Steve’s Little world

1. Google releases a Contacts API - hooray to having a way to get all my contacts in and out of google apps

2. Firefox 3 really is faster and pretty nice looking as well.

3. Busy playing with PostGIS, Java, and some JavaScript - demo should be here relatively shortly for new stuff coming in our 4.3.1 JS API.

4. I am predicting that MS is gonna pull out of the deal and that this was all a ploy to decimate Yahoo!

5. I really hope the rumors about Apple taking the lock down route to being the gatekeeper to iPhone apps is false but somehow I don’t think it is. How come Apple keeps getting these free passes - meet the new boss, same as the old boss

6. I miss Sean’s posts about birds

7. My birthday is next Sunday - so you better get the Wii and various games in the mail soon.

Last night I went to the WCA LBS SIG to hear about Yahoo! Fire Eagle - here is my transcript from the session. Overall the take home is that Yahoo is building a public store of your location that gives you the ability to grant permission to applications to update and query your location. In other words creating a REST API to push your location to their service - they they standardize the location as best they can - then provide a REST api to query for GeoJSON or GeoRSS for your location.

Very exciting possibilities -Yahoo has taken on the task of trying to store location information in a public way. OpenSocial is trying to build the Social Graph but not on a single server - Fire Eagle is trying to do this on a central server for people’s location. So instead of being distributed data sits on their servers.

How are they going to make money with this? Either Mor was being coy or Yahoo is being coy or they really haven’t figured it out. I can see 3 ways

1. Since you need a YahooID to use it you may then start using other Yahoo services
2. They eventually start charging people to store their location (unlikely)
3. They start accessing people’s location data in an anonymous way to aggregate location information to provide unique services - such as feedback to advertisers about how many Fire Eagle users actually ended up at the event.

Should be interesting all the way around

and now the transcript…

---

FireEagle
Excellent presenter with great presentation zen
Lots o cool things you can do when you know where people are

Problems
1. Hard to capture where people are - lots o methods and even same method are different on different platforms
35 ways to find your location talk is recommended

2. Locations are hard to interpret. How to get from cell tower to lat,long and then from that to human place names is also hard [not for us]

3. It’s hard to abstract - which hierarchical level do you aggregate to, city state…

4. Location is hard to handle - have to securely store it, have to query it,

5. Hard to manage - mostly legal issues especially when you deal with different countries and states

6. Hard to share - disses symbian C++ and cross Nokia development

Implications
first casuallity is the location based web
Second - location-enhanced social networks. Claims loopt suffers from platform issues but he doesn’t understand loopt - commiunication is neighborhood dependent
FireEagle should increase the number of ppl in the network

The Big Idea  - share your location online
Store and make sense of your location
Share the location with apps and services
While  maintaining control over data and privacy

Available soon but no time table

Fire Eagle sets up a service that acts to create a many to many between location capture and location services. Fire eagle is about managing permissions and also does a cross walk between input location to a standardized hierarchy

??So how does yahoo make money

3 step into the API
Authentication
Update
Query - there are different levels of accuracy that users can allow from exact to country

Uses OAuth for authentication
The application never knows the YahooID of the user
To update you send the REST request with the key and the location and get an ok response
To query you send the key and you get the user location at the proper level authorized for your app by the user

??How do I identify which user I want info for if I don’t know the ID

Using either GeoRSS or GeoJSON as the response to the query

??But an app is either allowed or not allowed but not on a user by user basis

They made a big deal about your own data and privacy

??Does Hide Me throw away the data coming in or just not show it in a query

In case you might have missed it - Android (gPhone) apps are being written in Java. I am not sure if this is the only way but all their demos are in Java and all the util libraries they have created are in Java as well.

Their LBS/GPS API has hooks in it for KML as the Mock GPS. It also has hooks for pulling in Google maps directly. Bet they make it easy cheezy to get a map up and running with a built in GPS.

Better spark up Eclipse (how long until …

Back to moving stuff to the Hayes Mansion for the big show.

