jake olsen

Steve Jobs:

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” said Jobs, referring to the concept of any phone owner writing applications for it. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

What is Cingular’s network built on? Duct tape and fishing line?

With open source phones starting to spring up, Apple has a big opportunity here they are going to miss. This closed source approach is why Apple stinks IMHO. DRM is another issue, but that discussion is for another day.

Anselm Hook:

to me the cellphone space still look like a witches brew of free agents competing over scraps without any real awareness of a bigger opportunity… if they could get their act together over the basic idea of making those 64 bits of information free… we’d all tra la la through flowery fields of bliss i am sure.

playing in somebody elses sandbox, with their image of prescribed activities is not fun…

For further reading, walled gardens and the iPhone are a hot topic in this months Geowankers discussion.

–jake

It’s time to hack some ubiquitous apps.

Today, MetroFi launched their 1 Mbit service in Portland. Premium non-advertising service is 2 Mbit and is $20 per month.

I logged into the network downtown from my phone. I only got to the login screen because I was driving, so I didn’t test the service yet. I could see the headline.

Free WIFI causes First Death in Portland

I didn’t know there was a local partnership with Microsoft, this should be interesting for local ads. I wonder if they’re doing WIFI router location based services?

Here’s an image of their router locations:

And these things are all over the streetlights:

Hell, even Om writes about it.

The PDC has the details on the project here.

–jake

I’m back from Where 2.0 and thinking through all the ideas and projects presented. Google’s Geo Developer Day was fun, but the interesting bits came out in the conference and some BOF’s.

I was most enthused about the launch of MetaCarta Labs and specifically, their GeoParser API, which we, at Platial, will be integrating soon as we’re fortunate enough to share wonder kid developer, Chris Schmidt.

–jake

(modified) Oh yeah, I won this phone after the Pixie (Scavenger) Hunt (photo by Hive and Chris Schmidt):

DJ P said “there is no such thing as a mashup” first about DJ’ng, and with the ever-so-popular Grey Album by Dangermouse, the word was tagged, and started being used in the technology realm.

DJ’s first called the blending of two songs ‘mixes’, or ‘a mix.’ It’s a very basic part of DJ’ing that, to some, was not deserving of a new title to make it more than it was.

Is walking a ‘mashup’ of legs and concrete? Do we call a computer a ‘mashup’ of a processor, memory, and a hard drive?

These are simply tools. These tools can be used to create new systems and products we’re still dreaming of.

Specifically, Google Maps is a tool to display geographic information on a map. It’s a nice service which also allows us to navigate that map. We are appreciative of Google for providing a nice API. Other APIs allow us to extract and interact with data (Flickr, Yahoo everything, EVDB, Amazon, ESRI, etc), allowing for a deeper interaction with humanity.

We are people using tools to help us interact with and shape our world. To call it a mashup makes it a passing fad.

–jake

Congratulations Adrian!

You’ve done a great job and created a very useful tool. I wonder if Google will steal you?

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The Web site chicagocrime.org, an innovative overlay of the city’s reported crimes with Google’s online mapping technology, today won the $10,000 Grand Prize in the Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.

The site, created as a free public service by online journalist Adrian Holovaty with design input by Wilson Miner, was credited with “setting a new standard for interactive journalism.” Chicagocrime.org allows users to search by the type of crime, the street and neighborhood, or the date and pinpoint the location on a satellite map. One can even track crimes that occur en route to work.

“It is one journalist’s ability to see all the pieces and put them together,” the Batten judges said, “but every city should provide this as a public service.”

Full press release

–jake

Microsoft opens APIs. Good for them, not as late to the game as their entrance into the INTERNET, but still on the heels of some very important development.

They must improve their goodwill with Web developers. Do they still market Frontpage?

Full text

In the geosphere:

Also next week, the company will announce a free commercial license to use a JavaScript “control” to display data from its Virtual Earth mapping service.

–jake

This is really really great, kudos to Portland!

The GIS/PortlandMaps.com team at the City of Portland is proud to announce our new dynamic mapping service with 25 data layers including:

- Address / Property information
- Elevation maps
- Crime (9 layers)
- Zoning
- Hazard (7 layers)
- Sewers
…

http://www.portlandmaps.com/google.cfm

Using ESRI GIS tools on the backend, and KML’s NetworkLink technology, we have been able to transfer much of our existing online map services that are available on PortlandMaps.com into Google Earth. All the layers in our new GE service are served live from our existing SDE database. GroundOverlay layers are rendered on-the-fly using ArcServer.

We are excited about the new Google Earth technology, and it’s ability to be extended using KML. Thank you Keyhole/Google for supplying this great new GIS client and making it free.

PortlandMaps.com Team
City of Portland

posted from http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/83386/page/0