Being part of the generation that set-up the racks of dial-up modems that made the Internet happening in +1995 - we never asked the question "Who is the president of the Internet?" Apparently some did.

More than 10 years later - we learned our first lessons how to be part of the network effect - sharing stuff online with friends and co-workers is part of our daily live. Having a deeper look into organizational structures - like in large corporations - it still looks like time has stood still - moving Word documents from A to B - reviewed by C to be approved from F together with M and Y. The ability to decentralize the decision making and using "open systems" to keep transparency among the collective, are goals I try to propagate.

Reading "The Starfish and the Spider" gives a solid overview and a lot of real-world examples how organizations can learn to adapt working methodes to be better prepared for the future. Reacting on trends - ability to outperform new competition - scale operations with less over-head. Some industries like in music, advertisement, newpapers have seen dramatic change in the last few years - and I'm sure we will see more happening.

I remember a speech I gave in 2002 - I use the sentence "Banking is essential, banks are not" (I think it's a quote from B. Gates) to visualize what possible could happen - PayPal isn't yet there! (though I heard, that in US people already use PayPal to pay their rent)

Posted by Cedric at 6/19/2007 12:27:00 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

A less technical - but rather entertaining speech about trends in web mapping (aka Neogeography). Basically a summary of interesting stories and links I collected during my stay at Where 2.0 conference this year. This speech has been held at a customer & partner event from Namics in Zürich (Switzerland).



Jürg blogged a summary while I was speaking - more on the namics blog (in German).

A special thanks to Andrew Turner and Danny from upnext.com.

Posted by Cedric at 6/15/2007 08:46:00 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

As I had the pleasure to attend the Where 2.0 conference end of last month - I now have the duty to speak about it. On June 14th I'm going to give a speech about trends in the web mapping space at two occasions:

• at the Namics Mapping event in the afternoon: See upcoming
  
• and before lunch (11:30) at the local.ch office in Oerlikon.

If you are around - feel free to pop in.

I'm going to touch these topics:

• emerging geo web
• local content matters
• DIY mapping
• advanced data visualization on maps

The slides are going to make random appearance after the speech on this blog.

Tags: speech mapping where20

Posted by Cedric at 6/11/2007 06:54:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

How to best view large size photos like panorama shots in a browser? - make use of the same technique that made browsing maps fun on the web. I converted a few shots made in Iceland two years ago as custom Google Map layers - that allows nice panning and zooming into the picture.

Click on the preview picture to load the full-window view:

360° View: On the road to Þingvellir

Gullfoss waterfall

Gullfoss waterfall with rainbow

Cookbook

Photos taken with Olympus u-miniS (responsible for the bad detail quality!), stitched together with Calico - then crunched with the GMapImageCutter and brought near you by the Google Map API.

Tags: iceland panorama googlemaps waterfall

Posted by Cedric at 6/10/2007 01:18:00 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

Years ago web sites started to providing geo personalized content based on the geo location of the users IP. While it works fine for countries and big cities (try your IP it here) - it fails to be precise enough to provide distinguished local services - like mapping, directions and local search.

After having experimented with IP based look-up on local.ch (and decided not to go on with it for now), we started another experiment: Extending the browser to know the exact position and providing this information to the site. Opt-in of course - always with the users permission.

Christian Stocker from Liip developed a Firefox extension called "WhereAmI" to do following:

• get the exact user location via location sources (plazes.com, connected GPS or manually by provided an address)
• provide the location to configured web sites (google maps, yahoo maps, flickr, local.ch)
• it should be possible to add further sites - like user scripts for the greasemonkey extension

More information about the WhereAmI extension and download can be found on the Liip Wiki - source code here

The final solution should be a core extension to the browser, that provides a standard API for web sites to access the geo location of the user. The browser then having plug-ins that allows location providers/sources to hook-in and provide the necessary data. Others have been discussing about that - e.g. here and here.

The guys from Loki are developing a similar solution like the WhereAmI extension - based on their proprietary WiFi positioning system. Right now it only works in large cities in US - I have been told last week at the Where 2.0 conference that they are starting to cover Europe as well this year. I'm looking forward to test it as soon as it's available in my region.

We need to find a standard way of doing geo location API in browsers - and then move on and adapt it for mobile browsers too. And yes.. the user should always be in control and opt-in to provide his location. For now, an browser extension is the right way to show people the possibilities. I welcome everybody to join the experiment and drive the idea.

Update June 7th: There is a working group that has been setup recently that focuses on creating a standard API for geo location in the browser - join at locationaware.org

Tags: geolocation whereami firefox where20

Posted by Cedric at 6/05/2007 10:12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post