Goodbye PND

Google announced the beta of their mobile navigation application yesterday.



It looks like a pretty fully featured navigation application, with voice recognition, plain English search, satellite imagery, streetview, POI's on your route, live traffic feeds and of course no need to download map upgrades. Downsides - what happens when you lose internet connectivity which seems to happen every few minutes with my mobile service (perhaps service is a misnomer) and a few questions at this early stage about how accurate and up to date Google will be able to keep its own maps. It's currently only available on Android and for North America but no doubt wider coverage and phone support will follow. Can't wait for the iPhone UK version.

I guess this has been waiting for Google to phase out TeleAtlas who had prevented them offering a mobile nav service to protect their lucrative contracts with PND manufacturers (one of whom ultimately bought TA and are now sitting on a turkey). It won't be long before Google extends their coverage - think StreetView vehicles driving round Europe photographing and quietly mapping as they go. Not sure that many people saw this coming, I certainly didn't.

So what is the future of Personal Navigation Devices? Somehow I can't see Google wiping them all out but the manufacturers are certainly going to have to dramatically step up the pace of innovation and deliver some much more compelling interfaces and applications if they are going to convince people to spend ca £100 plus service charges. At the very least we will see some pretty intense price competition over the next few years. How Nokia are going to make a return on their massive purchase of Navteq was always a mystery to me (business as usual was never going to do it) now it looks like maps and navigation will be a costly to maintain low to no revenue must have feature for them.

Respect to Navteq and TeleAtlas CEO's - looks like you sold at just the right time.

GI MSc on the way out

At last week's AGI Foresight workshop Muki Haklay made the provocative statement that he expected Masters programs in pure GI to disappear within a few years and for GI to increasingly be taught as modules within other programs. Quite a few of the participants including several academics seemed to agree with him. When I tweeted this it prompted some rebuttal from my friends at Kingston pointing out that being able to drive a GIS package did not imply an understanding of geographic analysis.

A couple of days later and Peter Batty pointed out this post by Don Meltz comparing GIS to word processing. You probably would not want to take a Masters in word processing but you might want an MA in creative writing or journalism (especially if you fancy a career as an unpaid blogger).

It seems that the geography bit is going to come to the fore again.

Augmented Reality? A bit more reality please

Simon and Tony at mashupevents ran an evening of debate and discussion on Augmented Reality on Thursday night.

I hadn't planned to go to this evening because I didn't think I would find much of interest but a couple of days ago I helped to facilitate an AGI Forsesight study (more on that soon) in which the subject of AR came up and I was struck by the opportunity for AR to supercede cartographic displays in presenting a lot of information in close up situations.

The impression that I got from the evangelists of AR was of a collection of technologies that had come together in the new iPhone and Android platforms which enabled location sensitive information feeds over the current camera view. Maybe it is AR but it didn't appear to be in anyway context sensitive or particularly intelligent. I don't think I want to walk around London holding my phone up and reading tweets from people who were nearby in the last hour or so nor do I want to navigate to the nearest tube by following little arrows in the view of my camera. As some wag pointed out loads of people walking round London with their eyes glued to their phone displays is a recipe for disaster - either collision with lamp posts (painful) or vehicles (worse)!

What got people excited was a description of this aid to a BMW service engineer, shame we didn't have the video at the event.



There will be real value in AR when for example it can be used to present underground asset info (pipes and cables) to someone about to start digging up the road. Prediction - we will see something like this within 5 years.

There were a lot of people asking whether AR was just the new wow factor and someone pointed out that wow was just what marketing campaigns needed. Good point.

The demo that blew all the others away was from Total Immersion who are doing some very neat things. Worth a look and definitely wow.

I pitched for a minute about the GeoVation Awards and the Ideas Forum we are running on 2nd November. I wonder whether we will see any Geo-AR apps submitted for the Awards?

Where do all the Manchester United fans live?

Nothing makes me happier than being able to link geography and football.

As a Londoner I am stunned by the number of Liverpool and Man U fans who live in London (and they didn't all move here).

