of the way to a full dataset. Data comes from Geograph."

They've got more planned for it like making it public, allowing for alternate arrival and departure times, and allowing for multiple destinations to allow for couples. Those are all great additions, but what I would really like to see is either open-sourced code or an API so say that other geographic areas could have this functionality. How would this change the real estate market? If you could see this style of map for any industrialized area would it change the way you think about your quality of life and what it costs. Sounds like a great task for real estate sites Zillow or Trulia, alternately it's something that Walkscore could tackle.

Right now Mapumental is in Beta, but if you want early access Tom Steinberg sent a hint to BoingBoing: "Beta's private at the moment but we're handing out invites in exchange for declarations of love." Send your missives here. To learn even more about the project check out the short video after the jump.

(via Cory @ Boingboing)

Updated: Properly attributed Stamen's role on the project

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GeoData Explorations: Google's Ever-Expanding Geo Investment

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 visualizations of their internally gathered geodata. Here's a round-up of them.

The image above was released on December 9th. It shows how much of the US is available via Street View. According to the post Street View imagery increased 22 fold around the world in 2008.

The dark image above was released on December 11th. It highlights the parts of the world that are being mapped on Google's Mapmaker by users (Radar post). Mapmaker is now live in 164 countries. According to the map it has gained the most traction in Africa and the Indian sub-continent. The Google Mapmaker team has released timelapse videos of Mapmaker building cities on the Mapmaker YouTube Channel. I've embedded one after the jump.

This final image shows all the points described by GeoRSS and KML all over the world. It was shown at Where 2.0 2007 by Michael Jones (video). Unsurprisingly, this image and the Mapmaker image show opposite data density concentrations.

In some more GeoData Explorations posts this week I will look at OSM vs Google and some surprising trends in KML.

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