Location Masti

Location Masti

Mobiance announces "Location Masti" - inviting all hackers for a month long celebration of innovation, creativity and technology.

Location Masti is an opportunity for hackers to use Mobiance's pioneering mobile location technology with other sources of data/ APIs and build innovative applications

What

Location Masti is a location hack event to build innovative mashups based on Location based services using Mobiance's location technology. The event organized by Mobiance is aimed at exploring the countless avenues to build useful and relevant location aware applications by hackers in a spirit of innovation, creativity and masti.

Mobiance will be inviting hackers to take part in this 30 day event building innovative location enabled applications in the fields of social networking, navigation, local search and a whole lot more. In addition to Mobiance's unique technology to determine the location of mobile phones, hackers can aggregate multiple sources of data, make use of various available APIs and tools to deliver their next "killer" application!

Registrations would be open on the 1st of December, 2007. The event will stretch for a period of 30 days from 15th January, 2008 where the developers will be able to use Mobiance's location feeds and build applications that are useful and relevant to individuals by using their location.

When

Announcement of Location Masti: 26th November, 2007

Registrations: 1st December, 2007 to 31st December, 2007

Event run dates: 15th January, 2008 to 15th February, 2008

Final demo and submission: 15th February, 2008

Announcement of results: 1st March, 2008

Live pilots with winning applications: Second quarter 2008

How

Hackers at Location Masti will have simulated location feeds of 20 people available through a web service that they can use in building their applications. The web service will allow requests for both real time location and the archived location of the person at every quarter of an hour for the past day for use by the applications.

If the participants would like to have live location of privacy approved phones instead of simulated feeds, Location Masti allows that too. Just a form to be submitted online and the location feed will be available.

Details of Mobiance's Location feed APIs and web services will be made available to registered hackers at the time of registration.

Participation

Location Masti is open to all people above 15 years of age and who are accepted by Mobiance as "hackers". Hackers can participate

• as individual "hacker" or
• as a "team" of hackers with upto 10 members. Hackers can belong to only one team.
• Corporate hackers may join in the fun

Number of entries

Hackers or teams can submit any number of hacks but will need to specify their hacks at the time of registration.

Accessing Mobiance location Feed

Hackers will be provided a unique access code for each application at the time of registration. This code will be needed to access Mobiance's APIs and/or web services by the applications. Hackers will be required to maintain the privacy of this access code.

Submission of entries

The hackers can make their application available through a URL for demo purposes subject to presentation rules. For submission of entries, the code will have to be uploaded with documentation and instructions through a mechanism communicated to the hackers by Mobiance.

 

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Web Mapping Illustrated

Developers who want to publish maps on the web often discover that commercial tools cost too much and hunting down the free tools scattered across Internet can use up too much of your time and resources. Web Mapping Illustrated shows you how to create maps, even interactive maps, with free tools, including MapServer, OpenEV, GDAL/OGR, and PostGIS. It also explains how to find, collect, understand, use, and share mapping data, both over the traditional Web and using OGC-standard services like WFS and WMS.

Link: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/webmapping/

VeoGeo Map (Video & Map Tracking)

VeoGeo takes video sharing to the next level. Now you can map the activities you video, and share even more of the experience!


See what people from around the world are doing, and see where they’re doing it!

* Capture your outdoor activities on your video camera
* Capture a GPS record at the same time
* Upload them to VeoGeo and share them with the world

This could take off with GPS and Video Capture on Mobile Phones.
The N95 could be used in conjunction with Sports Tracker and the 5 mega pixel camera.

As the video is played the map has a route and marker that moves in relation to the geographic position in the video. A nice touch is the graph that shows both speed/acceleration and elevation.

Hotmap: the Use of Virtual Earth

Hotmap - A good way to show your Virtual Earth (Live Maps) user base.

Hotmap Virtual Earth Users
This data is based on a sample of tile logs on servers from January through July of 2006.
It combines server hits from road, aerial, and hybrid imagery in one view.

* Zoom in and out with the control widget in the top left. You can also zoom in by double-clicking the mouse; and zoom in or out with the mouse wheel.
* Pan by clicking and dragging on the map surface.
* Inspect a specific point by right-clicking. It shows the exact imagery available at the point clicked, at the current data level.
* Works in FireFox too!

"Hotmap shows where people have looked at when using Virtual Earth, the engine that powers Live Search Maps: the darker a point, the more times it has been downloaded. Each square represents one unit of imagery, called a "tile". When the program starts, it shows tiles at zoom level 11, which has tiles at a resolution of 74 meters-per-pixel. At the closest in, Virtual Earth has tiles at zoom level 19, 0.3 meters-per-pixel. You can look at higher- or lower-resolution points with the "select data level" indicator at the top."

http://hotmap.msresearch.us/


Now it would be good to see results from Yahoo Maps, Multimap, Google Maps and others...

Microsoft Should Abandon Vista?

"An editorial written by Don Reisinger over at CNet's News.com takes Microsoft to task for the outright failure of Vista. He suggests that Vista may be the downfall of the company as, despite years in development, Vista was delivered to market too early. His suggestion? Support those who are running it, but otherwise ditch Vista and move on. 'Never before have I seen such an abysmal start to an operating system release. For almost a year, people have been adopting Vista and becoming incensed by how poorly it operates. Not only does it cost too much, it requires more to run than XP, there is still poor driver support ... With Mac OS X hot on its tail, Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level with some of the best software around. If Microsoft continues down this path, it will be Vista that will bring the software giant to its knees--not Bill Gates' departure.'

Absolute truth !
Daily you will find people asking questions about normal features of vista. Even I got few calls from my friends owning vista machines. One of my friend called me from California. He wanted to uninstall MS Office. I was just laughing on him and was feeling pity about his new laptop. Another incident ! My friend from Symbiosis Pune visited my place last month at IITB. He wanted to access Internet. It took me more than 15-20 mins to configure the net settings for him. I don't know how many abuses bulged out from me while configuring the settings. There are plenty of more bad experiences.... very disappointing indeed !!

Hawths Tool

Hawth's Analysis Tools for ArcGIS
Hawth's Tools is a FREE extension for ArcGIS (ArcMap) that performs a number of spatial analyses and functions that cannot be conveniently accomplished with out-of-the-box ArcGIS. Most of the tools are written with ecological analyses in mind, though many will be useful to any GIS user. Visit the Hawths Tools page for further information, or to download the extension. This is one of the modules of the Hawths tool, which is very helpful and not readily available in ArcGIS. for more details on HAWTHS tool visit http://www.spatialecology.com/htools/tooldesc.php

Raster Tools

Clip Raster

Clip Raster By Polygons

Landscape Characterization (fast)

Extract Raster Edge

Thematic Raster Summary (by polygon)

Zonal Statistics ++ (by polygon)

Spatial Replace Tool

Maximum Grid Separation Tool

Cellular Automata (1D x Time)

Grid Spread (Cellular Automata)

Raster Pixel Type Conversion

Dowload HAWTHS Tool for free

Open Layers!

Hey, I am delighted by experiencing the simplicity followed by OpenLayers. I never ever thought that a GIS solution will be much easier to embed in my own website. But, OpenLayer made it possible. Its few lines of html simple code.. and you are done.

OpenLayers makes it easy to put a dynamic map in any web page. It can display map tiles and markers loaded from any source. MetaCarta developed the initial version of OpenLayers and gave it to the public to further the use of geographic information of all kinds. OpenLayers is completely free, Open Source JavaScript, released under the BSD License.

LINK: http://www.openlayers.org/