Reading the runes

If you have a LinkedIn account you can get a weekly update of what your contacts are up to including new profiles, pictures and requests for references.

Sometimes you can correlate bursts of activity from multiple contacts in the same organisation with impending restructuring or downsizing (aka layoffs). Try it, you may be surprised.

Now if someone could write an app to do this on a large scale they might have a market prediction tool.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

A GeoVating good day

So we finished the GeoVation Awards Programme with a cracking showcase at the wonderful RGS venue in South Ken on Tuesday evening. I got home late and had to pack to head off to for a series of meetings in another time zone first ting Wednesday so I have not had much time to gather my thoughts or write anything up.

I want to write about the whole GAP, what we achieved, what we can improve, whether it is worthwhile and how we should/could move forward but that will have to wait till I get home.

In the meantime Gary Gale has blogged on his views as a judge and shared some pics & Paul Clarke the papperazzi of the twitterati has posted some more pics

Now the hard work starts for the winning ventures and for the judges and GeoVation team who will be supporting them.

Another nut to crack

Just as everyone has been getting excited/delirious/innovative over the launch of data.gov.uk (and of course they should be chuffed) a little spanner appears in the metaphorical works.

Over 2000 people signed this petition to No 10 seeking to get postcodes freed up after the Ernest Marples site was closed down and several useful services that relied upon it were forced to close. Now you might have though that after the PM himself announced in November that he was going to make Ordnance Survey midscale data freely available for use and reuse (even commercial) that post codes were a slam dunk. Here is what Gordon Brown said on 17th November:

And from April next year Ordnance Survey will open up information about administrative boundaries, postcode areas and mid-scale mapping.

No 10 has just responded to the petition on the day after opening up 2,500 data sets many of which have a geographic component and guess what?

As access to the PAF is governed under a condition of licence, Postcomm monitors its practice. Royal Mail’s licence obliges the company to make access to the PAF available on reasonable terms. Postcomm allows the company to make a reasonable specified profit margin and monitors its accounts.

Postcomm has previously undertaken a public consultation reviewing how the PAF was managed. The consultation started in 2006 and finished in 2007. Postcomm took all the diverse uses of the PAF into account before reaching its decision in 2007, announcing more safeguards for the management of the address information held in the PAF with the aim of making sure that the PAF is maintained properly and made available on fair and reasonable terms. The findings of the consultation can be found on Postcomm’s website (www.psc.gov.uk).

If any PAF user or stakeholder feels that Royal Mail is not complying with the terms of section 116 of the PSA 2000 or Condition 22 of its licence, they can either raise concerns direct with the company or with Postcomm. Postcomm would consider the merits of any such concerns in the light of its statutory duties.

I think in English that means "No, no no"

Quite how this response fits with the current spirit of openness in government and the plans to free up some of Ordnance Survey's data products after consultation is beyond me!

Perhaps Sir Tim needs to put a call into his friend Gordon to point out the inconsistency. Oh for a bit of joined up government.

UPDATE: This post on the Ernest Marples blog (which I found after writing this post) sets out very eloquently why the response is so inadequate.

GeoVating thoughts

Less than a week to go to the GeoVation Awards Showcase, starting at 1pm on 26th January at the RGS in London.

There will be 9 ventures pitching. Although I did not have a vote in the judges shortlist session I found most of my favourites seemed to get the judges thumbs up and I am not saying which ones didn't.

It wouldn't be fair to mention one or two of the ventures and not others so I encourage you to pop along to the list of finalists pick your favourites and then register for the Showcase next Tuesday (there are still a few places left) and vote for your choice for the £1,000 Community Award and cheer the winners of the 3 main seed fund awards totalling £20,000.

In some regards the showcase is the beginning of the whole GeoVation program not the end. Once we have made the awards the real fun will start as we try to support the ventures and hopefully see their ideas progress and succeed. I am sure they will welcome offers of advice and help from the wider community - hint hint.

I know some of my friends in the coolest regions of the geoplanet are a bit sceptical about GeoVation, who knows you could be right but you will never find out if you don't take an afternoon to come along to the Showcase and see what people are doing.

Oh and don't forget that if you come along the good folk at MapAction will benefit to the tune of £10 per attendee and they sure need every bit of support that we can give them.

