WASHINGTON — Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.
The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations.
–The New York Times, March 31, 2012
Article source: OreillyMedia
Mathew Lippincott and Stewart Long gave this presentation at the 2012 Where Conference in San Francisco this week.
Mathew Lippincott and Stewart Long are founding members of the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS).
Mathew is an artist and designer who has worked in technology education for eight years. He became involved in Grassroots Mapping through materials testing and the design of low-cost balloons and kites. In addition to developing flying machines, he supervises the production of kits and other materials. He is also a founder of Cloacina, Cewas startup. Cloacina is currently developing educational materials with ReCode:Oregon’s Ecological Sanitation Campaign andPNCA’s Collaborative Design MFA Program.
Article source: OreillyMedia
Ben Milne gave this presentation at the 2012 Where Conference in San Francisco this week.
Ben Milne is a payments outsider and founder of Dwolla, a new payment network based in the heart of the Silicon Prairie. The company continues to disrupt Visa and Mastercard by building useful and innovative online and mobile products on top of its open and low-cost payment network.
Article source: OreillyMedia
Scott Kveton gave this presentation at the 2012 Where Conference in San Francisco this week.
Scott brings 15 years of experience building technology, developing business strategy and leading engineering teams with companies like Amazon.com, Rulespace, JanRain and now Urban Airship. Urban Airship works with thousands of brands using their leading mobile messaging and monetization platform. Scott was the co-founder of the Open Source Lab helping open source projects like Mozilla, Linux, Apache, Drupal grow into mainstream usage. Scott was an active supporter of open web standards having co-founded the OpenID and Open Web Foundations. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
Article source: OreillyMedia
Leah Busque gave this presentation at the 2012 Where Conference in San Francisco this week.
A true visionary, Leah originated the phrase, “service networking,” a now industry-wide term describing the productive and service power of a web-based social networked community. In the fall of 2008, while trying to figure out how to juggle dinner out with her husband, Kevin, and buying dog food for her 100-pound yellow labrador retriever, Kobe, Leah’s flash of inspiration resulted in her registering the RunMyErrand.com domain name from her iPhone, and mapping the entire business model in her head prior to their meal. Eighteen months later, the company is flourishing, and has expanded and evolved into TaskRabbit.com.
Article source: OreillyMedia
Thomas Goetz gave this presentation at the 2012 Where Conference in San Francisco this week.
Thomas Goetz is the executive editor of WIRED Magazine, and author of the book The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine. Since Goetz joined WIRED in 2001, the magazine has been nominated for 23 National Magazine Awards and has won nine times, including the top award for General Excellence three times. His cover stories at WIRED have been selected for both the Best American Science Writing and the Best Technology Writing anthologies. Goetz holds a Master’s degree in English from the University of Virginia and a Master of Public Health degree from the University of California, Berkeley.
Article source: OreillyMedia
Noah Iliinsky gave this presentation at the 2012 Where Conference in San Francisco this week.
Noah Iliinsky is the co-author of Designing Data Visualizations and technical editor of, and a contributor to, Beautiful Visualization, published By O’Reilly Media.
The future of mobile is location! ………. The future of computing is mobile!
Two bold statements. We don’t necessarily believe them yet. But one would be foolish to ignore them offhand. What do these have to do with our question: “Should we retire the term GIS”?
GIS deals with location. Why not simply use this universally understood term when we sell our geo-technology solutions .. and drop GIS altogether? As the need for location technology grows, lets begin to use the language all can understand. GIS is a niche term understood by geo-nerds, often in the public sector (nothing like a good generalization).
Article source: TechSoupVideo
Philanthropy is making growing use of the latest data visualization tools to analyze and share information. To hear about tools that your organization could utilize, watch this webinar on Mapping Philanthropy: How You Can Use Data Visualization to Do Good.
During this webinar, you would hear the Foundation Center’s George Ford and Jake Garcia discuss visual grantseeking tools and solutions. You would look at how grantseekers can use the interactive maps and charts in Foundation Directory Online – the Foundation Center’s grantseeking database for nonprofits – to identify prospective funders. Next, the webinar turns your attention to several data visualization tools developed by the Foundation Center and other organizations that showcase how the philanthropic community has responded to a variety of issues.
This webinar is appropriate for nonprofits and libraries wanting to know more about data visualization and grantseeking.
I interviewed Jason Sims, Director of Marketing at Intergraph at the ASPRS Conference last month. Jason talks about the British Transport Police using the Hexagon products to manage images from 1000’s of cameras installed in London to keep the British Railways and Olympics safe. He proudly proclaims, “Erdas Apollo is a solution helping power the Olympics”.
Reportlinker.com announces that a new market research report is available in its catalogue: Utility Geographic Information Systems
GIS Tools and Workflow Applications for AEC and Operations: Market Analysis and Forecasts
The electrical grid consists of power generation, transmission, distribution, and customer assets that literally cover the face of the earth. Ultimately, the smart grid is all about awareness of the situation of these assets in order to facilitate optimal performance and effectively anticipate and respond to events that might disrupt performance. A geographic information system (GIS) is the method by which utilities capture, store, manipulate, analyze, and manage geospatially referenced information about these assets. Geodata types relevant to electric utilities might include everything from land-based data, streets, ownership/real estate, vegetation, network topology, GPS location data, census data, and many others.
In a session entitled “10 killer apps,” at Esri DevSummit 2012 last week in Palm Springs, CA, Mansour Raad @mraad and Sajit Thomas @spatialAgent show 10 new beta apps developed using Esri technology. The demo in this video shows a UAV shark driven by a Flex Mapping app, the shark is filled with helium and being “flown” around the room powered by a cool Flex mapping app.
David Cardella gives an overview of ArcGIS Runtime SDK for iOS and ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Android and how they can be used to extend the reach of your GIS to mobile devices. He gave this presentation at the 2012 Esr Federal GIS Conference in Washington DC in February, 2012.