Posts about #geomob • Gary Gale

The Collective Noun For Geo People Is A GeoMob

2013-12-10 17:50

Started in 2008 by fellow WhereCamp EU co-conspirator Chris Osborne, #geomob was conceived as London's answer to Silicon Valley's popular (and still running) WebMapSocial meetup group. After a brief hiatus in May 2010 when Chris hung up his hat and offered the event to anyone willing to spend the time and effort in running it, #geomob restarted in September of the same year, this time fed and watered by Ed Freyfogle and Vuk Trifkovic of Lokku, the people behind Nestoria and Open Cage Data. It's been going strong ever since.

The Greek Philosopher Heraclitus was fond of saying "the only constant is change" (actually he said "nothing endures but change" but let's not split hairs). He probably wasn't talking about meetups and get-togethers in London but this still fits rather well. Events come and go as their themes either go mainstream or fade. But some remain and London's #geomob is one of those.

But what is #geomob? The name was originally a contraction of London Geo/Mobile Developer's Meetup. Officially it's a quaterly meetup for location based service developers. But the geo industry is still small and friendly and I prefer to think of #geomob in the most literal sense of the word, as a mob of geo enthusiasts.

Each meetup takes the same form; a couple of hours of people talking about geo, location and maps related stuff, sometimes with slide decks, sometimes not. The topics range from startups pitching the next big thing, from people who want to share their thoughts and views to topics which are just so out there you wouldn't believe it (geolocation by subsonic sounds from industrial facilities anyone?). It has to be experienced to be believed. Afterwards, the time honoured tradition of retiring to a nearby pub and the ritual of geobeers is observed.

I've been fortunate enough to speak at #geomob not once, not twice but three times. This may be something of a record. The speaker list for the first #geomob of 2014 is already up and you can go and show your interest on Lanyrd too. Did I mention the whole thing is free?

If you live or work in or around London and you want to see what this city is thinking about when it comes to maps, geo or location, I can't recommend it enough. Once experienced, you'll never look at a social meetup quite the same again.

How A Map Can Go Viral (In 8 Simple Steps)

2013-04-26 10:46

Vaguely Rude Places Map, Ed Freyfogle from London's #geomob meetup got in touch and asked me to come and tell the story behind the map. This is that story.

And so last night, in the Chadwick Lecture Theatre in the basement of London's UCL, after listening to some amazing presentations on building a map of mobile cell tower coverage, of building a seismically powered alternative to GPS and a whole host of other great talks, I took my place on the podium and started where any good story needs to start ... at the beginning.

Back in February of this year, at the height of the madness that was the Vaguely Rude Places Map, Ed Freyfogle from London's #geomob meetup got in touch and asked me to come and tell the story behind the map. This is that story.

So, hello, I’m Gary and I’m from the Internet. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo-technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Global Community Programs for HERE Maps, formerly known as Nokia Location & Commerce. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

There’s a lot of URLs in the slides to follow and rather than try to frantically jot them down, this is the only URL you really need to know about. If you go there right now, this link will 404 on you but sometime tomorrow this where my slides and all my talk notes will appear here.

https://vtny.org/mo

In today’s global market place when you choose a brand name you normally do some research to make sure that the name you choose doesn’t mean something unfortunate in another language. Most brands succeed at this …

… some don’t

But the names of most of the places in the world came about long before globalisation and the reach of today’s interwebs. A name that can have totally innocent or meaningless connotations in one language can appear amusing when viewed in another language

Naming a village at the bottom of a hill half way along a traditional 12 mile race from the town of Newmarket seemed perfectly rational in the 1840’s and it’s only today that the name probably induces a snigger or two

The same probably goes for a town believed to be named after Focko, a Bavarian nobleman in the 6th century. Today this Austrian town is more noted for having it’s signs regularly stolen and vain, but apocryphal efforts to rename the town to Fugging

The word ‘intercourse’ used to mean ‘fellowship’ and ‘social interaction’. It still does, but there’s another colloquial meaning that makes English language speakers snigger. Of course, it’s the former meaning of the word that forms the etymology of the Lancaster County Pennsylvania town.

And if you live near an area of coastline which relies on fishing, it’s totally natural to name your town after a suggestively shaped piece of wood that you would use to pivot the oar on your fishing boat. At least that’s what people would commonly understand the name of this town in Newfoundland to mean in 1711 which is the first recorded instance of this name for this town in this area.

