GeoSeasonal Greetings

To all my geofriends and geofollowers I want to wish you geoseasonal greetings.

Whatever your faith and geoinclination (neo, paleo, proto or nono) I hope this time of year brings you and yours peace and happiness.

May 2010 be a geotastic and prosperous year for you

Thanks to Gary Gale a geolly good geogeezer for the use of his great geopic

Come to the GeoVation Awards Showcase and we will support MapAction

The deadline is drawing closer for submissions for a GeoVation Award, plans are thudding onto the GeoVation virtual doormat as we speak, the judges are panting with anticipation and the award funds are burning a hole in our e-pocket!

There is still time to submit a venture plan to The GeoVation Awards Programme this blog will tell you how.

All we need now is you to come along to the GeoVation Awards Showcase at the Royal Geographical Society on the afternoon of 26th January. For every registered delegate who attends the Showcase, GeoVation will be making a £10 donation to MapAction.

So come along, grab a geosandwich, listen to some exciting and innovative prospective new ventures utilising geography, vote for the £1,000 community award which will be given to one of the venture teams at the end of the day in addition to the main awards and you will be supporting a very worthwhile geocharity. It should be a lot of geofun.

Have a look at some of the ventures on the GeoVation Challenge to get a preview of what you might see on the 26th.

Registration here is free

New Years Cheer

It has been a tough year for many who work in UK Geo and uncertainty about the future will be clouding the celebrations for some as we approach the new year. So here is a bit of good news for all of us.

The Guardian is asking readers of its Technology section to pick their top technologies for the next 5 years as part of their final print edition, in the article they include the latest Gartner Technology Hype Curve. Just look at "location aware applications"

So we are pushing up the slope of enlightenment and should be mainstream within 2 to 5 years. Now will that be good news for those currently working in the industry or will there be some new entrants into the market who will reap the benefits of "enlightenment" at the expense of established players?

I can feel an end of year poll coming on if I can work out how to do it on the Blogger platform (suggestions?)

Who pays for our new pavement?

It's a decade or more since our street was enhanced with the questionable wonders of cable from Telewest or whoever they were before they became Virgin.

The byproduct was our pavements being ripped and then relaid with broken uneven paving stones, patches of tarmac and shoddy workmanship. Why Haringey allowed them to get away with it I don't know. Then recently Thames have replaced the water mains and had to dig up much of the pavement to make the connections to the houses. Loads more tarmac patches.

At long last and after numerous complaints and probably a few accidents we now have a beautiful new flat pavement being laid. I wonder whether Haringey is recovering any of the cost from Virgin and Thames? Or will this be paid for from my council tax?

What's this got to do with geo? Not sure. Oh yes "someone has to pay to fix the mess"

Correction - Poscodes will not be free

A case of the left and right hands not being connected.

This morning the BBC web site ran an article on the freeing up of the postcode dataset

"Currently organisations that want access to datasets that tie postcodes to physical locations cannot do so without incurring a charge.Following a brief consultation, the postcode information is set to be freed in April 2010.The announcement about releasing postcode data came as part of a much wider plan to use technology as part of the Smarter Government strategy. As part of this push, the government said it would start "consulting on making mapping and postcode datasets available for free reuse from April 2010.""

Within a couple of hours Giles Finnemore, the Head of Mrketing at the Address Management Unit of the Royal Mail sent an e-mail to all the current licensees of the PAF

Dear PAF(r) Customer

You may be aware of a story on the BBC website today that Government is planning to give anyone free access to postcode data.

Access to postcodes is already, and will continue to be, free to every citizen via www.royalmail.com/postcodes4free.

For the avoidance of doubt PAF(r), the Postcode Address File, remains the intellectual property of Royal Mail and is supplied and used under licence. The new and recently published licences come into effect from April 2010. There are no plans for that to change.

Maintaining a world class postal address file requires significant ongoing investment and it is right that organisations who obtain value from using the file pay to do so.

We are aware of no plans for Government to pay Royal Mail for businesses and organisations to use our address file.

Regards

Giles

Seems that Giles listening to Gordon. I wonder whether he got a call from the Cabinet Office today?

Someone is going to have to do some back pedalling here.

10/12/09 Some useful comments on the Free Our Data blog following up on this

Embedding content into Google maps

Have you noticed the points of interest data that is now incorporated into Google Maps when you zoom in?

I know it has been there for a while but I only recently discovered that it is clickable - could be I just missed it or it could be because the click tolerances for some of the tiny square dot icons are very small or it could be that it is one of those neat tiny changes that google just slips in from time to time (well almost every week actually). No doubt Ed Parsons if he is reading this will chip in and tell us when this feature launched.

