Did they drop TeleAtlas too early

So I want to follow up on the nuclear bomb dropped on the geospatial industry – but instead I want to focus on what James pointed out about spatial accuracy. I think Goog made the switch to their own data too soon. My wife has used Google religiously for getting driving directions for a couple of years now and always been happy with it.  In the past week it has gotten her lost 4 times – she has now switched to MapQuest or Bing.  I tried to use it for directions here in the bay area and it took me into the East Bay to get to somewhere on the Peninsula. I went straight back to TeleNav (ATT Navigator) and had no problems.  Google’s routing data sucks right now and there are no two ways about it.  This is not due to bad algorithms since they used to work great on TeleAtlas (TA) data.

I know there would have been huge $ implications for using TA data for turn by turn navigation routing (they charge a lot more for that “use case”) but Google has a bazillion dollars. So I think there are two reasons why they did it.

1. They think they are smarter than everyone else and their fairy dust network would get them up to speed fast enough.

2. Marc Prioleau had the idea that perhaps TA got wind of what was going down and gave them an ultimatum. Sign a contract or we will never let you do turn by turn.

If it was number one then I think they switched too early.

Getting directions wrong has a lot more serious consequences than giving me the wrong search results. I only need once or twice and I am switching providers. I don’t care if it is free – directions are either right or wrong.

If I am lucky, wrong wastes my time, if I am not so lucky it can put me in danger.  Yeah yeah, say all you want about you get what you pay for – but that is not a way to keep users on your service.There are a bunch of other “free services” out there that I could use but I don’t because they are worthless.  Google dominated in search because it gave the best results and then inertia set in. They may not be so lucky here – wrong driving directions are useless.

I hope those fairies are working overtime correcting their street network…

Btw, poor TeleNav – guess they picked a bad time to stop being a privately owned firm.

Why isn’t this file in the ESRI geoprocessing help- NAD to WGS geographic projections

The files listed here should be included in the geoprocessing help for geog. transformations. So if you are out there doing a projection from NAD27 to WGS84 and you don’t know which of the 11 or so different transformations to pick please come back to this link to find the link to the help page that links to the word doc that explains why use which transformations. Got it? Good

http://support.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=knowledgebase.techArticles.articleShow&d=21327

The CP-Pack rocks Open Street Map (OSM)

So the kids, some of their friends, and I did the recent OSM street mapping party for San Jose.

We had a phenomenal  time – I highly recommend taking your kids if one of the parties comes to your neighborhood. You can discuss crowd-sourcing, GPS units, mapping, landmarks, and all sorts of fun hiking around. The CloudMade staff were awesome and basically my kids got one on one tutorials from the staff and each child got their own GPS unit.

So now my kids edits will live in OSM forever. All the fountains, landmarks, memorials, footpaths that end in fountains, museums, and public toilets (need to change styles to see it) are due to my kids!!!!! How frickin cool is that. And the great part is that my kids can download the data again and use it for whatever they wish.

http://maps.cloudmade.com/?lat=37.337664&lng=-121.892087&zoom=17&styleId=1045

Promise - they were really having fun

Schedule for LinuxFest NW is up

Hey all – if you were planning on attending LinuxFest NW my presentation is on Saturday afternoon. The whole two days are free and there looks to be some great talks. If you are in the area you should come on by.

Oh yeah and I will be giving one of the 4 hour workshops on the first day of GeoWeb 2009. I am bummed that Mansour will be giving his workshop at the same time as me since I now expect 2 of the original 5 people to show up for my workshop. The other reason it bums me out is because I really wanted to go to his session.

I know James will be there but who else from the GIS posse is planning on attending?

I am not going to where but I am going to WhereCamp. Are there any other events people are really looking forward to attending?

What does the beginning of freedom look like

Take a look at this image and stand in awe -

This is the beginning of freedom for me. The astute members in the group will notice I am rocking windows in VirtualBox ( a FOSS virtualization application, so this might bring Sean some joy) on my Ubuntu x64 8.10 machine (more to follow on building the machine later). ArcGIS Desktop runs as fast as I would expect on a normal windows box. But you know what this means to me – I don’t have to mess up my registery, I can use rsync natively to sync files among my server and desktop, I am getting closer to running my rig the way I want – FOSS baby.