There’s a lot more of them … I know of at least 250 more, some more prosaic than others and some more profane than others.

For a long time I’ve had a list of these, sitting in a file on my laptop. The product of a Friday afternoon when someone I worked with thought that cataloguing the rude place names in our geographic data set would be a really good idea. And there the file sat, taking up a small amount of disk space.

And then someone, actually this someone, said some fateful words to me …

And so I did … in 8 easy steps

Step 1. Make coffee. An essential element to any form of geographic or cartographic endeavour.

Thus fortified I moved onto step 2; trying to geocode the raw data and weed out those places which seemed to be more a product of wishful thinking than any geographical reality. I now had a basic list of place names, long/lat coordinates and the full name of the place according to the geocoder.

Step 3 was to convert this raw list of names and coordinates into something that I could manipulate easily and so with the help of a couple of hacked together command line scripts which made use of PHP’s built in JSON encoding, I was able to spit out a file in GeoJSON

… which looked something like this. a FeatureCollection array containing a the coordinates and formatted labels for each place name.

Step 4 was to select a mapping API which could easily handle GeoJSON. Most modern APIs do but I’d wanted an excuse to play with Leaflet and this seemed like an ideal opportunity to do so. Leaflet also has a simple and flexible way to convert GeoJSON into a series of push pins or polygons on a map canvas. The only thing I was less than happy with was the map tiles that I’d initially used.

Enter Step 5; using a custom OSM derived tile set called Toner from San Francisco’s Stamen.

Thus armed with my data in GeoJSON format, my map tiles of choice and a custom push pin icon, all it took was 35 odd lines of JavaScript, plus some supporting HTML and the Vaguely Rude Place Names map was born. But this was still sitting on my laptop …

Thankfully I’d registered the geotastic.org domain a while back and this seemed like the ideal place to put the map

So to step 6. Open up an SSH connection to one of my web hosts, this one kindly donated as payment in kind for some WordPress hacking for a friend, and push the whole lot onto the public internet.

Step 7 was sharing the code and underlying data on GitHub in the vague notion that someone might like this as a working example of a map.

And finally step 8 was writing a blog post, tweeting about it and then moving on with life and forgetting about the map.

All of this happened on February the 6th. I forgot about the map, forgot about the blog post, forgot about the tweet and got on with my day job

But then …

Someone pinged me an email which basically said ...

you need to look at Twitter, search for the URL of that map of rude places, see what's happening

So I did. People seemed to like the map, or maybe they liked what the map was showing, or both. Who knows? All I know is that it started proliferating across Twitter at a frantic speed. This wasn’t what I expected. This wasn’t what I intended. You put stuff onto the internet to satisfy whatever motive you have, whether it’s to blog, to tweet, to release code on GitHub or any other of the multitude of reasons. Most times it gets ignored. But sometimes, just sometimes, something strikes a chord and you find yourself on the receiving end of the phrase ‘going viral’.

Of course, it’s not just individuals who read Twitter. It’s individuals who work for companies that read Twitter as well. Before I knew it the map was appearing in the traditional media as well as social media

From the Huffington Post …

… the Daily Telegraph

… the Independent

... and further afield, such as the Sidney Morning Herald

… into regional publications such as Germany’s Der Spiegel

… and Denmark’s Ekstra Bladet, even if this is a Danish Equivalent of the UK’s red-top tabloids. There’s loads more examples of this that I won’t bore you with, most of them unoriginal pieces that copied and pasted other articles. I even ended up getting interviewed on US and Irish radio chat shows

But talking of the tabloids …

This also got picked up by the Daily Mail which provided the only negative view of the whole episode. It would have been nice it the journalist responsible could have spelt my name correctly and if you’re going to lift the copy and paste my blog post wholesale, ignore the Creative Commons license that specifies attribution and don’t rewrite it, littering it with other spelling and grammatical errors. But we live in an imperfect world.

So what lessons have I learned by making the Vaguely Rude Places map?

Firstly, if something’s going to go viral on the interwebs it happens very very quickly and without you necessarily noticing it initially

From a minimal number of hits, presumably from Twitter followers and connections on other social networks, things started to take off around February the 10th, peaking on the evening of February 19th with, to me, a staggering 48,000 hits an hour, totally 310,000 hits for that day.

