Here’s an eye opener, courtesy of an article in the Daily Star Egypt:

Today, only three countries in the world still ban the commercial use of GPS: Egypt, Syria and North Korea.

And I happen to have moved to one of them.

I’d previously heard rumors that GPS was banned in Egypt, but paid no heed as I hauled my Nokia N95 and Garmin eTrex around the Western desert in the pursuit of a good blog post. It seemed outlandish to me that mass-produced consumer devices brandishing a specific chip would fall foul of a security law that is so clearly outdated. GPS was made available for civilian use in the US in 1983, and all but this trio of countries soon followed suit.

There are of course plenty of Nokia N95s and iPhones in evidence in the fashionable cafés and bars of Cairo — their absence on the local market simply increases their desirability, with places like Dubai, Beirut, London and Paris catering to demand. Nor is there any danger of arrests or mass confiscations — these GPS-enabled gadgets are owned by the sons and daughters of the country’s political and business elite.

The desert expedition industry’s dependence on GPS is also tolerated; tourism is the engine of Egypt’s economy:

GPS devices are also commonly used in desert safaris. When 19 tourists were kidnapped in the desert between Sudan and Egypt earlier this month, they used their GPS devices to inform authorities of their exact location, which facilitated the rescue operation.

So why would Egypt enact a new telecoms law as recently as 2003 that continues the ban on imports and use of GPS-equipped devices? In brief, because politics in Egypt is dysfunctional, and one of the key players is the notoriously paranoid military. For GPS use to get the green light in Egypt, all kinds of ministries as well the army would have to sign off on the law. Since these institutions are all run as fiefdoms, instead of in the best interests of the state, that isn’t going to happen, as Nokia found out:

Last June, Finnish manufacturer Nokia and the Egyptian government were in a row over the decision to ban GPS equipped phones from entering the country.

“We negotiated with the Egyptian government a lot but they insisted on their position and we aren’t responsible for illegal smuggling of banned devices,”

Eddy Rezq, Nokia regional manager, told Al-Masry Al-Youm at the time.

It is not the consumers that are the primary victim of this law — they simply pay higher prices, either on the black market or in the form of a plane ticket. (And let’s put things in perspective: The overwhelming majority of Egyptians can’t afford these phones, and are much more pre-occupied with getting food on the table than the hypothetical freedom to know their location to within five decimal places. They know where they are. And they aren’t going anywhere.)

But local GIS companies, incredibly, are officially making do without GPS:

“Because GPS is illegal, we resort to genuine methods like deploying surveyors in the streets and using satellite images,” Walaa Hassan, head of the geo data department at Dotmap, told Daily News Egypt.

“It would differ very much for our work if we were allowed to use GPS,” Hassan said

Confidence inducing, no? This is not how you develop your way out of poverty.

How should companies like Nokia and Apple respond to the legal constraints of the Egyptian market? (Garmin doesn’t have a prayer, of course:-) Nokia’s response was to not sell the offending devices, rather than release a crippled version:

“Over 40 percent of all handsets produced by Nokia within the next two years will support GPS-based applications,” [Nokia vice president and director of services and programs] Savander said, adding that it is absurd to consider changing course at this point.

“Who would regress to meet the demands of markets that refuse to keep up with progress when we’re moving at a fast pace towards developing and devising new technologies?” he added.

What about Apple? Well…

The 3G iPhone is coming soon to Egypt, as this placeholder page on Apple.com announces. Curiously, it contains no mention of the three-letter acronym GPS. If you check out a placeholder page for another country where the iPhone is pending, however, such as Jordan, the device’s GPS functionality gets a prominent airing. Here’s what Egypt’s page promises:

Here’s what’s Jordan’s page promises:

So is Apple readying the release of a GPS-crippled iPhone in Egypt? My hunch is yes. Would anybody here buy such a phone? Again, my hunch is yes. For the typical Egyptian user, jailbreaking the 3G iPhone is not a trivial endeavor, and using a foreign phone plan is prohibitively expensive if it is possible at all.