As for VirtualBox, I can not reccomend it enough – small download, easy to install, runs on windows, linux, mac, and solaris, can host a ton-o-guest type of OSs, easy to run, very lightweight, can run vmware images, has good docs, supported by a large corporation that cares about virtualization, it’s free, and it’s open source.

I can now keep all my ArcGIS + Visual Studio stuff in a virtual machine and not have it bog down my laptop or make my desktop machine windows only. Hip Hip Hooray!

[UPDATE - instructions on moving to vBox 2.1  on Ubuntu 8.1, which among other things support 64-bit guests on 32-bit hosts – yeah baby

A bachelor for a week

So the smoking hot wife (aka The Queen) and the F1s are back on the East Coast visiting family for the week. I go out to join them next week but until then I am leading the bacheloresque life style. This is the first time I have been alone in the house for more than a day since my first child was born many moons ago. I have had plenty of alone time on business trips but never just time alone in my neighborhood in my house. Yesterday the pup and I took a beautiful hike into the Santa Cruz mountains.

But the point of this post is that I have had more time with Hulu than I care to admit and here is my verdict…

Serenity Firefly = suckage (sure to get flames on that one)

Chuck = Fun though a bit too predictable. Besides, being the sentimental one it bugs me that Chuck and Sarah don’t just hook up and get on with it. I hate this we both love each other yet are both too scared to do anything about it – bleh.

A hanukah gift to all my GIS homies – how do you do on the SFGate geography quiz?

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/18/TR041480K3.DTL

To all my Heeb tribe members – a great Kachunkah number from the brother of Sasha Baron Cohen (Borat). I love the song I am not so down with the portrayal of the chasidim – though they do know how to party

Update – I removed the embedded video because it was removed by request – here is the link to the song.

http://newlinerecords.com/hanukkah/video.html

Any other Hulu or Musical recommendations from the loyal listeners?

The map discussion on a list apart

So there is a great article on “A List Apart” about making maps without using the G or the Y (hat tip to the map room). It does a nice job introducing some of the open source players in the market. I put a small comment in the discussion about using deCarta (caveated it with a warning that it is a blatant product pitch) and there was a response. This blog post should serve as a way for people to give feedback if they want on my comments or about getting started with deCarta services. I did not want to hijack the discussion there with a big discussion with deCarta – so it was not that I was trying to drive traffic here – I was just trying to not dilute the discussion on their original post.

Could it be true – ArcWeb Services Discontinued?

Little birdies have been telling me that ArcWeb Services is no more – folded into other services and the staff dispersed. There is no more purchase options on their page – only renew. Well, Nature Valley and all you other Arcweb Service customers, I could always recommend another service that is fast, stable, and scalable. You can start for free and then move on to exactly the same API when you are ready to make some bling. Same API whether we host it or if you bring it behind the firewall; novel concept – ain’t it.  If you are interested go ahead and contact me or sales@decarta.com

If you care about my schedule

If you want to meet up with me here is some of the things I will be going to in the near future:

1. The web 2.0 mapping and social network meetup in Menlo Park – This should be fun with Mapfacture, remapper, and mashed life giving presentations

2. Mashup Camp at the Computer History Museum -  had a great time last year and lookin forward to going again. Love the lightning round when you get to see all the cool apps people are making but it is also nice to hear the big boys talk about where they will push the enterprise.

3.  CTIA in Vegas – I am going to Mobile Jam beforehand. I really don’t like Vegas but it will be fun to be floor for this extravaganza. I will be working the booth so stop by.

4. Web 2.0 Expo – I will be there in the Tele Atlas booth looks to be a great floor as well. Come on over for a chat. I will be showing some of the demos I put together.

Farther out I am planning on attending Where and  for sure going to be at WhereCamp, perhaps Location Intelligence and Extend08.

Have I mentioned that I love living in the Valley…

Yahoo! FireEagle [or is it Fire Eagle]

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