Welcome to edition#2 of my Carnival of the Geospatialists and a short recap of some items of interest from the GIS/GeoGeek community. Please note, if these updates persist, I’m wide open to submissions and suggestions to feel free to ping me @gletham to make suggestions.
Speaking to a crowd is something you either love or you fear… there’s very little middle ground. To help you out a little I picked up on a decent read in Inc Magazine offering up some tips to help with your presentations in 2012. In a fun, top 10 format the popular biz mag offers up their 10 Zen Ways to Nail your next presentations. Some of may favorites… Breathe, Dare to be Silent, and Begin, Be brief, be seated. Enjoy this read from Inc.
In his typical eloquent style, Brian Timoney shares his predictions and tips for 2012 from his Mapbrief blog with Timoney’s Geo "Hot" List for 2012. In this fun read, Brian shares some cool links that I guarantee you haven’t stumbled onto yet and he also shares pointers to very useful Geo technologies that he feels you and your orgs should consider embracing. In particular, he points us to some tools like TileMill, MapBox, GDAL and PostGIS, a tool I’m not familiar with in Raphael, and complements the read with some excellent examples. Thanks to Brian for sharing – See Details HERE
Team Jordan Romero is in the Antarctica and updating the world along the way – http://www.jordanromero.com. Fifteen-year-old Jordan Romero left his home in Big Bear, California, on Dec 12, 2011, and is on a journey to Vinson Massif, Antarctica’s tallest mountain. During the climb, Romero and his team are using an Esri app to provide updates that include their GPS location, weather, and elevation. The app integrates with social media sites and supports the 7 Summits Challenge, in which Romero encourages others to participate in his climb by logging their own miles running, walking, cycling, or swimming. Esri has partnered with GeoPro LBS Inc. to develop a service layer to capture text, e-mail, and GPS coordinates from the satellite phone every five minutes and store the data on Esri ArcGIS software. Jordan is providing live phone casts via ipadio along the way as they continue their attack on the summit. (See example http://ipad.io/nM8) Follow along @TeamJordanR
Young GeoGeek David Runneals @iageokid is always sharing loads of goodies with the geo twitter sphere, recently David dropped a birthday greeting on me using a very cool service I’d never seen before. The greeting came via a Google maps API driven service called http://www.geogreeting.com. The app took me on a quick image tour around the Earth displaying interesting images that spelled out a personal greeting – very clever and fun! You can see the greeting here
A good one from a techie friend of mine, not a Geo geek, however, Mike is pretty Geeky (he runs the Mobile Fanatics website themobilefanatics.com) and savvy about mobile technology! Mike shared some fine last minute tips for those interested in grabbing a tablet over the holiday season including his top 5 deals on tablets including deals on a Toshiba Thrive, Galaxy Tablet, and a sweet deal on a Nook Android tablet… fun stuff! Check it out HERE
I was referred to this resource by Brian Timoney and found it very interesting. Facebook intern Paul Butler takes a look at some amazing visualizations (see below) created by using the localities of his friendships. the result is an impressive graphic and a longing for more! Check out how Paul connects his FB friendships and their moves with great circle arcs to result in an amazing graphic depiction – see the facebook dev blog
Useful tips via the Esri dev blog on getting started with the Esri Runtime SDK for Android… With ArcGIS for Android now available, this article discusses what steps are needed to set up your Android development environment to work with Runtime. To follow along, you will need an Android 2.2+ powered device to test your application – See Details HERE
Skip Cody (@SkipCody) who’s always got a ton of great tips to share on Twitter (you need to follow him if you’re into Geo) reminded me of a fine update from the GotGeoint blog. In typical year end fashion the GotGeoint gang shares their picks for maps of the year. You’ll find graphics of the fb visualization map (seen above) as well as a very cool Tsunami wave height map (below) and the popular River naming map you may have seen – check it out here
And because the Tablet is likely the HOT item of the year, some more useful tidbits on the tablet ecosystem from a fine resource at Retrevo. The gang shares some research and interesting discussion on this huge market… By our calculation, over 100 tablets were introduced since the iPad however, we defy even the most tech-savvy of you to name more than a few of them . What was so wrong with the competition that it failed to make any inroads in the tablet market, at least until the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook came along? Read on HERE
Dale Loberger @daleloberger shared an interesting link to an article on theStreet as they tackled the topic of LightSquared. What’s nice about some of the more mainstream tech sites like this taking on the topic is that they seem to break things down into a language that we can understand! Honestly, until now the constant back and forth techno ramblings of Lightsquared then a PR reciprocation via the coalition to save GPS and others has really confused many and in my mind there’s been so much of it over the past 10 months that many following the topic are left with many questions or are simply downright stumped or clueless! Thanks Dale for sharing this short but sweet article in TheStreet
Wnat More? See also Carnival Of The Geospatialists #1 – Musings and Down-Right Cool Things Shared by the Geo Faithful
Some Tweets of interest from the Geo Twitter-Sphere
- @techvibes See News Break All Over the World in Real-Time on This Live Map
- @neilljobe Map made of computer scraps http://goo.gl/MG3QQ Beautimous!
- @skipcody Updated Terms of Use prevent using Bing Maps with 3rd party road layer http://bit.ly/deM1Mz #maps #gis #geolocation
- @daeaves Another really nice map of bike accident using ICBC data by @AnthonyNSmith http://bit.ly/vUwd3E #opendata
- @iageokid new @nasa sat gets awesome visible IR imagery of Earth!
- @twbell Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works
