tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84709950593843905712026-03-25T01:44:24.373-06:00Thoughts on geospatial and location technology from Peter BattyPeter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.comBlogger252125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-79695104262758978132015-07-27T21:28:00.002-06:002015-07-31T14:51:33.006-06:00

Yesterday I backed a Kickstarter project called Mapwheel, I think it’s a really cool idea. They let you design a custom “toposcope” or map wheel showing the direction and distance of places of interest from the location where you live (or any other location you choose). You can choose various materials (wood or metal) and customize the design in various ways. Working on the design has been a

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-61216540265349701502015-03-18T17:52:00.001-06:002015-03-25T21:06:08.620-06:00

Warning: this is a LONG post! Note: updated 3/25/2015 with links to presentation videos where available. TL;DR FOSS4G NA was awesome There were way more female presenters than at previous events Mapbox was everywhere Boundless wasn’t Lots of new developments on vector tiles, including several efforts from companies other than Mapbox – even some promised from Esri! Progress towards Leaflet 1.0

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-49086339763199471272014-08-25T22:16:00.002-06:002014-08-25T22:16:27.231-06:00

This is slightly off topic, but as a side project I have just put together a small web site which is a guide to all the cool new developments at Denver Union Station. If you live in (or are visiting) the Denver area and haven't checked out Union Station recently, you definitely should! And to make it not totally off topic, there will be an interactive map appearing on the site shortly, I

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-87772796570940269522014-04-14T22:30:00.000-06:002014-04-14T23:02:43.493-06:00

Summary I spent the past weekend in Washington DC for State of the Map (SotM) US, the OpenStreetMap conference. It ended up selling out, with around 500 attendees, making it the largest OpenStreetMap event yet. As with previous SotM events I’ve attended (the last one being in Denver in 2011), I found it very enjoyable and interesting, and there was great energy about it as always, much more than

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-7062604991722856862013-04-29T20:21:00.001-06:002013-04-29T20:21:39.667-06:00

Myself, Nate Irwin and Jason Sanford are starting a new monthly meetup in Denver called Geospatial Amateurs. We plan to have a few short talks each month and hang out for a few drinks and chat about interesting things that people are up to in the geo space. The first meeting is this Thursday at Galvanize, come along and say hi! Details here.

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-34479315488301691342013-01-15T21:26:00.000-07:002013-01-18T10:28:01.418-07:00

The past couple of days I've been at the js.geo event in Denver, which was a small informal conference focused on JavaScript and geospatial, organized by Chris Helm, Steve Citron-Pousty and Brian Timoney. I've been head down on customer projects and product development the past few months, so it was great to get out and see what's going on in the broader world. As usual with this type of event I

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-84685576037899514172012-08-21T15:37:00.003-06:002012-10-22T12:18:51.717-06:00

Just a quick post to let you know that tomorrow I'll be doing a hangout with James Fee to talk about the future of GIS. If you watch live you can send in questions for either of us via chat. If you miss the live show, a recorded version will be posted shortly afterwards. Full details of this and James' other hangouts here. Update: here's the recorded version of the hangout, we had an

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-37801197779918223542012-06-11T21:41:00.001-06:002014-10-20T11:16:33.130-06:00

What they announced As predicted by the entire world, Apple announced their new maps application today as part of iOS 6. You can see the keynote presentation of the video here, and Apple's summary information about the Maps app here. Overall my predictions from last week were pretty spot on :) ... they announced that it would have turn by turn directions with voice guidance, real time

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-58721016205494380582012-06-06T22:42:00.001-06:002012-06-06T23:06:51.952-06:00

Today's Google Maps event pretty much confirmed all the speculation that has been going on about Apple announcing their own mapping product next week. As I discussed in a post earlier today, I was underwhelmed by Google's announcements, and the overwhelming message I took away was that Google was concerned about Apple's plans. In this post I'll get into some detail on some predictions about the

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-53388859168169023182012-06-06T13:14:00.000-06:002012-06-06T22:44:08.324-06:00

As mentioned earlier, Google held a press event this morning to talk about the "next dimension of Google Maps", with a timing that is clearly intended to pre-empt Apple's expected mapping announcement next week. The first part of the talk was given by Brian McLendon, and included both some interesting history and some very interesting information on how Google creates and maintains its map data.

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-88288437056107929832012-06-06T07:08:00.001-06:002012-06-07T09:11:56.670-06:00

The next week is going to be an interesting one for the geospatial industry. It's not every week that the world's most valuable company enters your industry with a fanfare, but next week at its worldwide developer conference, Apple is expected to announce its own mapping application to replace Google Maps as the primary mapping app on iPhones and iPads. This has been anticipated for quite some

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-71189068056066007182012-05-14T04:03:00.001-06:002012-05-14T04:05:12.249-06:00

I spent last week up in Calgary for the GeoAlberta conference, which was celebrating its tenth anniversary. It was a good event and I attended a number of good presentations. Dale Lutz of Safe Software gave an interesting review of the history of geospatial data, and my vintage 1990 paper on Exploiting Relational Database Technology in GIS got a mention in the section about moving into databases.