Intriguingly, Apple has also removed the mention of wifi- and celltower geolocation technology from its Egypt placeholder page, not just GPS. Would these functions also be crippled on the Egyptian 3G iPhone? I don’t know. Wifi- and celltower-based geolocation services by themselves would still make the Egyptian iPhone a usable location-aware device for most casual users. Without them, not so much.

But perhaps Apple is merely being clever: By selling GPS-crippled 3G iPhones in Egypt, it is carrying out its profit-maximizing duty to shareholders and yet able to blame the Egyptian government if anyone complains. (And it has occurred to me that the GPS chip is still likely to be in iPhones sold in Egypt, though turned off in firmware. That would make jailbreaking the GPS chip possible. I’m sure Apple wouldn’t mind especially.)

(Thanks Jan for the link!)

Three things:

• Avi Bar-Zeev, one of the original programmers on Keyhole Earth, which became Google Earth, has some insightful commentary on on Google Earth for iPhone, including:
  

  I’m not too surpried about performance. It reminds me of how the original Keyhole app ran on unaccelerated laptops. Without terrain, the number of triangles shouldn’t be the limiter (you only need about 1000 triangles to make a nice sphere). Texturing, caching, and download speeds seem like they would have been the biggest challenges.

• After a few hours of using Google Earth for iPhone, I’ve concluded that the easiest way to navigate is by holding the iPhone sideways and then using both thumbs on the screen. Pinching/zooming and twisting/rotating becomes even more intuitive, and you have a better view of the screen. Also, a wide screen gives you more room to read labels, which are always horizontal in Google Earth. (Horizontal labels are still my favorite usability advantage over over Virtual Earth 3D, where labels remain hard-coded into the map, which means they are upside down if you are looking South.)
• Technological advance is a wonderful thing. Who’d have guessed even five years ago that before this decade was out I’d have the ultimate 3D atlas in my pocket. Even more remarkable perhaps is how smoothly we adapt to new gadgets that until very recently were in the realm of science fiction. Still, I’ve caught myself several times these past 24 hours with a “wow” on my face, amazed at where technology is taking us. I’m glad I’m still able access my boyish sense of wonder:-)

While iPhone developers were busy discussing when Google Street View will be made accessible to the iPhone API via Google Maps (check out these cool screen shots — there will also be bus and walking directions) Google surprised with a major release: Google Earth for iPhone and iPod Touch — a free download in the App store.

CNET was first out the gate with a good review, Frank at Google Earth blog gives his positive impressions, Google has a help page available on the web, as well as a complete user guide. And here is Google Earth product manager Peter Birch announcing it on YouTube:

[Update 12:02 UTC: Google’s official anouncement]

Even as version 1.0.0, this is a very well implemented and mature app. Google Earth iPhone gets all the basics right, and at surprisingly high frame rates, but also manages to add some flourishes that are not even available on the full-strength standalone version:

• True multitouch navigation: This is how navigation is supposed to work, as demoed on those futuristic multitouch panels we regularly get to drool over: We’re already familiar with the one-fingered gestures: Move the finger to drag the Earth along with it, double click to zoom, just was with a mouse. But with two fingers, you can pinch, twist and drag on the screen to zoom, rotate and look around — even all at the same time! Double click to zoom out. Overall, the user interface is stunning for its simplicity and intuitiveness — the best yet I’ve experienced on the iPhone.
• Dynamic search: Unlike on the standalone version of Google Earth, the search function on the iPhone version is dynamic. Start typing “Berlin” for example and several choices start to appear in the dropdown menu — in my case, contacts with addresses in Berlin were listed. Just click on one and it flies you there. You can also search for coordinates (of the type as “60.123, 18.123” or “60 12′ 34″, 18 12′ 34”) and zip codes for the US and UK.

  

On the downside, I found the autotilt functionality to be a bit gimmicky — it interferes with the cool multitouch metaphor this app has got going and only partially delivers: You can look around vertically, which leads you to think you can look around horizontally, but you can’t. Fortunately, you can turn off autotilt in the preferences.

On the wishlist: The ability to load KML files, the addition of the road layer, and directions. 3D buildings aren’t supported, but I don’t consider that to be an essential function of a pocket-sized Google Earth. I’d also love to be able to add and then save or email placemarks but that will be easier when support for KML comes. And thinking even a bit more wishfully: It’d be nice to sync placemarks and KML between the Google Earth on my desktop and the one on my iPhone, much as Apple syncs my contacts, calendar and mail.

