maps

Google Glass and Time Travel

February 25, 2013

A lot has been written about how Google Glass will be great for those that put on a pair. Immediate access to the world’s most powerful database, push alerts from your closest friends, a voice UI so you can look up directions without having to look down at your phone, a  camera that lets you [...]

Japanese Maps a Unique Challenge

September 25, 2012

The New York Times has a piece pointing out that the new iOS 6 cartography woes that Apple is experiencing are amplified in Japan which presents it’s own unique mapping challenges. Mainly because they are trying to jam a global mapping paradigm into Japan which has its own challenges. … cities like Tokyo are changing [...]

Digital Cartography

November 7, 2011

Eric Fischer takes large datasets and turns them into art. His flickr stream is a collection of fascinating time-series maps plotting data over time to draw out shapes which take on a greater meaning. Weather it’s a map of taxis in San Francisco or an overlay of flickr metadata on top of NYC, Eric’s creations are at once [...]

iPhone Tracker Art

May 13, 2011

Dav Yaginuma, my brother-in-law, exported his iPhone’s location data and, using the open source iPhone Tracker modified the settings to create very fine grained view of his whereabouts. I would have thought an aggregated view such as the one above would give a strong signal to where he lives and works but I guess he [...]

Location Traces as Art

March 28, 2011

Determined to teach others how much data telecom providers not only harness but retain, German Green Party politician, Malte Spitz, sued his cell phone service provider, Deutsche Telecom, for his location data. What he received was raw data of his location, signal strength, and when he was on the phone.  Working with the German newspaper Zeit, he then [...]

Driving around with lasers

March 5, 2011

I heard about this cool project from a Nokia colleague on the Maps team using some amazing hardware used by Navteq. I promised not to blog about it but I discovered today that it was shown off last year so I guess it’s OK to talk about what’s already been reported. Apparently this was all [...]

Fun with Foursquare

August 24, 2010

The visualization below was built in 48 hours using the FourSquare API. Ian Kennedy’s Foursquare by WeePlaces.com. A video of the global view, posted it on Vimeo, and posted it below.

Location, Location, Location

September 17, 2009

Great article in Ad Age about the significance of location-aware phones made the rounds yesterday. It’s not about the ‘text a Starbucks coupon when you walk by” type use case, it’s about engagement and brand utility. “Everybody’s got a website, but nobody has a mobile experience right now,” he said. “Next year, probably the end [...]

Geo-tagging without tears

November 14, 2008

If you have a camera that writes geo data to the photo’s EXIF header – flickr’s new Import EXIF GPS preference is the simplest way to geo-tag your data. I like the way the preference text is written too. Thanks very much!

Garmin to provide directions to your friends

August 24, 2008

Image via Wikipedia Congratulations to my buddy Walt Doyle! His company, publishes the Facebook app, Buddy Beacon, which you use to broadcast your physical location to your friends. They’ve got and iPhone app and, just recently, they announced a partnership with Garmin to provide an overlay to Garmin’s GPS maps so you can see where [...]