Having bandwidth really helps if the equivalent of being Slashdotted happens to you. Thankfully, the geotastic.org domain lives on a server with absolutely no bandwidth restrictions. If I’d have hosted this on my main, paid for, web host, I would have ended up using a year’s worth of bandwidth allocation in less than 48 hours.

Since February, my web server's analytics tell me the map has been viewed almost 30 million times; 22.2 million of those in February alone and most people stay and explore for around 5 minutes. Roughly 75% of traffic came from referrals. Surprisingly the lion’s share of referrals were not from Twitter or Facebook but from key worded Google searches. Maybe word of mouth is still more powerful than social media.

By March, traffic had ramped down to around 2.2 million hits

And this month has so far produced around 96,000 hits, at least when I took this snapshot at the start of the week. Extrapolating this out, it’s not unreasonable to predict around 1 million hits this month but I fully expect this to tail off even further

None of this surprises me now, today’s viral hit is quickly forgotten as the next big thing happens and people’s attention goes elsewhere. I’m more than happy about this. I never set out for this to go viral. I never set out to make something that made social media briefly buzz or to get written about in the more traditional press or to end up speaking to people on radio shows. It’s been fun.

In fact this has been the most successful thing on the internet I’ve ever done, which probably says something about what I do and about what people seem to like. But now the fuss has died down I’m glad to go back to being someone who makes maps for a living and writes the occasional blog post or PHP or JavaScript code which is usually maps based. The Vaguely Rude Places map turned my life upside down for a few brief weeks. Life goes on and it was good to get back to normal again. And now I leave you with the last word on the subject …

… which my old friend and ex-colleague from our time at Yahoo had to say. I think this tweet and the animated GIF of Bert and Ernie sums it all up rather neatly. You can see the full animated GIF here.

Thank you for listening

Of W3G, AGI And Other Geographical Acronyms

2012-11-23 16:20

I was at GeoMob's very first event, talking about Yahoo's Fire Eagle location brokering platform. Four years later and it was great to go back, see GeoMob still flourishing despite a brief hiatus in 2010, and meet up with a lot of old friends as well as meet some new ones.

And what an evening it was. Truly a veritable feast of maps. David Overton spoke about SplashMaps, his Kickstarter funded project to produce lightweight printable fabric maps for outdoors.

I didn't think it was possible to map happiness but apparently it is and George MacKerron showed how with the aptly entitled Mappiness project.

In November 2008 I was still working for Yahoo and a fledgling meetup event for people interested in maps, location, geo and mobile started up in London. It was, and still is, called GeoMob. I was at GeoMob's very first event, talking about Yahoo's Fire Eagle location brokering platform. Four years later and it was great to go back, see GeoMob still flourishing despite a brief hiatus in 2010, and meet up with a lot of old friends as well as meet some new ones.

And what an evening it was. Truly a veritable feast of maps. David Overton spoke about SplashMaps, his Kickstarter funded project to produce lightweight printable fabric maps for outdoors.

I didn't think it was possible to map happiness but apparently it is and George MacKerron showed how with the aptly entitled Mappiness project.

Staying with tangible maps, Anna Butler from Wellingtons Travel wowed the audience with her lovingly hand drawn map of the centre of London, styled after the glorious illustrated maps of yesteryear. Almost all the audience immediately added a copy of her map to their Christmas lists en masse.

And then there was James Cheshire who, along with Ollie O'Brien, runs Spatial Analysis and they'd produced Lives On The Line, a map of the life expectancy of Londoners along the path of the London Underground lines. Not only maps, but Tube maps. What more can you want?

Finally, standing between the audience and a thirst quenching GeoBeer or two, it was my turn. This wasn't my usual talk. No mapporn. Not even that many pithy or wryly amusing images. Just some raising of awareness for the W3G conference and the AGI. As usual, the slide deck is below and the notes follow after the break.

[scribd id=114211713 key=key-1fshphqj3fe65ojic5s7 mode=scroll]

Slide 2

So, hello, I’m Gary and I’m from the Internet. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo-technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Web & Community for Nokia’s Location and Commerce group. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Slide 3

There are URLs in this talk but this is the only URL in the entirety of this talk you might want to take a note of. Although if you go there right now, it’ll 404 on you, later today or tomorrow, this is where this slide deck, my notes and all the links you’ll be seeing will appear on my blog. That’s a lower case “l” and a lower case “h” at the end of the URL by the way ...