And finally: In unlimited-plan, fully covered 3G areas like Sweden, we are now just a hop-and-a-skip away from having the iPhone be a workable GPS navigator for the car. Just click on Google Earth’s “find current location” button to zoom in on your whereabouts. It’s no great leap of the imagination to turn that into a recurring function and add directions…

The past few months have been unexpectedly busy, and as has too often been the case this past year, Ogle Earth has suffered. I now hope to stay put for at least a month, and by way of atonement have collected below all the stories that I had time to catch but not write up during the past few weeks…

Too cool:

• Webcam from the ISS: This is amazing, and amazingly well implemented. Would love to get these images as an automatically reloading KML network link, though. (Note: Images were live from Oct 12-22; currently they are archived simulation images. More info here.) (From Oct 13)

Visualizations:

• Obscenely huge immersive 180-degree 3D globe viewer: And I mean that in a good way — behold the world’s best Microsoft Virtual Earth viewer:

  That’s an impressive piece of coding with Microsoft Virtual Earth’s API. My sincere hope is that in my lifetime, everyone will be afford one of these in their home:-) (For those in the market today, here’s a HD version of the YouTube video. Thanks Maria! From Oct 19)

• Burning Man 2008 OSM: Time-exposure of the Burning Man 2008 Open Street Map as it is being created, on YouTube. (From Oct 10)
• London Street view now: Can’t wait for Google’s Street View of London to hit the web? Seety.co.uk has London photographed, and linkable. For example, here is the world’s best bookstore. I like how nearby photographed locations are overlaid on the image, and clickable, so you can speed up your search a bit. So far, no uproar by Londoners on privacy grounds, but that is probably because it’s not Google taking the imagery. When Google does come out with their own Street View, they’ll be able to point out that they’re not even first with this, so what’s the big deal?:-) (from Oct 16)
• Panoramio heatmaps: Alexander Tchaikin explores “territorial photogenicy” (great neologism!) by creating heatmaps of georeferenced Panoramio photos. His project page gets into the nitty programming aspects, but also has some gorgeous screenshots. Here’s Rome (from this KML file)

  

  It’s still a work in progress, so expect refinements over time. (From Oct 9)

Humanitarian aid and the environment:

• Georeferencing aid jobs: Aid work is often done locally on the ground, so aid worker jobs are — more than most — geographically pinpointed. Enter ReliefWeb’s map of humanitarian vacancies, which comes with its very own KML file. The map is especially amenable to drilling down. Anyone for a job in Juba?

  

  Via Aid Worker Daily, Oct 15)

• Greenpeace maps Indonesia deforestation tour: Greenpeace ship Esperanza is touring Indonesia to investigate deforestation on its many islands. An excellent opportunity for georeferencing the ship’s updates, both on Google Maps and as KML. The content is created with Google’s Spreadsheet Mapper, writes Jamie Woolley from the ship, and adds:
  

  Indonesia is the third largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world and that’s largely down to deforestation.

  I didn’t know that! Can you guess who’s number one and two? (From Oct 22)

• Elephants send georeferenced SMS: Lovely use of neogeo tech to help conserve elephant populations. If an elephant’s GPS collar shows an elephant migrating out of a safe region, it sends an SMS to park rangers via a mobile phone SIM card showing the peripatetic pachyderm’s location. (From Oct 13)
• Marine data as KML: I’m still waiting for a bathymetrically accurate sea floor on Google Earth, but in the meantime there is plenty of cool data for the oceans. Most recently, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) released a KML layer depicting all the Earth’s Marine Protected Areas (Frank Taylor has more info) but there is plenty more marine-themed geospatial data out there. A post on Deep Sea News collects much of what’s out there. (From Oct 8)
• UK hydrography: One more thing: The UK’s Maritime and CoastGuard Agency now publish their civil hydrography surveys as KML. Very pretty to look at. More info at Hydro International. (Via Kurt’s Weblog, from Oct 16)

History:

