everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: maps

  • Driving around with lasers

    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 the buzz at CES 2010 but I was in Finland and Mapping isn’t really my field so I didn’t know it was public. Any excuse to blog about a car mounted with lasers!

    The image above is the output from a specially equipped car that scans the road and surrounding buildings with an array of 60 lasers on it’s roof. Think of it as an über-version of the standard camera cars you see mapping the streets today. It’s insane. Here’s how it’s described in a post by CNet.

    One big part is a LIDAR (light detection and ranging) system that uses lasers to construct 3D maps of the world out of a sea of data points. The company boasts that its True system uses 64 rotating lidar lasers, captures 1.5 million 3D data points per second from features as far as 150 meters away and works even when the data collection vehicle is traveling at highway speeds.

    There’s more that can be done with the hardware than what you see above but I better not go into that. Rest assured, it’s mind-blowing. I was joking with a colleague, combine the plane and landscape database from the Flight Simulator guys at Microsoft with the street view database from Navteq and you’ve got a hyper-realistic gaming environment.

    If you want to learn more about LIDAR and the technology about it, there’s a talk by two folks from Navteq at the upcoming Where 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, CA in April.

  • Fun with Foursquare

    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

    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 of next year, if you pull your phone out and you’re in the Hilton hotel and it doesn’t tell you information about the Hilton, either your phone is broken or the Hilton’s broken. If you, as a business, own a location, you’ve got an interesting shot at reaching your customer.”

    and

    The promise lies in the realization that mobile isn’t just an ad play but an extension of the services and products businesses already offer. And location is one of the most important contextual clues a mobile phone can provide. “Mobile marketing will move beyond promotions and advertising,” said Kenneth Parks, senior VP-managing director at Digitas in Stanford, Conn. “It’ll be about mobile services that might be marketing but they’ll feel like services.”

    and my favorite, from Dennis Crowley of Foursquare,

    “There’s no such thing as information overload but filter failure,” said Mr. Crowley. “Location is one of those big filters we’ve been missing in a lot of stuff.”

    Effective filters are topic near and dear to my heart and location is gearing up to be one of the best vectors we have to making this social/mobile web thing work.

  • Geo-tagging without tears

    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

    no original descriptionImage 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 your online friends are in the physical world.

    No more calling your friends for directions to the party. Just have them check in on Buddy Beacon and you can get instant turn-by-turn directions!

    Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

  • Realtime Map Tracking

    Maybe it’s the air traffic controller in me but there’s something oddly compelling about watching little dots move across the screen when you know they represent objects in the physical world.

    TechCrunch posts about Bill from BitGravity is streaming his driving trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles over a live video stream showing the traffic out his front dashboard and a Google Maps tile showing his position as he drives down Interstate 5. He’s just south of Tracy as I write this so tune in now if you want to see it live.

    And tomorrow morning, before I head over to pick up my wife and kids as they return from Japan, I will fire up Google Earth and use Aeroseek to follow Northwest Flight 28 as it soars over the Pacific and make sure they’re coming in on time.

  • Grim Visualizations : Crime Mashups 2.0

    We all remember the Chicago Crime Map which took Chicago police reports and overlayed it on top of Google Maps. For many, this was their first exposure into the world of mashups and to a large extent opened everyone’s eyes to the benefits of opening up your data. That was 2005. Now the UED crowd has taken a shot at the concept and are starting to publish their own versions:

    Oakland Crimespotting by Stamen Design
    LA Times Homicide Map

  • Zillow Heat Maps

    zillowheatmap.jpg
    I was just checking out Zillow’s new redesign and noticed something I hadn’t seen before. The Zillow Heat Map layer shows you relative price per square foot over a region. Check the box in the upper-right of the map view and zoon out to city level to see it in action.

    Was that there before or is this new?

    zillow.com

  • Tag Maps

    Introducing Tag Maps, the latest shiny toy out of the Yahoo! Research Labs. Basically they’ve pulled in the geo-coding information from flickr and extracted tags to clump together a people-powered view of the world on Yahoo Maps. Be sure to also check out Night Explorer and Trip Explorer for different views of the world.

    Badges you say? But of course!