Slide 4

Before I get started I just want a moment to pay my respects to the first mapping API I ever used in anger. After being slated for closure in September of last year, the Yahoo! Maps API finally got turned off round about 1.30 PM London time today.

Slide 5

Now, despite being the aforementioned map addict, I'm not going to be talking about Apple's recent foray into the world of smartphone based digital mapping, tempting though it is.

Slide 6

It also looks like at least one member of the audience tonight was hoping to hear about Nokia's new Here maps platform.

Slide 7

But I'm not going to be talking about that either I'm afraid, though if GeoMob invites me back I'll be more than happy to do so.

Slide 8

Instead, my brief talk tonight starts off with "Hello, I'm Gary and I want to talk to you about W3G and the AGI" ...

Slide 9

So what's the best possible outcome from a statement like that from you, the audience?

Slide 10

It's probably something along the lines of "Ah. Yes. W3G. We've heard about that conference. Err. What's the AGI?".

Slide 11

That's the best outcode. But is it a realistic outcome?

Slide 12

That's probably along the lines of "The AGI? Oh yes. That's the GIS organisation. Nothing to do with me".

Slide 13

But actually there's a more probable outcome ...

Slide 14

It's along the lines of "Eh? W3G? That's the World Wide Web Consortium and you've spelt it wrong. AG what? Never heard of 'em".

Slide 15

So to change this probable outcome, it's time for some audience participation, which involves nothing more than sticking your hand up in the air.

Slide 16

Who here uses or works with maps? Maps APIs? Big Data? LBS? LBMS? Anything related to the concept of "geo"?

Slide 17

Despite the glorious maps we look at and work with, today's digital maps that we interact with are just the tip of the iceberg and what we all work with is really GI ... Geographic Information.

Slide 18

And this is where W3G comes in.

Slide 19

W3G is an (un)conference. The parentheses are important here. It's the unique combination of invited guest speakers and open format foocamp style unconference sessions.

Slide 20

We've probably all encountered what I call the conference curve of despair. Where you see a conference you'd like to attend but it's too expensive and it's not even in the country you live in, let alone the city you live in.

Slide 21

But W3G follows the unconference line of elation. It's free and it's local.

Slide 22

Next year will be W3G's fourth consecutive year.

Slide 23

W3G 2010's theme was the 3 W's of Geo, the where, the what and then when

Slide 24

In 2011 the theme was that there's more to Geo than merely just maps and check-ins.

Slide 25

But just because W3G is free to attend doesn't mean it's free to put on. We're able to do his through the cold hard cash that our sponsors put up and also because of W3G's parent ...

Slide 26

... the AGI ... the UK's Association For Geographic Information. The AGI is uniquely positioned to inform, react, connect and communicate on all matters relating to geographic information. From startups to global enterprises. From developers to business development. From local to central government. From classic GIS through to whatever the successor to Web 2.0 is called these days. I think it's a worthy endeavour. So much so that I sit on the AGI's governing council.

Slide 27

If you think this is a worthy endeavour and want to find out more, the interwebs can help.

Slide 28

W3G maintains a web site and a Twitter feed

Slide 29

And so does the AGI. Take a look. Get in touch. Thank you.

Geomob In A Coma

2010-05-07 10:19

Geomob, the highly successful mobile/geo/location/place fuelled meetup for geographers, both latent and professional is on hold. Possibly permanently. As Chris Osborne, the founder and organiser, said in an email to all members of the group:

After a wonderful couple of years doing geomob, and the people powered success that was WhereCampEU, I'm afraid to say that I am stepping down to make way for some new blood.

That does mean that there is an opportunity for one or more of you to step up and continue geomob in the spirit it started - free, non corporate, disrespectful and focused on people doing things.

Get in touch if you want to take on the mantle, until then geomob is on hiatus.

Its been a blast

To paraphrase both Douglas Copland and The Smiths, Geomob, the highly successful mobile/geo/location/place fuelled meetup for geographers, both latent and professional is on hold. Possibly permanently. As Chris Osborne, the founder and organiser, said in an email to all members of the group:

After a wonderful couple of years doing geomob, and the people powered success that was WhereCampEU, I'm afraid to say that I am stepping down to make way for some new blood.