So if there is a football mad hacker out there maybe you can help me to put together www.wheredoallthemanufanslive.com (good URL?). You can make suggestions or offer help at the GeoVation Challenge

Any guesses which team has the lowest proportion of fans living within 30 miles of the ground?

£21,000 for GeoVators

So we are off and running with the GeoVation Awards Program.

If you have an idea or know someone who has an idea that has been simmering for a while or was drawn on a beermat or the back of a cigarette packet then now is the time to enter the GAP and you could win an award of up to £10,000

You can find details of how to participate at Mind the Gap - it is easy to register and you will get the chance to share your idea with others who may be able to help you turn it into a venture and possibly an award winner.

We will be running an ideas evening on 2nd November at the RSA from 6.30 to about 9.30. Come along, meet some other GeoVators, eat some nibbles, share some ideas, drink some beer and learn more about the GAP. Just let us know that you are coming by registering here as places are limited.

Please Mind the GAP

Legible London

Great evening at BCS this week listening Tim Fendley talk about the Legible London project.

On behalf of TfL his team have been looking at how to coordinate the signs and directions available to pedestrians to encourage people to walk around London rather than use the underground because they don't know the way. In London we have all sorts of people putting up signs which offer conflicting and confusing advice to pedestrians. They have done some great research into wayfinding and how people navigate using visual cues and have produced the new miniliths that are being piloted around Bond Street

They have also produced some stunning cartography which really makes pedestrian navigation easier. If you have an iPhone you can download a copy of their early app for Brighton from the App Store, it is called WalkBrighton (says what it does on the can). At the moment they are just a set of georeferenced raster images that you can pan, no search or navigation but it gives you an idea of what pedestrian mapping should/could be.

It would be nice if we could get something similar for the whole of London but that will take a load more tech than a few rasters. Anyone?

The party is over .... or is it?

A week and a bit has flown by since the end GeoCommunity and I have gone through post conference elation, slump and a stinking cold (possibly related). Jo Cook, Ed Parsons, Gary Gale, Martin Daly and others have written some great summaries of the event and their impressions of it – you can also view masses of content from and about the conference at www.geocommunitylive.com (we will need to work out what we do with this site between now and next year, polite suggestions welcome). The presentations can be found here, the papers are here and all of the video is here and that in itself is a big first for GeoCommunity getting all that stuff up so quickly (we hope to be able to add the video of the 3 plenaries and some other stuff over the next few weeks)

So before it all disappears into the mists of my increasingly forgetful mind here is my view of what happened and whether it mattered.

Before commenting on this year’s event I want to look back 4 years to the end of the AGI conference in 2006. Declining numbers of delegates, a separation between the conference and the industry, a London venue that made attendance unaffordable for many in the public sector and an agenda that seemed to have limited relevance to those outside of it. Add to that an industry that had been coasting, to some extent, on the back of the flood of funding from transformational government initiatives and that was not delivering the innovation that customers were craving. That’s a slightly harsh view which is purely mine and not AGI’s or anyone else’s (before the how dare you’s come flying in). I was of the opinion that the event did not any longer serve the AGI, the wider community or its sponsors (I had decided that my company would not exhibit at a future event under the same format) and perhaps foolishly told the AGI in my forthright manner.

Some wackos (aka far sighted people) in AGI then entrusted their flagship event to me and a largely new conference team (fortunately moderated by the common sense of the then new AGI Director, the outstanding Chris Holcroft). At our first team meeting I outlined to a somewhat stunned team my vision for an event that would be the base for building a community of people who use, research and earn their livings from geography – somewhat unoriginally we called it a GeoCommunity. Moving out of London, going residential, reducing to 2 days, not having a free walk in exhibition (“wow you can put dots on maps, can I buy some?” really wasn’t working anyway), limiting the number of sponsors, not giving away free passes, tough rules on sales pushes in presentations and big reductions in delegate fees and sponsor costs were just some of the changes that we took on (to be honest with some hesitation/reservation).