• Ancient Cities database: Daniel DeGroff is building a cool database with linked KML file with the locations of cities founded before 400AD. Plenty there, and very accurate for the ones I checked in Egypt, but you can help add to it. This is yet another step on the way to a truly 4D virtual globe. (Also on Le Technoblog du LAC, which has been bringing some great geospatial content to light recently.)
• Forbidden City goes 3D: Two years in the making, IBM and the Palace Museum have now released a meticulous virtual reconstruction of Beijing’s forbidden city as a 3D virtual world, accessible via a free client for PC, Mac and Linux. This is the most ambitious use of 3D technology so far that I know of for creating a historically accurate rendition of a real place and populating it with avatars. (Via Shangaiist, From Oct 14)
• Searching for Genghis Khan’s grave: Sounds like a job for Google Earth. (Also check out Google Earth Blog’s story about the recently discovered Peruvian pyramid, visible on Google Earth.) (Via Yellow Menace, Oct 21)

Satellite imagery:

• 1 Earth, 1 meter, 1 week: Mark your calendars for the year 2014 for the new holy grail. According to French space agency Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES),
  

  it will be possible by 2014 to photograph all of the continents in colour at a resolution of 1 metre, every week. How? With a constellation of 13 Earth-orbiting microsatellites at 600 km, imaging everything in their path and downlinking compressed data to processing centres around the world.

  The technology behind this is something called e-CORCE, a network of 13 microsatellites and 50 ground stations, with a estimated cost of EUR 400 mln. (Via Geomatiknyheter.se, from Oct 22)

• GeoEye’s first light: The recently launched GeoEye satellite, part-funded by Google, seems to be working fine, if you look at the first image it sent back. There’ll be plenty more where that came from:-) (From Oct 8)
• DigitalGlobe signs deal with Microsoft: Now that DigitalGlobe’s contract with Google for online display of satellite imagery is no longer exclusive, Microsoft is quick to sign one. That’s a good thing — my main disappointment with Virtual Earth (other than lack of Mac support for its 3D offering) is a scarcity of imagery from remote regions and developing countries. DigitalGlobe has plenty of that. If there is anything I can do to start an arms race as to who gets DigitalGlobe content out to the web first, let me know:-) (From Oct 7)
• Updated imagery for Google Earth; Google Earth Blog also has this covered, as usual. (From Oct 13)

Politics:

• Shooting the messenger: An Iranian blogger discovers that Google Earth is not available for download in Iran due to US-imposed sanctions (as is the case with Cuba, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) but still proceeds to bash Google for it. (Add to this the dual naming of the Persian Gulf/Arabian Gulf in Google Earth to really convince patriotic Iranians that Google is out to get them.)

  Of course, bloggers will be bloggers, but I expected more from an established media outlet like PBS, which also uncritically manages to portray Google, a US company, as having a choice as to whether it obeys US law or not: PBS takes Google to task for now allowing downloads of Google’s Chrome browser in these countries.

  One really good point, however: The “error” messages could be a lot more expository, explaining precisely why the download isn’t available. (From Oct 13)

• Crisis mapping: “Are citizen journalists playing an increasingly important role in documenting violent conflict and human rights violations?” So asked Patrick Meier. Anecdotal evidence suggests Yes, but Patrick decided to do an empirical study using Kenya’s 2008 election violence. A central analytical tool: Google Earth.

Neogeo tidbits:

• KML Interactive Sampler by Google; requires the Google Earth 3D plugin (not out yet for Mac). Great for getting under the hood of KML.
• Google Maps API for Flash, now with demo gallery.
• Google Maps API get reverse geocoding. (From Oct 22)
• iPhone map app primer: So you want to make mapping apps on the iPhone? Here’s a primer. (From Oct 21)
• Whereyougonnabe gets GeoRSS: Social trip and location planner for Facebook Whereyougonnabe gets an update, adding GeoRSS as one of its outputs. I’m all for recycling semantically rich data this way, as I don’t use Facebook nearly as much as my RSS reader. (From Oct 11)
• FireEagle + EagleFeed => Atom, JSON: Another way to take your position and mash it up is via Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, with the data converted to JSON or an Atom feed via web app EagleFeed. BYO programming skills. Note: Unlike Dopplr and Whereyougonnabe, Fire Eagle doesn’t know or care about future locations — just the present. (Both Whereyougonnabe and Dopplr sync up with Fire Eagle, though, so you can get the best of all worlds.) (From Oct 18)
• The making of Photosynth, the video. Must watch. (From Oct 8)
• Google Gears gets geolocation for laptops, ITN News implements with a page that automatically shows you the news nearest to where you currently are. reports TechRadar. Be sure to install Google Gears first before surfing to the ITN page, however.
• And finally: xkcd does Google Maps.

