Earth Stumbler: “Earth Stumbler is a program to import GPS-tagged Netstumbler information into Google Earth.”
Softree, maker of surveying and engineering mapping applications, announces support for Google Earth in the latest versions of its software applications. What took them so long? :-)
3dTracking.net turns the live tracking of somebody using Maps or Earth into the seamless web 2.0 mashup experience for the masses that it should be, rather than an exploit for geeks to boast about. You, the “trackee”, will need a GPS, PDA (running Java/Symbian or Windows Mobile 5) and a connection to the net, perhaps via your mobile phone, or a hybrid of all three. Palm OS support is coming. (It also helps if your “tracker” has a Mac or PC running Google Earth somewhere, or else there isn’t much point:-)
The site promises that this will stay a free service, comes nicely packaged, and doesn’t even bother asking for your email address when you register – how enlightened is that? Premium services are in the works, presumably to allow you to see more than just the last 20 tracking positions.
I’m still waiting for somebody to track their transatlantic flight live using, for example, SAS’s in-flight wifi. If nobody does this soon I might be forced to buy myself a GPS unit:-)
[Update 23.43 UTC: A positive review from somebody who’s actually used it.]
[Update 2006-01-19: Modded up from the comments, Sergio has an interesting niche blog dedicated to GPS devices. Here is his positive review of 3DTracking. I’ll be tracking his blog…]
Some network links really astound with the kind of information they can convey. For example:
Örsted DTU (Technical University of Denmark) does a lot of remote sensing of the polar regions. Some of their projects monitor polar sea ice, and in fact they have a couple of very fancy java applets that shows you the extent of polar ice in real time.
DAMOCLES (“Developing Arctic Modelling and Observing Capabilities for Longterm Environmental Studies”) tries to pin down the effects of climate change on Arctic sea ice by measuring a range of properties, both via satellite and from drift buoys. Damocles (apt name:-) is a brand new project, with barely a home page to its name, but if you dig a bit deeper, you find a network link [kml] that renders all this information about the Arctic sea ice in near real-time, with drift indicators. Wow.
Our receding Arctic icecap is a hot-button issue at the moment, and this network link is precisely the kind of contribution to the debate that science can and should make.
(Aside 1: Though 2D, there are plenty of dimensions of data portrayed by this network link; it reminds me somehow of that graphic of Napoleon’s Russia adventure highlighted by Edward Tufte.)
(Aside 2: And while you’ve got a snapshot of Arctic sea ice on Google Earth, why not complement it with the auroral activity overlays Google Earth Blog linked to last week?)
EchoLink is a curious hybrid — it’s VOIP for amateur radio, like a Skype for licenced ham radio stations. Base stations that are continents apart but connected via Echolink can act as repeaters, so that anyone driving within reach of one of these stations can talk to anyone within reach of any other station. In the specialized world of ham radio, it has apparently made quite a splash, with 170,000 registered users in 158 countries (according to the site).
And now comes the Google Earth network link [KMZ] that shows all the currently connected stations, live. Very cool, that. More info here. Ten-four.
(Via Ben Sutton, who explains how it comes in handy for him. There is also a Mac Echolink client.)
In case you were wondering if the popularity of Google Earth is straining Google’s servers (and some have wondered), you can rest assured:
In a support forum post, PenguinOpus of the Google Earth team mentions:
Google Earth servers currently have enough capacity that no rate-limiting has occurred in several months. Your performance will be controlled by your own ISP’s throughput and your latency to our servers. Ping kh.google.com. <100msec, good. >200msec, not-so-good.
(Here in Sweden my average ping response is 22.6msec (!))
Chris Davis of 9Rules posts a beginner’s tutorial for writing simple KML placemarks, and promises more are to come.
Fotocade’s Archi-maps contains KML files for several places in the UK highlighting interesting architectural landmarks. Many of the placemarks are annotated by photos by Andy Marshall, an architectural photographer. If you like them, you can buy them. It’s an interesting new way to sell stock photography — by georeferenced location.
Safe Software, the 363-kg gorilla of GIS transformation tools, has announced FME2006, their latest version. It does KML (of course).
Not to be outdone, Brian Flood is putting the finishing touches on Arc2Earth before its official 1.0 release. Arc2Earth turns output made by pros with ESRI ArcGIS into KML, so that the rest of us can consume it with Google Earth.
Earth Contest issues a press release claiming “over 60,000 new users” since its “initial launch” two weeks ago. That confuses me. Are we talking about the old game, which was actually launched in October, and then relaunched on December 17? Or are we talking about the “big game”, which was announced then and scheduled to launch at “midnight January 2006” but which isn’t actually running yet? All you can do is pre-register and hang out in a deserted players lounge forum (275 registered members), where posts by different authors sound the same. The game is free and promises “big prizes”. What could the business model possibly be? Had to go read the small print… Ah, yes:
We may share information with other reputable companies or organizations whose products or services we think you might find interesting. […]
From time to time, we may also make our customer postal addresses list available to other reputable companies or organizations whose products or services we think you might find interesting. […]
Persons who supply us with their telephone numbers on-line may receive telephone contact from us with information regarding new products and services or upcoming events. From time to time, we may also make our customer telephone number list available to other reputable companies or organizations whose products or services we think you might find interesting. […]
caveat emptor.