It’s been a busy year so far and therefore my posting has been woefully slow. Much have my time has been working with Google Earth Builder. This provides a new way of distributing geospatial information from Google into all sorts of clients, providing a true geospatial platform as a service without the need to worry about how many servers or virtual servers you need to support your clients, allowing GIS experts to worry about geospatial information science rather than geospatial information systems. There will be more information coming out about this platform over the next few months and I hope I...

I’ve been increasingly remiss on the updating of this blog, which I’ll hopefully remedy over the next few weeks. I don’t have any more excuses apart from the fact that I’ve been on a never end whirl of meetings, conferences (as delegate and booth babe!), training courses (run by me) and the never ending search for people to help me out. I’ve also been coming to grips with the never ending volume of innovation and products coming on stream at Google, absorbing their nature and understanding their impact on enterprise geospatial. What no PC? The other fact is prior to...

The term GIS is one that tries to balance two very different disciplines, that of Geographic knowledge and  processes with information systems, that of the computer systems and processing power that allows the computer provision of maps and spatial analysis that was never possible before. As the software and systems have become more and more sophisticated it has often been the fact that GIS has seemed to be more about the IS component and less about the G. This is especially true with the advent of server software for providing map and analysis functionality that can be deployed on the intranet...

Part of me chuckled at the so called hack that affected Twitter today, not that something like this couldn’t affect any site (although given the simple and well known nature of the attack, it really shouldn’t have hit a site like Twitter) but it did remind me of the days in the early 00’s when this sort of thing was common place and the sort of problems we all had to face when coding sites in that era. What did strike me was whilst I did notice it (whilst random JavaScript tweets are always fun doing the same one over and over again is sort of labouring any joke) I wasn’t affected by it. Why...

Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you tell yourself you don’t want something, how much you know an item isn’t really worth the money your shelling out for it, how my you think that getting a device mainly for browsing the web on the sofa is an unnecessary luxury, in the end you end up opening the wallet and handing over money to someone who is being far to smiley in an Apple store. In fact you do this and wait in line, or in my case shambolic huddle, for the privilege. Come on, I was only there to buy a grown up iPhone, or was I? Shouldn’t there be angels or something? I think angels seem to...