This art installation is awesome! Hat tip to San Jose Merc for pointing it out

So the other event I will be talking/helping at the Community Day at SAP TechEd ‘07, Las Vegas. The idea is that I will give a short (10-15 minutes) presentation on mapping and using the deCarta API and then we all proceed to hack adding maps to SAP applications. Our javascript api and XML over HTTP services are easy enough that I think having SAP experts with laptops around means we could build some cool applications.

Hats off to James G. and Craig C.  for the invite and if you are not a developer in the deCarta developer zone please sign up before the conference. Since we give out free access to our partner data for your development there is an approval process for signing up. Turnaround on sign up usually takes 12 hours but it might take a day or two.

Please excuse the current experience of the current dev zone, it will be updated to something new and shiny in the next couple of weeks.

If you haven’t seen it go do a google route RIGHT NOW! After the route is finished start dragging points in the middle and watch the route recalculate right before your very eyes. Here is a sample if you don’t want to type places in. This has to be one of the best AJAX things I have ever seen.

You wanna start taking bets now on how long until it does traveling salesman type optimizations or tying directly into the traffic feeds or tie ins to google news?

If I were a small or medium business that needed maps and directions with some custom points of interest - I would be knocking in Googles door for an intranet license. How much do you think it would costs to set up this kind of infrastructure for myself and get it to work some time in this century.  Think about the value in this.

Oh yeah, and one more point for all us developer types , the bar has been raised yet again for what users will come to expect as “standard”. I can see the discussion now - “When I move break point in the electrical line around I want to see the power reroute in real time.”

I don’t think I even have to mention what this means for ArcGIS Server w/ network analyst or even on desktop ArcGIS…

Hat tip to Brian Flood for pointing it out. As he said (paraphrasing) - if they can do with web service calls what can they not do?

Now this is definitive, witness the RESTlike urls…

http://sucks-rocks.com/rate/GeoServer/MapServer/ArcIMS/ArcGIS+Server/FeatureServer 

Tagzania gave a very funny overview of the conference

My boring talk

Geo ERV and GIS Vista - basically setting up mobile mapping units and they are hiring. They are doing good work with setting up strategic disaster mapping services

Hacking Google StreetView - man these folks are good. They basically used someone elses steps to hack the service and they did things like show the images of street van that has a GPS unit attached or add the streetview pictures to upcoming.com for events - most excellent and funny

Geotudes - they want to divide the world into cells and use it rather than lat and long. They think of this as a permanent address for all spaces on earth.

FreeEarth - Poly9 Free earth -buit in flash with a free api great demo of all the places using it.

NNDB.com - part of rotten.com

GPS Drift - artist describing how we deal place

Ortho production - Marc P from #planetgs gives a talk about the process of creating orthorectified photos. Quick and just demonstrating what needs to be done

Steve Echtamen - doing a start up of location based aggregation content, media streaming, and handheld portable devices.

<aside>Man there are a lot of Steves at this conference </aside>

Had to go to meet with the family….

See you on the other side.

Cool find from Chris Heilmann at the WhereCamp. A little app that when installed allows you to just start typing the name of the app you want to lauch. It goes to the registry (sorry, windows only) and looks for apps with the letters you have started to type. No more mousing to the start menu or anything. Freeckin shweet!

Launchy: The Open Source Keystroke Launcher for Windows

So the biggest benefit about being at WhereCamp so far is getting a USB stick from crshhmidt (James has already covered some of it). Man he has packed a great bunch on a small space. It is a great way again to get started. Ahh the riches of the OpenSource world. He has written featureserver to be a great and simple API to mapping data in a ton-o-formats ™. He has a demo that both publishes and accepts KML. It has a great REST API for featureserver which allows you to say /<layer>/<feature> or  /layer/feature/with a bunch of parameters.

Another cool feature is the ability to get the featureserver to give back attribute data in html format. So if you have shapefile or other geodata source being served through featureserver your url ends in .html and you get all the attribute data for those features in a standard html page. Can you say hello google bot indexing all your attribute data. You can control the template behind the page and get it to point to the data source. This is great for “show me all the data sets which talk about Central Park”.

The configuration files are just plain text files with a structure similar to an apache config file - which is easy cheezy to understand.

Hats off to Chris for putting together a sweet little get going in an easy way  dem/application on a stick