What will UK GI look like in 2015? Your opinions wanted

You may recall me mentioning the AGI Foresight Study that I have been helping to edit.

We are drawing to a conclusion but before we write the final wrap we would like to gather some input from the wider community (a bit late I know but weather, holidays and technology have all conspired to delay us). So hop along to SurveyMonkey and share your wisdom with us.

The survey will be included in the editorial which will be published in February.

And if you can mention the survey to your geofriends or geotweet it that would be appreciated

Thanks

GeoVation Awards Shortlist published

The judges have met (well virtually) - plans have been reviewed, combed, questioned and debated and finally we have a shortlist of ventures for the GeoVation Awards Showcase on 26th January.

You can find the 8 shortlisted ventures here

The short-listed candidates will be invited to present their plans at the GeoVation Awards Showcase, to be held at the Royal Geographical Society on 26 January. Doors open at 11:30 with a sandwich box lunch before the main event which kicks-off at 13:00. £10,000 is up for grabs for the outright winner, and £5,000 each for two runners-up. A Community Award of £1,000 will also be made, as voted for members of the audience on the day.

The GeoVation judging panel includes Steve Coast the founder of crowd-source mapping project, OpenStreetMap; James Alexander, CEO of Green Thing, the online service that encourages people to lead greener lives; James Cutler, CEO of eMapSite and Gary Gale, Director of Geo-Engineering at Yahoo.

It should be an interesting and enjoyable afternoon, so why not come along you might meet a collaborator, an investor, an employer or just a plain old friend.

Registration for the GeoVation Awards Showcase is free (but don't leave it too late as the numbers are limited) and you can also help the good folk at MapAction. GeoVation will be donating £10 to Map Action for each registered delegate who attends the showcase.

See you there hopefully

You can't teach an old dog new tricks

But you can repurpose an old video clip with a new humorous set of subtitles

Enjoy

In the wonderful world of free

In the wonderful world of free you pay (yes pay) London Underground to advertise a free browser. I suppose there must be some logic here, it just bypassed me.

No doubt there is some added value to getting people to click on your ad inventory in your own browser. I wonder what is hidden under the covers of Chrome.

Watch out for the adverts for Maps and mobile directions

Posted via web from Steven's posterous

Civilisation, roaming charges, GPS and holidays (not neccessarily in that order)

Back from a fantastic holiday in Egypt except ....

Roaming rates in Egypt (or for that matter most places) are so extortionate that you can't use mobile internet services. I cannot see how all of the much vaunted location based services like Rummble, Yelp etc are going to reach the travellers who most need them if the cost of using them is £6/MB! There surely can't be a justification for the current level of data roaming charges, perhaps the EU needs to add this to their list of gripes with mobile operators (not that that would help in Egypt, the US etc) because there is no effective competition on international data roaming packages to my knowledge.

Planning ahead I downloaded maps of Cairo using OffMaps only to discover that for some reason the GPS on my iPhone did not work all the time I was away. Mysterious? I know that Egypt opened up to GPS receivers last year, surely they can't be blocking the GPS signal on my phone? Perhaps it isn't the GPS that is doing most of the locating on my phone but a combination of the cell tower locations and Skyhook (I doubt they are too hot in Cairo). So it was OffMaps without GPS to help me work out where we were which isn't easy when most of the street signs are only in arabic script. Good thing we had a nice old fashioned paper map with landmarks etc.

So forgetting all of that what about the civilisation bit. The Step Pyramid (or Djoser Pyramid) at Sakkara was built about 5,200 years ago.



Within a couple of hundred years the more famous pyramids of Giza were being built, the largest is over 130m high.



About 500 years later the Temple of Hatshepsut had been built


Which makes you wonder a bit about so called Western Civilisation. The only thing that I know of that is pre Roman and of any substance in the UK is Stonehenge which is (depending on who you believe) 4,500 years old which is pretty cool but sort of pales into insignificance when compared with the Egyptian stuff

So how do the pyramids fit into the same blog as a rant about data roaming rates and GPS? Not sure really but perhaps the pyramids and temples of Egypt offer a humbling alternative to my (or our) expectations of technological advancement. They managed to build them without GPS, CAD, modern surveying and materials technology but they did have one heck of a lot of people available, apparently they were paid in beer.

Happy new year. More pictures here if you are interested.