In addition to restaurants, hotels and cinemas I found Muswell Hill railway station. Hah I thought caught you out Google! There is no Muswell Hill railway station, the line closed ages and ages ago. But when I found the click zone on the item up pops this useful bit of local history from wikipedia

Pretty neat!

Now you can see how Google will start to drive revenue from all those sites using the API to embed maps or develop applications, the adverts will be embedded in the map. Now can they make them context and user dependent?

To privatise or not to privatise, that is the question

Yesterday Gordon Brown announced a "radical plan to put frontline services first by streamlining government". The headlines have focussed on his comments on the pay of senior civil service employees perhaps masking some inconsistency in the aspirations and the detail of the programme Putting the Frontline First.

"Putting the frontline first: smarter government sets out how Government will improve public service outcomes while achieving the fiscal consolidation that is vital to helping the economy grow. The plan has three central actions: to drive up standards by strengthening the role of citizens and civic society, to free up public services by recasting the relationship between the centre and the frontline, and to streamline the centre of government, saving money for sharper delivery."

So what is wrong with that you may ask? Drive up standards, shift focus to frontline and save money - sounds good but is it realistic and deliverable?

Last month the PM announced that a range of data sets from OS were going to be made freely available garnering widespread praise from all who have argued that geographic information is key to opening up public information and allowing innnovators to create new services and activists to hold public services accountable for their decisions and performance. In yesterday's announcement buried in the detail was

"We are publishing an OEP asset portfolio alongside today's report. This portfolio sets out those state-owned assets which government might seek to commercialise over the medium term. The OEP asset portfolio includes a new framework to govern which government activities should be managed as a business and which should be sold. For those activities which are best managed as businesses in the public sector, we will separate the ownership role from the customer and policy role, with a presumption that they should be incorporated"

The OEP Asset Portfolio can be found here. The introduction explains that

"The Government has today established a new policy framework – summarised in Annex A to this document – to guide decisions on how government activities will be delivered. This will facilitate clearer decision making and faster progress in improving business performance and, where appropriate, pursuing transactions"

One might think that pursuing transactions is a euphemism for privatisation or sell off. The section on the Ordnance Survey has some choice but confusing nuggets (my italics below) including

"On 17 November 2009, the Prime Minister announced that Government proposes to make certain datasets from Ordnance Survey available for free, including information about administrative boundaries, postcode areas and mid-scale mapping. There will be a public consultation on these proposals from December 2009, with implementation of any change from April 2010.

The consultation will also cover other issues around the interaction of Ordnance Survey with the market – particularly the regulatory environment and the governance structure around the free offering.

Market studies have identified significant growth opportunities across the geographic information (GI) market, as data is made more available and new technologies are used to support innovation and greater use of GI data and services. The outcome of the consultation above may affect the opportunities available to Ordnance Survey in some of these growth areas and the alternative asset options outlined below. It may also open up new opportunities to work more closely with other parts of the public sector to realise efficiency savings, for example in local government resource planning and deployment, or working more closely with the Land Registry. Similarly there may be an opportunity to collaborate with local government and Royal Mail to provide a definitive addressing solution for Great Britain."

But then at the end of the chapter under the heading of Private Sector we get

"There are a growing number of commercial market opportunities, particularly around value- added services using geospatial information, which Ordnance Survey is not currently well placed to exploit.
A private sector investor and/or partner might bring expertise, new market access or additional capital for innovation. This could accelerate the development and delivery of these opportunities more quickly and successfully than Ordnance Survey operating alone."

So does this mean that privatisation is on or off? My hunch is off (no inside knowledge though).

I wonder how much of this section on Ordnance Survey had to be rewritten after Gordon Brown's announcement on 17th November. Do the left and right hands know what the other is doing? Maybe that is why senior civil servants are getting those high salaries that Gordon is so concerned about!

It is easy peasy to submit an application for a GeoVation Award

There is just under a month to the deadline for applications for the £21,000 GeoVation Awards Programme.

I have just posted some notes/advice for those who are planning to submit an application. Ian Holt has also made this fun little video which runs you through the submission



Couldn't be easier really could it?

There are now over 120 ideas and over 30 ventures on the GeoVation Challenge web site. If you haven't had a look through the ideas and ventures it is well worth taking the time, there are some really stunning ideas there and three are going to win some worthwhile seed funding. Even if you don't have an idea to submit it is worth considering whether you would like to link up with an idea originator or a venture team to offer your skills and participate in the programme - there are people with ideas looking for techies who can help them and others who are looking for some design or marketing or business skills.

Go on, have a go.

Good luck