Posts tagged as "berlin"

Forget Neo-geographers, We're Now Geo-hipsters

I don't grow my own organic vertices. Nor do I use gluten-free technology. At least not that I'm aware. But I have been known to geocode by hand, in small batches and I do follow the @geohipster Twitter account. According to a new map put together by Ralph Straumann, that's enough to make me a #geohipster.

Who am I to argue with a map?

It's a simple and neat affair. All followers of the @geohipster Twitter account with a location in their profile have that location geocoded and then shown on a map.

geohipster-null-island

Of course, not everyone has a location that can be successfully geocoded. Either that or a lot of people really do live on Null Island. These seems to be the only way to explain the cluster of people allegedly located somewhere off of the coast of North West Africa, South of Ghana and West of Equatorial Guinea, which just so happens to coincide with where you'll find latitude 0 and longitude 0.

Thankfully, whatever geocoder Ralph is using works properly and places me in the Teddington that's a suburb of South West London and not the Teddington that's near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire.

geohipster

Which makes me happy and also seems to makes me a Geo-hipster. Nothing in the vaguely defined and nebulous industry that is the geo industry should surprise me anymore.

Farewell Ovi, Nokia And HERE; It's Time To Open The Next Door

This may be a personal foible but when I join a new company I mentally set myself two targets. The first is what I want to achieve with that company. The second is how long it will take to achieve this. If you reach the first target then the second is a moot point. But if the first target doesn't get reached and your self allocated timescale is close to coming to an end, then it's time to take stock.

Sometimes you can extend that timescale; when reaching your achievement target is so so close and you can be happy to stretch those timescales a little. Sometimes though this just doesn't work, not necessarily for any reason of your own making. Large companies are strange beasts and a strategic move which is right for the company may not align with your own targets and ideals.

In 2010, I left the Geo Technologies group at Yahoo! and departed from a very Californian large company to take up a new role with a very Finnish large company called Nokia. Though Nokia started life as the merger between a paper mill operation, a rubber company and a cable company in the mid 1800's, by the time I joined Nokia it was best known for mobile and smart phone handsets and the software that makes these ubiquitous black mirrors work.

In addition to mobile data connectivity, apps and GPS, one of the things that defines a smartphone is a maps app and the suite of back-end platforms that drive that app as well as all of the other APIs that enable today's smartphone location based services. Just as TomTom acquired digital map maker Tele Atlas in 2008, Nokia had acquired rival maps provider NAVTEQ in 2007, putting in place the foundations for Nokia's maps and turn-by-turn navigation products, part of the company's Ovi brand of internet services.

Re-imagining Berlin's U-Bahn And S-Bahn System

This is another mass transit map, but this time it's not of the London Underground system, but the U-Bahn and S-Bahn system in Berlin. The name U-Bahn derives from Untergrundbahn, or underground railway whilst S-Bahn comes from Stadtschnellbahn, or fast city train.

As a general rule of thumb, the London Underground is, as the name suggests, underground in the centre of the city and surfaces as you move into the suburbs. The same can't be said of the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, which is underground and overground in pretty much equal measures over a lot of the network.

But this post is not about the official map of Berlin's transport, it's about this, unofficial, map of Berlin's underground and not so underground trains.

Not Your Average User Contributed Map

Today I contributed to a map. I did this yesterday as well. I even did this last week. In fact I've been doing this since the end of July 2009. As of right now I've done this 11,880 times. I'll probably end up contributing to this map again later on today and will almost definitely do it again tomorrow.

But this isn't your average user contributed or crowd sourced map. It's not one of the usual suspects; it's not OpenStreetMap, or Google MapMaker or Nokia MapCreator. It's none of these, but it's a map nonetheless and it looks like this.

What Do You Call The Opposite Of Mapping?

Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, who was awarded the Turing Prize in 1972 is reported to have once said ...

If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

With this in mind, if the process of taking geographical information and making this into a map is called mapping ... what do you call the opposite, the process where you take a map and deconstruct it back to what makes up the map in the first place.

Un-mapping? Anti-mapping? De-atlasing? Whatever you call it, you start out with a map and you end up with an oddly compelling form of art. Which is just what French artist Armelle Caron has been doing.

Start with the map. Let's take a map of Berlin. If you've spent any time in this city, the map will look pretty familiar. It's not the most granular or small scale of maps, but that doesn't matter. What happens next is most definitely art and is akin to magic.

Map Wars; Are Apple's Maps Really That Bad?

Making a map isn't easy. Making a map of streets and land features is hard. Making a map of streets and land features that stays up to date is harder. Making a map of streets, features and places, businesses, services, points of interest is harder still. Making a map of all of the previous that stays up to date is really hard. Making a map with all of the previous, wrapping it up in an app that runs on your smartphone and making it useable is verging on insanely difficult. Yet that's what Google and Nokia have been doing and with the release of iOS 6, that's what Apple is now doing as well. So how is Apple doing?

The Olympic Tube Map

Not all maps are created equal. I've always had a soft spot for maps of the London Underground network ever since I saw one on the back of an old London A-Z street map far too many years ago.

In case you hadn't noticed, London hosted the 2012 Olympic Games a few weeks ago so what could be more natural than a map of the Tube with famous Olympic athletes in the place of the more familiar and geographically correct station names. Maybe Chris Boardman instead of Swiss Cottage, Victoria Pendleton instead of St. John's Wood or Daley Thompson in place of Baker Street?

Hop over to the Transport for London web site and for between £3.99 and £49.00, the Olympic Legends Tube Map can be yours. I certainly want one. Huge amounts of kudos go to my darling wife for spotting this in the first place.

Making Maps Underground

Warning. This post contains a sweeping generalisation. Yes, I know that Places are not just part of today's digital maps; see the James Fee and Tyler Bell hangout The One Where Tyler Bell Defines Big Data as a proof point. But for the sake of this post, just assume that Places and maps are synonymous.

It's never been easier to make a map. Correction. It's never been easier to contribute to a map. Today we seem to be makingcontributing to maps everywhere, even underground, or should I say Underground?

To makecontribute to a map, you used to have to be a professional map maker, with easy access to an arsenal of surveying or an industrial grade GPS.