New York Tourist attraction marketing with Google Earth

Interesting to see how commercial entities are using Google Earth in their business... one great use is marketing. This Google Earth NYC Tour Preps Visitors for the Real SKYRIDE Experience at Empire State Building. With a new Google Earth Tour, visitors get 3-D Modeling with 3-D renderings of major NYC tour attractions, from the Coney Island Cyclone to the Statue of Liberty; all a preview of the real NY SKYRIDE HD virtual experience, located on the 2nd floor of the Empire State Building, New York. In addition to the Google Earth Tour, the new NYSKYRIDE.com includes the ability to purchase NY Pass tickets, featuring access to some of the most exciting city entertainment New York has to offer, including an Empire State Building tour. http://www.skyride.com/Movie/googlemovie.html

Event of interest tonight in Boulder area - Service at Sea - ship-based Geo-technology assistance program

This comes on short notice to any of you in the Denver, Boulder area or Colorado. Tina Carey tipped me off about his one that you may have heard about last year at the ESRI UC. Tonight in Broomfield at the ESRI office, members of this interesting initiative will provide a synopsis/status of the Service at Sea project. This is a great opportunity to understand the purpose of the project, how it will operate, who is involved, and how you can get involved. Visitors will be treated toe stories and pictures from the proof-of-concept trip to Africa last summer. Date - Thursday (7:30PM) at ESRI in Broomfield, CO. Some background on service at sea - Service at Sea is a non-profit ship-based Geo-technology assistance program, launching from the ESRI User Conference (San Diego, June, 2007) this year. GIS experts, scientists, and teachers will sail around the world facilitating conservation and heritage organizations with geo-technology to support their missions, and to celebrate the importance of service to others. The journey will be chronicled and shared with K-12 teachers worldwide as downloadable teaching units, and live broadcasts via the Internet to augment social studies, geography, conservation, and technology curriculums. See www.serviceatsea.org for more and be sure to contact their info email for details and to let them know you want to attend. I'll be there so be sure to look for me and say hi ;0)

A new GISuser How to - creating heat maps and a heatmap API for google maps

This tip for a how to reference comes to me via Geospatial Analytics Inc. A heat map is a graphical representation of three dimensional data (X, Y and Value) on a two dimensional surface by using colors. How can I create a heat map? Perhaps you've asked this... here's one clever solution and an API thats freely available for you to use. Using the HeatMap API users can use it over the Internet or as a .NET DLL to run in your environment. You can also integrate heat map images into Google Maps or other GIS systems. Check out details of this heat map solution and a pointer to the API at http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/11371/ See also http://www.heatmapapi.com/

AWhere from Location Intelligence event

More interesting news coming from Location Intelligence event. There's definitely some cool announcements coming out the the San Fran event put on by Directions Media. What I find cool is hearing from companies that I'm not familiar with... like this morning word from AWhere about an enterprise mashup solution. Simply put, AWhere’s powerful data integration design allows users to create maps to visualize their data. The company provides solutions focuse on government, agriculture, and business users. See http://www.awhere.com - I'm looking forward to hearing more announcements that come out of this event.

Web 2.0 conference reminder and blog of interest

A reminder that O'reilly Media's Web 2.0 Expo is underway this week in San Fran... if you're interested in the latest developments with Web 2.0 then the O'reilly event weblog is a must read. See http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/web_20_expo/

Article of interest - Mashups: The What and Why

This interesting article from Apex devnet provides some insight on developing a mashup using the slaesforce.com platform... The second article in this series presents several concrete techniques for building mashups. By the end of the second article you will be in a position to comfortably create your own mashups on the Salesforce platform. The article looks closely at the Google maps API, using AJAX, and other APIS... http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Mashups:_The_What_and_Why Of interest, some of the most popular APIs for mashups according to programmable web include:

Google maps 50%

Flickr 10%

YahooMaps! 4%

Virtual Earth 3%

See more at http://www.programmableweb.com/apis

Looking for data or tools for your mashup? Try some of the following:

Yahoo! Geocoding service - http://developer.yahoo.net/maps/rest/V1/geocode.html

USGS Geonames - http://www.geonames.org/export/

USGS Elevation Service - http://gisdata.usgs.gov/XMLWebServices/TNM_Elevation_Service.php

A huge blow to GITA Conference... ACSM bows out of next year's co-location in Seattle

This one is definitely bad news as we just received official word from GITA that ACSM has been forces to postpone the co-location of their annual event with GITA... recall the 2 events were planning on being co-located next spring in Seattle. According to the PR, ACSM has a major conflict with another industry event and won't be able to locate with GITA for the scheduled event. This is a bummer as its no secret that GITA Conference attendance (and exhibitors) has bee steadily declining. The event is always a fantastic show with terrific speakers, presenters, and exhibitors while it has become known to many in the GIS space as the "utilities GIS show". After attending the recent event in San Antonio I was disappointed to see the decline in attendance but was lifted by the announcement that GITA would co-locate with ACSM... after all, I've never been to ACSM as it typically conflicts with GITA! GITA Conference 31 will proceed as planned in Seattle next year MArch 9-12, 2008 - see www.gita.org

Virginia Tech Looked into text messaging alerts last year - here's one mass SMS alert solution

One thing that has gone through my mind today (and likely yours too) is why can't an institution like Virginia Tech implement an emergency response system based on text messaging... isn't it a no-brainer given the level of of penetration of cell phones? This isn't to knock the response or second guess the response by officials, however, it is to bring awareness to the technology that does exist. This morning I featured details of one such solution - OmniAlert. OmniAlert specializes in mass communications for sending time-sensitive information to large groups of people. The web-based service requires no additional hardware or software, is extremely easy-to-use, and is completely self-administered by each client and their subscribers. Now here's a chilling news item that was reported last year on Roanoke.com http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/wb/wb/xp-81392 ... the story was titled Tech looks to tap into text messaging. The story details how VT was considering following the lead of other Colleges by implementing a text messaging notification system. The need for such an alert system came out of last year's evacuation of the student center at Tech due to a manhunt. Obviously one problem with mobile alerts is that cell phones are banned from use in most classrooms, however, it would be a viable use for those in transit or perhaps between classes. Moreover, the notification system provides users (students in this case) with a number of options for receiving notices, including text message, email, IM, RSS feed, email, Blackberry, pager, and many more. For more on this see http://www.lbszone.com/content/view/1842/2/ - See also http://www.omnilert.com - another such system that is in use by many institutions and provides mobile alerts is e2Campus - see http://www.e2campus.com/notification_services.htm

Tea map! shared with photobucket from smartphone

Photobucket Album

This image has been uploaded fron photobucket. I was testing this image storage utility at photobucket.com - think flickr. The service is free, with a pro option and enables users to upload images and video from PC, email, or mobile (phone). This image was sent via SMS from my phone then shared using the share with blogger option. There's a number of options provided for sharing including Typepad, myspoce, blogger, and many others. I do think the image does need to be shrunck to a manageable size when blogging (ie (640x480 max) but overall the service is pretty simple so far. See http://www.photobucket.com - this image captured at the Celestial Seasonings factory in boulder, CO. The map shows tea growing regions that supply the company with product

Design your own smartphone and win a custom Nokia N76

Here's something rather cool from the nseries crew at Nokia. This latest contest invites users to create their own, personalized N76 smartphone. Use the application provided, download the design template, customize it, upload, and see your very own, personalized smartphone... if Nokia likes it you could win a smartphone created by you! See http://www.nseries.com/index.html?l=campaigns,n76,yourtalent#l=campaigns,n76,yourtalent