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-48973058187578860772012-05-02T14:05:00.001-06:002012-05-02T14:10:47.504-06:00

I have been absent from blogging for a while, working on various interesting new things behind the scenes! I am planning to make an effort to be posting here more regularly - yes I know everyone says that, we'll see if I can manage it! To kick things off again, the post below is a document I was asked to write for the United Nations Programme on Global Geospatial Information Management (GGIM),

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com5Wynkoop Lofts39.7537923 -104.998490339.7522663 -105.0009578 39.7553183 -104.9960228tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-38256925835246275922012-02-08T17:30:00.000-07:002012-02-08T17:30:45.017-07:00

My previous post was also about a job ... am definitely going to start doing more posts shortly on a variety of other topics including some of the cool new things we've been working on in terms of products at Ubisense! But anyway, we are looking for a senior developer and software architect to join the Ubisense myWorld product team. If you read this blog you're probably familiar with

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-52585303116535719732011-11-18T08:10:00.001-07:002011-11-18T09:24:11.080-07:00

Just a quick post to mention that Ubisense is looking for a couple of people to join our geospatial team in the US. We've been growing rapidly and have a lot of exciting things going on. First is a Senior Project Manager.  Ideally we'd like someone with experience managing complex geospatial projects in utilities and/or telecommunications companies, and preferably but not

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-65962836584795132172011-09-04T14:39:00.000-06:002011-09-04T14:44:30.651-06:00

A couple of months ago I gave a talk at the monthly OpenStreetMap meetup in Denver and I decided to try crowdsourcing the content (in the best OpenStreetMap tradition), and it worked out very well. I received a good amount of interesting content from several folks (thanks everyone!). I rashly agreed to do a keynote at the upcoming State of the Map conference in Denver (rashly since I'm chairing

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-38070913289959966852011-08-07T12:07:00.003-06:002011-08-07T12:11:32.432-06:00

As some of you will know, the FOSS4G 2011 conference is coming up in Denver and I am the conference chair. I have only been to one previous FOSS4G, which was in Victoria in Canada in 2007. That event had a profound impact on my perspective on the geospatial industry, and on the software platforms I've chosen to implement geospatial applications on since then. And it has saved my companies a lot

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-49891527234761604902011-06-20T10:01:00.001-06:002011-06-20T10:02:40.205-06:00

As mentioned previously, I'll be speaking at tomorrow's OpenStreetMap meetup in Denver tomorrow, at the cool new MapQuest offices downtown. My attempt to crowdsource the presentation got a great response, and I got lots of suggestions for interesting content. I plan to have something for everyone, along the following lines: A quick intro to OpenStreetMap for any newcomers Some tips on using the

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-85534562001298080502011-06-14T15:58:00.000-06:002011-06-14T15:58:56.319-06:00

I'm doing a couple of upcoming presentations on OpenStreetMap, the first one next week at the very cool MapQuest office in downtown Denver, so I encourage you to come along to that if you're in the neighborhood ... and this may well evolve into a presentation for State of the Map in Denver too! So in the best OpenStreetMap tradition I thought I'd try a little crowdsourcing to help me pull this

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-36809486717477189812011-04-27T08:46:00.000-06:002011-04-27T08:46:47.833-06:00

So my recent posts analyzing the iPhone location data log have gained a lot of traffic and attention over the past few days, from places including the Toronto Star, the Wall Street Journal, TUAW, PC World, MacDailyNews, Apfeltalk (German), Cisco, Pete Warden at O'Reilly, Business Insider, and more. This led to me being invited to participate in a discussion on the Brian Lehrer Show yesterday on

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-85384878571205921942011-04-27T07:14:00.004-06:002011-04-27T07:26:29.001-06:00

Apple rather belatedly issued a Q&A on the whole "LocationGate" saga. This confirms what I said about the data being a cache of cell tower and wifi locations. The fact that this was kept for up to a year was a bug. Within the next few weeks they will reduce this to 7 days, they will not back up the cache any longer, and they will turn off the cache when you turn location services off, which

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-21128247995431046002011-04-24T08:51:00.011-06:002011-04-27T07:48:15.837-06:00

The Summary So in my previous two posts I discussed how the data I was seeing in my iPhone location logs was actually not very accurate, and certainly didn't reveal where I lived or worked or had stayed on my travels - beyond showing the cities I had been to, including general areas I had visited, as well as some I hadn't. There had been some discussion that the data appeared to be, in a number

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-30965336093179093262011-04-23T17:49:00.001-06:002011-04-24T09:29:22.751-06:00

In my previous post I discussed how the location data being recorded from my iPhone actually wasn't very accurate, and certainly not accurate enough to tell where I live or work (based on the data I've examined so far, which is in a table called CellLocation in the iPhone backup, and is the data discussed by Pete Warden and displayed by his iPhoneTracker app, which is what I used for the

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-65405922824784108042011-04-23T14:05:00.002-06:002011-04-23T17:54:23.242-06:00

So over the past couple of days there has been mass hysteria, questions in Congress, etc, over the fact that Apple is apparently recording all the locations you've been to with your iPhone without telling you, and storing it without encryption. The news was broken by my friend Pete Warden at Where 2.0 last week and has escalated rapidly since then. As someone who publishes their location anyway (

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470995059384390571.post-51228651356349559102011-04-13T15:51:00.001-06:002011-04-13T22:00:43.356-06:00

I just wrapped up the closing panel at the 34th and last GITA "annual conference" (officially known as the geospatial solutions conference these days), which was quite a sad moment for me. I attended my first GITA (then AM/FM, Automated Mapping and Facilities Management) conference in 1992, and have only missed one since then. Especially back in the 1990s, and into the early 2000s, it was always

Peter Battyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10803273537153805225noreply@blogger.com0