This past week, georeferenced panorama photo site 360Cities rolled out a site-wide upgrade and redesign. The experience — both for viewers and panorama publishers — is now much improved. The single biggest change, in my mind, is that panoramas are now served in a multiresolution format using the much-lauded KRPano engine. Just as with Google Earth satellite imagery, as you zoom in on a panorama, the resolution of the image automatically increases. This is a big deal — it makes the experience much faster without sacrificing detail.

But there are many more changes under the hood. I asked 360Cities’ Jeffrey Martin to list the most noteworthy:

• A reseller program for people who would like to provide VR/immersive photography services to local businesses.
• All new map page with advanced search, author-, area-, or business-centric searching.
• Critically acclaimed fullscreen panorama layout including map, thumbnails, and image transitions.
• HOTSPOTS in all panoramas which are automatically created as panoramas are added to the site.
• Photographer profile page to show the latest works by author.
• RSS feeds for the whole world, by area, or by author.
• Now using a “multiresolution” panorama format which means that the image loads much faster, and the full resolution of ANY size image can be displayed with optimum performance.
• Location pages showing all images in any area anywhere in the world.
• Search anywhere, for anything, on any page of the site.
• Get driving directions to any business on the site.
• Discussion forum to learn and share ideas with other 360 Cities members.
• Google Earth integration, so you can view any image on Google’s Earth platform. (This is not new but worth mentioning, as it’s really cool!)

Jeffrey writes that the site currently shows over 8000 panoramas from 100 cities around the world, having grown 10-fold in the past year. And they’re looking for more good content:

If you are a panoramic photographer, we are welcoming new members to continue our goal of covering the whole world with beautiful, immersive content. Street View it ain’t ;-)

Here are a few of our favorite panoramas currently on the site:

• Cutting open a dead whale during a snowstorm at midnight in Barrow, Alaska
• Muscovites of all sizes enjoying the sunshine
• Berlin’s holocaust memorial
• View from the top of the WTC in NYC
• One of Iran’s most beautiful mosques
• An ecologial amusement park in Damascus ;-)
• The McCall Glacier, in the ANWR, Alaska
• A marketplace in Banjul, Gambia
• Waiting for Marlon Brando in the middle of the Pacific Ocean

I tested the new site this past week. From the point of view of the photographer, the process of adding content is really simple: Just upload a 2:1-ratio equirectangular JPEG of your pano in the highest resolution you can muster (mine was at 11,700×5850 pixels, 31MB) , and then start adding metadata via the user interface:

Pinpoint the location on a Google Map, point to North on the pano (so that accurate hotspots to nearby panos can be automatically generated) and add it to various geographically delineated collections. For example, as all my recent panos were taken in Sweden, I defined a polygon around Sweden’s borders — and now all panos georeferenced to a point inside that polygon will automatically belong to that collection. Processing such a huge file once uploaded? It is mere minutes before it appears on the site.

I’ve only had time to add one pano, but plan to add all of the ones I took on a recent trip around Sweden, as the resulting view in Google Earth really is worth it, and automatically generated to boot. Here’s the KML file of my 360Cities panos, present and future, and here is the RSS feed for future updates.

Can it get even better? There are still some bugs to be ironed out of this brand new interface, and I’m really hoping for the ability to embed panos on any website. The settings for the KRPano engine are currently skewed towards smoother speeds on slower systems, though at the price of straight lines sometimes going wavy; it would be cool to be able to change these settings on the fly (as KRPano lets you do in this demo) for those panos that feature plenty of straight lines. And wouldn’t it be cool if visitors could annotate parts of a panorama? Perhaps these will be in future releases — for now, I’m enjoying the rock-solid new foundations.