That does mean that there is an opportunity for one or more of you to step up and continue geomob in the spirit it started - free, non corporate, disrespectful and focused on people doing things.

Get in touch if you want to take on the mantle, until then geomob is on hiatus.

Its been a blast

As both Chris and I found out, organising the WhereCamp EU event that took place in London earlier this year was an exhausting, if ultimately rewarding, task. Imagine doing that every other month?

I hope this isn't the last we hear of Geomob; it's been a major contributor to the Geo community in London and has, indeed, been a blast. It also gave me my very first Geo themed public speaking engagement and for that I'll always be both profoundly grateful and profoundly embarrased at my first stumbling efforts.

If you're thinking of taking up the role of Geomob organiser, I encourage you to do so; it's a battering, weary, exhausting and sometimes thankless task in the run up to a meetup. Then you see the audience waiting expectantly , watch the speakers, listen to the Q&A session and before you know it the evening's over in a rush; you won't regret it. Photo Credits: Roman Kirillov on Flickr.

Plenaries, Privacy and Place

2009-09-24 10:51

Day one of this year's AGI GeoCommunity conference saw the geoweb track draw a sizeable, if varying, share of the delegate audience; some sessions were crammed tight and reduced to standing room only whilst others had a slightly less cozy but still enthusiastic crowd.

Showing that Steven Feldman, the conference chair, started as he meant to continue, both the introductory plenaries were from people well known in the neogeography end of the geographic spectrum; Peter Batty and Andrew Turner.Peter started talking about the Geospatial Revolution and about how geo is now mainstream after starting off life as a disruptive technology. He touched on crowdsourcing, neogeography and how geospatial data is really just another data type. Due to Steven Feldman's over running welcome plenary, Andrew gave us a view on How Neogeography Killed GIS in record time; talking to an appreciative crowd on place, data, and how neogeographers see GIS professionals (answer: they don't). The geoweb track kicked off with Tim Warr, down on the programme as working for Microsoft, announcing "I'm not working for Microsoft as of yesterday" and then promptly launched into a talk on Cloud Computing and GIS; All Hype or Something Useful? and covered the good cloud (accessibility, cost and speed), the bad cloud (security, control and continuity) and the realistic cloud where you don't put all your clouds in one basket.I was particularly pleased to see that WOEIDs made their debut at GeoCommunity thanks to Terry Jones and Tom Taylor. Terry spoke about Using FluidDB for Storage and Location Aware Software Apps. If you haven't come across FluidDB before, think about it as a wiki database for the web, or as Terry says "Why don't our architectures let us work with information more flexibly?"; I strongly advise you look into this further and see what potential this platform has. WOEIDs were mentioned to a somewhat bemused audience but with a nice mention of my talk on this topic later today.Tom took this one step further and gave a well received and insightful talk on the way Flickr are creating crowd sourced neighbourhood definitions from geotagged photos, all tagged with WOEIDs naturally. Tom's Boundaries microsite shows just how powerful this can be, visualising and displaying neighbourhoods where no official definition exists, such as in London. Tom is a natural evangelist for this sort of data discovery process and caused some wry smiles when he added "I'm not an employee of Flickr or Yahoo! They haven't paid me to say this".I took part in the Privacy: Where Do We Care? panel on location and the implications for privacy which I've blogged about earlier.The day rounded off with a series of soapbox style georants; 15 slides, 20 seconds per slide and with the presenters having no control over the timing. Lots of themes were covered, some serious like Chris Osborne's ITO World product pitch, some ... interesting ... like the Pitney Bowes boy's geojokes, some semi disrespectful like my "Neo this and Paleo that ... it's all just Geo" (which will end up on my SlideShare account as soon as I find a net connection with some bandwidth) and some just rip roaringly hilarious like Ian Painter's paeon to palegeography which featured Martin Daly, Ed Parsons, Darth Vader and Isaac Newton. All of which were received by an increasingly well lubricated crowd from the soapbox arena, also know as the bar. Photo credit: myself and Jeremy Morley. Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

An Unscientific View of Location Usage in London

2009-01-27 10:50

Yahoo! Geo Technologies sponsored, London #geomob meetup coming up this week, this weekend I took a look at how many companies were actively using location within London. No easy task. After much web searching this weekend I took a trawl through those companies tagged as being in London in CrunchBase, the database of tech companies that TechCrunch operates.

