Mutual respect

Found this on the Google Earth Blog by Frank Taylor reporting on the Where 2.0 Conference last month:

Ordinance Survey - the last talk from Ian Holt was - intriguingly amusing. The last organization I expected here was Ordinance Survey from the UK. They have been universally panned by most of the Where 2.0 generation of geospatial technologists. The primary reason being that OS refuses to let anyone use their mapping data without their collecting a license fee. I guess they are trying to improve their image because they came here saying they will be offering an "open source" project. Only it wasn't clear how this would change anything. Ian demonstrated an application which amusingly lets you compare the OS data to "other" maps (specifically Google Maps) to show how the OS data is so much better. For those of you who don't know, a former OS technologist named Ed Parsons left there and is now one of the top dogs on the Google Geo team.

I guess the Ordinance Survey is our National Mapping Agency. What a poorly informed and condescending piece - "the Where 2.0 generation of geospatial technologists" yuck.

I wonder if Ed Parsons relishes his ascension from the depths of an "OS technologist" (CTO, I thought) to the stellar heights of a " top dog on the Google Geo team"

Friday afternoon ....

Who is No 2 GI Company?

Discussions have been running a poll to determine who is the number 2 provider of GIS (ESRI being the number 1)

Of course the poll is only a bit of fun and the sample is hardly representative but interestingly as the poll has run the trends have changed. At the beginning of the week Bentley were in number 2 slot by mid week MapInfo had risen to within a couple of votes of taking second place from them. This morning there seems to have been a flurry of votes and MapInfo have crept past Bentley but hey look out on the inside track here comes Intergraph and they have surged past both Bentley and MapInfo into 2nd place nearly doubling their vote in 24 hours!

Here are the poll results at 9.00am GMT

Daratech recently offered that Bentley Systems is the #2 GIS company (ESRI is #1). Based on your usage of GIS technology at your organization, what GIS company is second to ESRI?

Total of 422 Votes

Autodesk - 57 votes (13.5%)

Bentley Systems - 80 votes (19%)

Intergraph - 104 votes (24.6%)

Pitney Bowes MapInfo - 89 votes (21.1%)

Logica - 5 votes (1.2%)

ERDAS - 28 votes (6.6%)

Other - 59 votes (14%)

So who is voting in this poll? Would it be unfair to wonder if a particularly high proportion of voters work for these companies?

UPDATE

Here are the final results of the poll as of 1st July

2nd Intergraph 29%
3rd MapInfo 20%
4th Bentley 16%

What's the ROI for Spam

Have you ever wondered why there are people who are willing to go to such great lengths to try to sell you imitation Rolex watches, Viagra, Cialis or pirated software? What is it about you that makes scantily clad young women from eastern Europe approach you because they are so lonely and they just picked you? And how come so many people working for the banks in Nigeria seem to need your help to free up $100m with a tiny bit of paperwork (your bank account details)?

Our spam count at home now runs to about 400/day, mostly filtered out with little inconvenience and then deleted. My wife asked me why on earth these people keep sending the stuff and my usual answer would be because someone occasionally responds. But you have to wonder whether anyone with an e-mail account has not heard of the Nigerian bank scams or the phony attempts to get you to reveal on your on line bank account details (usually from a bank that you don't bank with!). I guess we will never know as the people or organisations who are sending this stuff out don't publish accounts or any other information.

There is some correspondence with the direct mail industry here and many people describe their products as junk mail which could be the hard copy version of spam. However there is a difference, most direct mail has some element of targetting based on geodemographics or some other intelligence about the recipient. Response rates may only be 1% or 2% but there is a well proven return on this marketing approach.

The challenge as we move away from print to "e" is to find ways to target campaigns to the individual recipient so that they are clearly distinguished from spam. Educating the spam filters will be fun.

Cadastre - if you think we have problems ...

Directions has an interesting interview with Susan Marlow of Smart Data Strategies about Parcel Datasets, something akin to a cadastre in the US. Quite a contrast to the sanity prevailing in Northern Ireland or even the fragmented and somewhat fractious affairs here in England

Shaping a changing world - we have a program

Last week,12 of us spent a couple of days wading through nearly 100 good to great submissions for the AGI GeoCommunity 08. Of course there were a couple of papers that got a "you have to be joking" and a couple that no one could understand (and they were in English) but the vast majority were of a very high standard.

Selection is a chaotic process - we wanted the best papers and we wanted to created a balanced program. Eventually we got there.


And along the way we had a couple of laughs

So there are nearly 50 papers, 4 keynotes, over 10 workshops and hands on training events, GPS walks and a panel discussion and a Big Debate on "GI Going Mainstream - An Own Goal?" You can review the whole program here

Now all we need is for you to register. Get a move on there are over 100 delegates already signed up and the early bird discounts will run out.

I think it is going to be an even better conference than last year. See you in Stratford.