3 events on what have we learnt? Clearly we got more right than wrong, the numbers have grown to nearly double those in Islington, even in a very challenging financial climate delegates and sponsors see real value in supporting GeoCommunity.

The excitement building up to this year’s GeoCommunity and the number of returning delegates suggests that our aspiration to create a community has at least to some extent been realised. GeoCommunity was an unashamed celebration of all things geo with over 620 delegates spanning practitioners in local government, central government, utilities, business, education/academia, policy makers and the geoindustry.

Much has been made of the paleo meets neo sessions and dialogue – in my opinion we are moving beyond the mutual misunderstanding and distrust towards a recognition that we are all engaged in aspects of doing geography. It’s not that we do the same things, anymore than UI designers, web services architects and database people who all work in IT do the same things (and that is not suggesting that any technique or skill set is in any way more important than another) just that we all do geography. The geosolutions of the future will rely upon neo, paleo and a whole lot more. I think Ian Painter (winner of the Steven Feldman Georanter 2009 Award) just about summed it up in his brilliant 5 minute slot at the Soapbox which is worth a pause to watch

Although the Soapbox may have grabbed a lot of attention (next year we will need to find a bigger space and a wealthy geobeer sponsor) it was not the only new idea that we introduced at this year’s GeoCommunity. Probably the most significant change was the introduction of a geoweb stream that ran through the whole event. Watching so called “paleos” squeezing into these packed sessions validated Christopher Osborne’s and my belief that we could bring relevant and stimulating new content to the conference. I am not going to pretend that we are in the mutual love and admiration phase, I imagine that there are some who are horrified by the arrival of the “free data, free software” generation (nb “free stuff” still needs paid services or premium versions to support it) but there were also many potential users who were excited by the possibilities that geoweb offers them to deliver better services to their clients.

A big change this year compared to previous years was the online channel to the conference. The twitter tag #geocom was fizzing throughout the conference and continued for at least a week afterwards, the dialogue was both informative and at times critical of presenters, next year it would be great if the back channel could be visible on screens around the conference rather than just on the iPhones and Blackberries. We also ran the GeoCommunityLive blog which scooped up other bloggers pieces, the videos posted on youtube and the slide presentations went live within a couple of hours. I think it ran pretty smoothly despite the somewhat erratic wifi at the hotel (have to do better next year) and it enabled people who couldn’t get to the conference to track what was going on and hopefully decide to come to GeoCommunity next year.

So 2 days of love and maps came to a close with (in my opinion) an inspirational presentation from the Grammar School at Leeds which had all of the delegates on their feet applauding the 3 students (15,17 &17!) who had stunned most of us with their GI and presentational skills.

Was it a success? I think so. The early feedback certainly says so. After 3 years I think we have built a GeoCommunity that is vibrant and has the momentum to grow and flourish even in the difficult economic times that we are going through. With the digital channel, the hashtag and smaller events like the AGI Northern Where2Now event on November 10^th there is the potential for the GeoCommunity to become a year round series of gatherings of varying degrees of formality and structure.

Does it matter? I think so. Geography has a massive potential to solve problems and realise opportunities, we all know this and some of us preach it regularly. Those of us who enjoy this stuff and work with it need a GeoCommunity to nurture us, teach us, give us a voice and to showcase our successes. We also need a place to look for a new job, a new customer, launch a product or company and catch up with old friends.

So 3 years after “mouthing off” at Islington I can say “Job done”.

A few people noted that I looked “quite emotional” as I gave my final address as chair to the conference – that was an understatement! It felt like when I was saying goodbye to my teenage son as he set off on his gap year travels around South America, a mixture of pride that he was ready to go off on his own and anxiety about whether he would be safe. It’s time for me to handover GeoCommunity to a new chair and team and to ask them to take good care of my kid.

So for me the party is over or at least as the fussing host it is. Next year I will be back at GeoCommunity as a guest and will be lapping up the hospitality.

See you there?