Not strictly scientific but then again this is more about gauging a trend than being strictly empirical.

With the Yahoo! Geo Technologies sponsored, London #geomob meetup coming up this week, this weekend I took a look at how many companies were actively using location within London. No easy task. After much web searching this weekend I took a trawl through those companies tagged as being in London in CrunchBase, the database of tech companies that TechCrunch operates.

Not strictly scientific but then again this is more about gauging a trend than being strictly empirical.

Minor detour; in CrunchBase you can search for companies by location with London being flagged as a popular city. For the first page of London companies this works fine, with all the companies being shown within the boundary of the M25 on an embedded Google map. But on the second page it would seem that rather than geocoding the company address, CrunchBase are either doing keyword matching on tokenised text, picking up London Ontario or using the address of a parent company in the continental US. Whatever is happening it looks very odd when a company with an address in London WC2 is shown in Kansas.

The executive summary is that one of the prime drivers, and one presumes source of direct or indirect monetisation, is real eastate and property search, either as a direct USP for a site or as a side effect of a social network community. Another is that Google Maps API integration continues to dominate, both from a geocoding API perspective and as a geospatial presentation layer. I'm also particularly pleased to see innovators within this domain recognise the benefits and appeal of integrating with Fire Eagle, with the disclosure that I'm both a massive fan of Fire Eagle and work for the group within Yahoo! which provides the geotechnology which underpins the Fire Eagle platform.

Adviva

Online ad network offering geotargeted campaigns.

Archlight Media Technology

Operates Zoomf, a property search engine allowing searches tailored to a range of geo granularities from city to postcode district, though not to postcode sector or unit.

Cheapflights.com

Flight price search and comparison engine; allows geo search by country, city, resort and airport name and IATA code.

Chinwag

Not a location user per se but a media community platform which is particularly strong in championing LBS/LBMS and location in general.

Dopplr

Travel sharing platform with Fire Eagle integration.

Dothomes

Real estate search engine allowing searches tailored to range of granularities from city to postcode district, but again not to postcode sector or unit.

Mapness

Online travel journal sharing platform. Places/locations are geotagged within each entry via the Google Maps API.

My Neighbourhoods

Service allowing users to find out more about the area in which they live. The service would appear to support full postcode search, which implies PAF licensing, but searches are truncated to postcode district. Biased towards property search, which is supplied via Nestoria.

Rightmove

The "UK's number one property website"; property searching can be selected by county, city/town/village, borough/suburb, postcode district (again full postcode search is claimed but not implemented) and some POIs. Searches can also be constrained at a distance from the focus of the search.

Rummble

A location based discovery tool and social search platform which is integrated with Fire Eagle.

School of Everything

Social networking platform which attempts to match tutors with pupils by subject and location.

Where Are You Now?

Travel based social networking platform, which is directly competing with TripUp, HereOrThere and TravelMuse, allowing 'friends' met whilst travelling to keep in touch.

Here Or There?

Travel based social networking platform, using Yahoo! Maps based location identification and geotagging.

WorkHound

Job and recruitment inventory platform; offering job searches by county, city/town/village, borough/suburb and postcode district. Searches can also be constrained at a distance from the focus of the search.

Nestoria

Home and property search engine which aggregates content from property portals. Used by Google as a Maps showcase and Yahoo! as a YUI showcase. Nestoria has also recently launched where-can-i-live.com which uses OpenStreetMap as the preferred Maps API and presentation layer.

GeoPostcodes

A ZIP and postcode search engine which offers geocoded databases of localities, ZIPs (to district level), admin hierarchies and subdivisions and centroids in 60 countries. As an example the Jan 2009 update for the UK, with ~37,000 records is on offer for EUR 29.95/GBP 28.00/USD 39.00.

First #geomob Meetup

2008-11-28 09:29

Last night I presented a deck on Fire Eagle at the first London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup, held at Google’s UK headquarters in Victoria; the full write up is here.

Talking on Fire Eagle thumbnail Last night I presented a deck on Fire Eagle at the first London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup, held at Google’s UK headquarters in Victoria; the full write up is here.