The young company Geofeedia offers aggregating capabilities of a new kind – assembling data from various social media sources such as Instagram, Twitter, Picassa and others – representing that data on a nice visual map with pins. Each source has a specific pin so that users can see the source and location of the data.
Geofeedia aggregates data from various social media sources such as Instagram, Twitter, Picassa and others - representing that data on a nice visual map with pins. Each source has a specific pin so that users can see the source and location of the data.
Knowing where a person storm shelter is located is critical to being able to locate victims trapped in them after a tornado like the one that tore through Franklin County, Alabama on April 27th, 2011. A new GIS mapping system will help locate victims trapped in personal storm shelters.
On Monday Apple introduced a new version of its mobile operating system for iPhones and iPads that will bring a host of new features, including maps that let users soar over a three-dimensional rendering of a city, according to an article in The New York Times.
As was mentioned in this blog of a pre-announcement of Google Earth for mobile “(Pre-announcement of Google Earth for mobile made at Google event”) last week, the new map software replaces Google data with Apple’s own mapping system. This is a big step for a company that has considered Google a close partner up until now. Since Apple introduced the iPhone, it has relied on Google data to drive the mapping software. When Google released its Android platform, however, relationships between the two companies began to disintegrate. Not surprisingly as Android is the top mobile operating system in the world, putting Apple and Google head to head in several different markets.
Pre-announcement of new features for Google Maps and Google Earth for mobile platforms was made yesterday at the “New Dimension of Google Maps” event. These features aren’t available to the public yet, but possibly announced as a precursor to the Apple iOS6 event next week. It is expected that Apple will announce that Google Maps will no longer be the default mapping application on iPhones. Since Apple has been acquiring companies and building their own mapping applications, they will be offering new mapping applications that will compete with what is offered on the Android phone. This may benefit users ultimately.
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 City of Boston and a company called Innocentive recently teamed up to develop a smartphone app that allows drivers in the city to help track and predict where potholes develop. Much like the one developed by CitySourced, the Street Bump app keeps track of bumps while driving, as well as their location, and then sends this data on to the city so that it can address repairs quicker and hopefully, more efficiently.
Residents of Longview, TX (reported on earlier this week – “There’s an app for that – citizen pothole reporting”) with smartphones can get a new mobile app called “CitySend“ created by CitySourced (didn’t credit that company in the first blog) to inform public works officials of their public issues. The mobile app, unveiled by Longview GIS Manager Justin Cure, allows users to take photos, record video and audio of a problem, and automatically provide GPS coordinates. After the report is submitted, users can track all reported problems on a map as well.
This week, a smartphone app will be made available to the citizens in Longview, Texas, where pictures and video can help the city address issues such as potholes that need repairing. Starting yesterday, citizens could log on to their smartphones, take a photo or video of a pothole or other problem in the city, note location and send it to the city.
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) membership has voted to adopt the candidate OGC Open GeoSMS Standard as an official OGC standard.
What the OGC Open GeoSMS Standard provides developers with is an extended Short Message Service (SMS) encoding and interface to facilitate communication of location content between different LBS (Location-Based Service) devices or applications. SMS is an open text communication service most commonly used in phone, web and mobile communication systems for the exchange of short text messages between fixed line or mobile phone devices. According to the press release issued today, the lightweight and easy to implement Open GeoSMS Standard facilitates interoperability between mobile applications and the rapidly expanding world of geospatial applications and services that implement OGC standard interfaces, encodings and best practices.
email
Facebook
Twitter
RSS Feed
