Maps Per Second

There are a number of reasons why this blog has taken a bit of hiatus in terms of posts in the last few months. Probably the most important of which is that fact for once in the UK we seem to actually be having a summer, coupling this with my daughter forcing me to watch all of the Doctor Who’s since the reboot (honestly she’s only 4 but she’s quite persuasive) means I spend a lot of time outside on the bike or in explaining the fighting differences between Daleks, Cybermen and everything in between.

A slow spiral down the web plug

Secondly has been the slow demise of an excellent webhost, Webhost4Life. Whilst never the fastest host it has always been reliable for everything I’ve needed it for, especially for the price and features I paid for it. Recently though they decided to move to a new platform which I think this was due to the company being sold to another and a change of management went for a cheaper option. Initially it seemed good, the admin site was much improved and it seemed that things were going tickey-boo. Unfortunately as others have also found the support and stability of the site has gone way down. This blog was up and down more times than the Grand Old Duke of York, and even when it was up it was slower than an England footballer in front of goal. Finally having enough after 3 days of downtime I decided to pull the plug and move this blog over to a new host, Arvixe.

Not only has this host been a lot quicker for me, it obviously doesn’t seem to be as contested, but it also supports a variety of development platforms, from PHP to ASP.NET and whilst the admin pages aren’t as nice and I had to install WordPress 3 the manual way (actually it wouldn’t even upgrade on WebHost4Life so it was very broken) which took all of one hour including getting the data loaded from the old blog.

I wonder if it’s like changing banks, hosting is one of the most painful things to change once you have it all set up, once you’ve done it though, you wonder why you never did it before.

Moving On

Finally I had my final, final, final leaving do this week from the hallowed halls of ESRI(UK) esri(UK) ESRI UK. After 7 weeks of being at Google and one month of garden leave (people kept telling me there was no ‘–ing’) it was about time too. Moving on from a job where I talked to people about GIS technology to a company which I talk to people about GEO technology has been less of a shift than you might think. The complexity of solutions might be less, I haven’t yet touched SAP since I left (phew), but it’s still based around understanding how people’s workflows might fit and integrate with the respective technologies and API’s. Although it’s a lot more consumer-focused though, a bit like web mapping was with ESRI UK 8 years ago, I like it.

There is so many geo-technologies to learn at Google, from the server based Google Earth Enterprise to the cloud based Fusion tables, as well as the well know Google Earth and Maps. My first seven weeks I have have been like a kid in a candy store both metaphorically with the learning of new technology and physically in the micro kitchens (note to self, must do more exercise).

Expect to see much more Google Geo related tips and trips around here as I work the stack of technology in my sweetie bag. I won’t give up the esri thing just yet though and hope to do some integration work between the various systems and I’m giving a talk on integration next week

Now with added location and mobile

On a side note, whilst updating the site I implemented two new features. Firstly the move had broken my previous ‘where are you from’ section so I thought I’d update it with some Google Maps code. Unlike the previous attempt I decided to take the easy geolocation route and have the browsers (or gears) do it for me. I’ll discuss how this works in a subsequent post, it’s not tricky and takes about 10 lines of code, all of which you can get from the Google Maps v3 API page here. 

The second feature was the addition of the WPTouch plug-in which formats WordPress sites to work nicely on mobile devices like the iPhone and Android devices. The free version seems to work nicely for me, the pro version seems to have some nice features that one day I might find I need. Give it a go, it looks nice.

Let’s start this post off with a simple question. You do know what a spudger is don’t you? What you don’t and more importantly you don’t know how you could use one to take apart an iPad. Well you’ve come to  the wrong place to find out what and how. You can find the right place to do that at iFixit who are the self named ‘free repair manual that you can edit’ but actually are like a parts catalogue that shows you what you can do with technology and then gives you a link to buy the widgets that you need to do said task from their online shop. In this particular case, pun intended, they showed how to take apart an iPad using the implement in question, exhibit A one spudger.

This is a classic case of cross-subsidy of one product with another, the giving of a free guide encourages you to buy a new (you don’t already have one do you?) tool in order to perform the task. It’s one of many ways that companies are able to provide free software that for many users have absolutely no cost. Slightly different from completely free where there is no commercial gain by the supplier at all, these economic models have been growing on the web more and more since it started but was not begun there. The 2008 Wired article “Free! Why $0.00 is the future of business” gives an excellent overview about where free comes from and why it’s becoming increasingly important. In an almost prophetic manner, that article and the accompanying book “Free: The Future at a Radical Price”, expound on the nature of how you can seemingly get something for nothing, how people now expect it especially with software and services on the web and how as commercial companies you have to develop business models to embrace and/or compete with it. In the post bank bust world, with central and local government agencies, especially in the UK, having limited capital resource on which to blow on massive IT projects, free might not become part of the solution, it might become the only solution.

The book is itself free online and can be obtained here. It’s interesting to see how that the unabridged audio book is actually free also, but the abridged version costs money. Obviously anyone can read the book verbatim onto tape (old school) but the work it takes to create a meaningful abridged version contains value and is therefore costs money. Value that is in terms of the time is has taken to edit the book down and also the value it has to the attention challenged time poor iPod carrying commuter who can’t concentrate for six hours on anything. This is the same for the dead tree version also; the payback for being able to fall asleep with your new paper book in the bath is the cost of the pulping, printing and possibly delivery.

Free OS Data, finding a freemercial model.

In the GIS Industry in the UK, whilst there is a plethora of good software that is available for nothing (see here) it has always been the cost of data that has been one of the main talking points around the industry. The recent freeing of some of the data from the Ordnance survey, I know this makes it sound  like some sort of mystical quest that is because in some ways it has been, has now provided a good deal of authoritative spatial data for base maps, base geographies as well as gazetteers. Now that this data is ‘free’ it’s going to be interesting to see how people will try and add value to the datasets to realise value in the market place.

One of the main reasons behind freeing the data up was to encourage the use of geographic information within the general commercial landscape outside the Universities, Utilities and Governmental organisations that have been it’s natural home. How people will get access to this information is the next challenge, many of the business models outlined in Chris Anderson’s book will be applied to the delivery and usage of this data. Some will succeed and some will fail, but it will be interesting to see how many people outside the traditional geo-markets will be able to get access to this data and how they will interact with it for nothing using widely available tools, which themselves are free.

Who Pays?

Also it will be interesting to see how businesses can afford to cross subsidise this access, how they will be able to create money out of such offerings. in the past just the value add of supplying the data used to be enough to justify a fee, in today’s market, that might no longer be enough for many people, or at least some access should be available for nothing. One thing is for certain, in the current cash strapped world, there might not be many alternatives many people will want, or can afford, to start with.