Just passing this along from my inbox. Michael Kosowsky from HeyWhatsThat answers the GIS question of the current political season:

In this post the Inverse Square blog seeks to answer the burning question “from where in Alaska can you see Russia?” (The blog is written by a good friend, and this post is an example of one of its main themes: we should try applying analytic methods to make sense of what’s going on around us. Particularly in politics.)

Horizons and visibility being our expertise, I had to take a crack at it. The result is HeyWhatsThat — Russia?

TECHNICAL DETAILS
Putting the Alaska-Russia visbility analysis together required two things. First, data. I’ve been relying solely on SRTM elevation data, which runs from latitude 54S to 60N and doesn’t quite get us as far north as Anchorage. So I grabbed all I could of Alaska from the USGS National Elevation Dataset via the Seamless Data Server. And please note that I haven’t yet fully integrated that data, so while you can accurately run the mountain peak/visibility computations for Alaska, the contours and profiles for that state will still be based on much lower (SRTM 30″ derived from GTOPO30) resolution data for the time being.

Second, to actually try every high point in Alaska to see if Russia is visible would take a long time at two minutes per computation. So I’ve implemented a quick and dirty way to estimate where two regions can see each other: divide Russia and Alaska into rectangles, look pairwise between the highpoints of all those rectangles, and ignoring any intervening terrain, determine if they can they see each other. This will generate lots of false positives, e.g. this analysis would tell you that Vermont is quite visible from Maine because it doesn’t take into account the intervening White Mountains. But it does set an outer limit — the purple line on the above-referenced site — and in this case generated a small set of candidates I could then look at more closely with the longer computation.

This could be applied to any pair of regions; this graphic for example, shows the parts of Georgia (red) and Alabama (crimson) that might be able to see each other. Again, we’re not taking into account any intervening terrain, so you’d have to check individual locations by computing panoramas under the “New Panorama” tab at www.heywhatsthat.com.

I haven’t put a web interface on this — i.e. let you draw two arbitrary areas on the map, click, and see colored regions representing mutually visible spots — because I can’t think of any useful applications for it. If you can, please get in touch…

My own two cents are that Michael should really get himself a blog:-)

I’m in Shanghai for the week, and boy does the internet suck here. Try to access websites on servers outside China and you mostly just sit and wait, hoping to avoid time-out errors. The congestion seems to clear for a few hours in the middle of the night, but then its back to sucking at the internet through a leaky straw. Most Chinese don’t notice — 90% have never accessed an English-language website (how many Chinese-language sites have you accessed?). And expats in China seem mostly to be resigned to this situation. Censorship seems to be mostly ad-hoc and in reaction to flagged posts rather than blanket or preëmptive — none of the GIS sites I checked are blocked — but the aggravation factor of waiting is not to be overlooked as a deterrent for casual users to visiting sites on servers outside China.

That’s the reason I’m here — to figure out what’s needed to set up a Chinese-language version of a Swedish website inside the great firewall, so that it actually reaches its intended audience. In the meantime, however, neogeonews doesn’t sleep:

• Earth Atlas: Free Geography Tools and Google Earth Blog both flag Bjorn Sandvik’s latest neogeo web programming feat, the Earth Atlas, which uses many of the datasets of his Thematic Mapping Engine in a slick web interface that uses the Google Earth browser plugin (which is still not out for the Mac).
• Canada elections mapped: Cedric Sam has Canada’s 2008 federal elections, to be held October 14, completely mapped. Cool and useful stuff.
• Animated Historical Political Boundaries: A great layer on the Google Earth Community: Giasen’s KML file of historical boundaries of empires past. Use the timeline slider to see the shifting fortunes of the great civilizations from 2,000 BC onwards. A version of this would be cool to have as a default layer in a virtual globe — turning it into a 4D world rather than just a snapshot in time.
• “Making of” panoramas: I’ve had quite a few requests for a walk-through of my workflow for the panoramas I made during my trip around Sweden in August, including from people who read this blog, so I’ve written a post about it on my personal blog.