The Spatial Miscellany

The exquisite Virtual London model developed at CASA, won’t be appearing in Google Earth anytime soon, read more at DigitalUrban.

This article in the Times newspaper caught my eye this morning…

“The English Premier League is suing YouTube (Google), the video-sharing website, for alleged copyright infringement.”

Here in the UK, football is our national game, we love it – we just don’t get to watch it. Rupert Murdoch’s Sky television stumped up a billion pounds for exclusive rights to the Premiership (EPL), so the only way you can watch the football is to subscribe to Sky at the princely sum of £60 a month. Logging on to YouTube and watching a game for free is an attractive alternative, and a significant threat to viability of the Sky business model. If they lose their subscribers, they can’t afford the billion pound Premiership deal, they risk going bust – so they go to court.

Here we have parallels with another Google ‘business’…Google Earth. Google purchase their imagery from third party companies, on the assumption it will be used for non-commercial use…but Google seem content to let every man and his dog download Google Earth and ‘use’ the imagery for free. Great Stuff. But such acceptance of breech of copyright, will surely threaten the viability of the imagery providers business model, they will no longer be able to afford the plane, the camera or other overheads, they will risk going bust – is it not plausible, that one day, they too will have to go to court?

Ok, now I know we’re gazing into a crystal ball here, but this is a blog post…

Sky has a market capitalisation of £10 Billion, an imagery provider…maybe £20 Million…orders of magnitude difference. How much will a court case cost Google, a court case they are likely to lose? Much less than buying Sky, but enough to make purchasing an imagery provider good business sense.

Well it’s been six months since the Ordnance Survey (OS) announced a beta of their Openspaces API and we’ve heard no more? Attendees at the UK Geospatial Mashup event held at the OS last October where treated to a sneak preview – it looked good, a Google Maps like API using OS data (slides are online at the OGC). This is just the kind of service the UK public deserve, and in my opinion, the type of service the OS needs to start providing if they are to fully capitalize on future opportunities and compete in a fast changing market place.

Chinese whispers at the Mashup event last October suggested it would go live within six months…or not at all. Hopefully it’s just around the corner, pending execution, and their CTO joining Google was just a coincidence.

Andre Lewis has just written a book for Apress, ‘Google Maps with Rails and Ajax: from Novice to Professional’ (or something very similar). He presented some of the discoveries he made whilst writing the book at the Googleplex just before Christmas. Fortunately, Google have just stumped up $2 billion to make videos available online, so you can view his presentation here…Ruby And Google.

I really liked the video, he touches on some of the functionality not available with the Google Maps API ‘out of the box’, namely…

• How to ‘display’ thousands of markers on the same map
• How to build your own geo-coder
• How to build you own custom ‘Zoom In’ control for Google Maps

Google yesterday released Google Maps for Windows Mobile. Take a wander to Google Mobile to find out more, or point your mobile device to http://www.google.com/gmm to download the application itself.

First impressions are good. The .cab download was <1mb and installation on my SPV C600 was straightforward. Fire it up and as I might expect I get the option of viewing map or satellite image (usefully google have included what they call an ‘Insta-KB-o-meter’ allowing you to view your data consumption in real-time). As well as the usual ‘find location’ and ‘find nearby businesses’ Google also bundle real-time traffic updates, although at the time of writing this service was unavailable in Central London… Of particular interest is the ability of the app to integrate with contacts. If a contact has a valid address, hit select and up comes a map of where they live. I can also get directions and distances from one address to another as Google Maps for Windows Mobile provides routing much like its web counterpart. But perhaps the most useful feature is the applications GPS support. Were my smartphone to have a GPS chipset I would be able to track my location on the Google Map and I suspect get directions to a location / address of my choice…


The faithful ‘Sorry, I got lost’ chestnut looks no longer able to cut the mustard…