PGA

The IGGI web site includes this announcement about the award of the Pan Government Agreement.

OS AddressLayer 2 has been included as part of the agreement. Does that mean that Central Government will not be using NLPG or do they have a seperate agreement for that and intend to use both?

GeoCommunity Twittering

The GeoCommunity team will be twittering here If you are interested in the plans for this year's conference and want the latest news and thoughts of the team then why not follow us. 

It is also another channel to feed us your ideas on themes, speakers, entertainment or anything else to do with the conference.

Gaza Maps Update

The mashers have been busy over the last week. Here are a selection of links to maps of the Gaza conflict.

Al Jazeera offers an excellent mashup based on VE which links to Al Jazeera reports

Aid Worker Daily compares the detail avalable in GM, VE and OSM and declares GM the winner. Interestingly the maps that Google are using are provided by an Israeli company GISrael who claim

GISrael is the largest civilian cartographic department in Israel.  The GISrael database fully covers all settlements in Israel, even such that are not officially recognized, as well as all urban and interurban roads and highways in Israel.

The BBC has a pretty weak effort here

UNOSAT publishes some static damage maps like this which may be good to take into the field but aren't particularly informative or usable online.

The Guardian has an elegant Flash animation that combines a timeline and a map with links to video and photographs.

Not sure why but the mashup of Hamas rocket attacks on Israel that I wrote about a week ago seems to be broken at the moment.

ESRI gain advantage in UK education

Vector 1 reports the new A Level teaching resource jointly released by the Geographical Association and ESRI UK.

Produced by the GA (Geographical Assoc) in collaboration with ESRI (UK), the book is a complete guide to the theory and application of GIS, with five practival exercises described step-by-step. It includes ESRI ArcView 9.2 software with a 12-month license, plus DVD of map data for England.

Just think thousands of A level students learning to use GIS with ESRI software. Based upon the keynote that the kids from Leeds Grammar gave at the last ESRI EMEA user conference, these kids are already able to make good use of the software. Now what products will they choose when they move into professional roles in the future? 

So where are the other vendors? One up to Angela Baker at ESRI.

Someone must be doing something right

Following  on from Pitney Bowes announcement in December of 128 layoffs (8%) come announcements in the last couple of days from Intergraph of 200 job losses (5%) and 750 at Autodesk (10%). 

But all is not gloomy in the geospatial camp, the ESRI US site lists over 170 current vacancies! I guess they have a different view on how the next year is going to pan out (or they need to update their web site pretty quick). Perhaps not having to report to the stock market or placate investors in a leveraged buyout gives them an edge.

Willl we ever pay for anything again?

An article on TechCrunch entitled "Why do we still let webmail services get away with deleting our data?" suggests that with storage so cheap web mail services should not delete mail accounts and stored mail if the accounts became inactive. Recently there was also an outburst of concern when Google temporarily "lost" MyMaps data.

The article goes on to consider the future adoption of free cloud based services

Now that more services are moving to the cloud, our most vital data (like photos and documents) is increasingly at the mercy of these web companies - an unsettling thought given the precedent set by webmail services. For these cloud-based services to thrive users will have to believe they’re good for life, not just until the company involved holds their data ransom for a revenue boost (or worse - deletes it entirely)

As the global recession bites and advertising revenues go into a tailspin the "philanthropists" at Google, Yahoo and other cloud service providers will need to replace lost revenue with old fashioned subscriptions or cut back on the level/quality/security of service that they provide. The question will be how much we want our web mail, online docs and photosharing, are they nice to haves or are we prepared to pay a modest amount for them? Currently the percentage paying for premium services in the cloud is tiny. 

I wonder who will be the first to substantially reduce the service availability of free cloud apps? Perhaps we are waiting for the Cloud Crunch to dramatically change the free software landscape.

Street mapping in Israel

When I got back from a holiday in Israel this summer I was puzzled that there were no street level maps available on Google. I mailed TeleAtlas and Navteq to ask why they did not have coverage of Israel (starting to think it might be a political thing) only to discover that the primary driver for mapping was demand from PND manufacturers, maybe Israeli drivers don't need sat nav.

Not sure when things changed but stumbled on pretty good street level mapping for Israel (less detailed for Gaza and West Bank but good satelite imagery) on Google this morning. The mapping comes not from TA or Navteq but from an Israeli company MAPA GISrael who have been around for a few years now. Presumably Google got fed up waiting for TA. Microsoft still only have overview mapping.

Without any comment on who is most wrong in the current conflict (because no one is right) here is a mashup showing the landing sites of the rockets but to date I have not been able to find any showing the bombing of Gaza, I guess people have slightly more pressing concerns than posting maps. We were on a beach within range of the longest range rockets less than 6 months ago - scary!

Hopefully there will be some more positive themes in this region to mashup in the near future.

A recipe for success in 2009 - turn up the volume

The crunch/recession/crash whatever will impact all businesses in 2009. There is nothing special about geobusinesses except that there is perhaps a higher level of unsustainability in some business models than in the wider economy (financial services excluded). For years we have searched for the killer applications of geotechnology the "must haves" rather than the "nice to haves" or "usefuls", I can recall a CEO telling a user conference less than 2 years ago that the future of his business was dependent upon building these "must have" applications and relationships with their customers. 

If our solutions are not mission critical to our clients there is a real danger that in 2009 customers will start to disinvest and certainly the pace of new investment is likely to tail off significantly. CFO's will seize control of expenditure budgets and start looking for rejustifications of all expenditure. We will certainly need champions within client companies to help make the case for continuued investment in geo.

So why turn up the volume? In the last few years most companies whilst paying lip service to listening to their customers have failed to achieve the level of delight or devotion that they will need over the next couple of years. It is not too late though, now is the time to ensure that the voice of the customer is heard loud and clear throughout the organisation.