@gletham GIS, Social, Mobile Tech Images posted a photo:

The craft beer (micro-brew) industry is soaring in popularity and stats now show that these tasty little breweries are really starting to tap into the lucrative beer market. Heck, as an example, Costco sales reveal that over 1/3 of their beer sales are micro brew products (heck at about $25 for a 2 dozen pack of Fate Tire cans no wonder!!) The New Yorker has complemented their coverage with the release of a cool, interactive craft beer map (based on 2012 data) so you can see where the growth has spread - see blog.gisuser.com/2013/06/18/new-yorker-mapping-the-craft-...

Kudos to The New Yorker for recently looking at the rise of the craft beer industry. The craft beer (micro-brew) industry is soaring in popularity and stats now show that these tasty little breweries...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Recently OpenGeo announced that they’ve taken on funding and spun out from their not-for-profit parent organization, OpenPlans. OpenGeo is major player offering mature open source geospatial solutions based on solid software such as PostGIS, GeoServer, OpenLayers and much more, including their open source all-in-one OpenGeo Suite.  Here's our exclusive Q&A with OpenGeo.

 

Slashgeo: What were the real-life limitations of the not-for-profit model that OpenGeo wants to get rid?

 

OpenGeo:  To pursue our mission of growing open source geospatial software communities we truly need be independent. While we are very supportive of the OpenPlans’ (our incubator parent non-profit) mission, our ability to set our own course and be responsive to the needs of our customers and communities was limited until this spin-off.  There were additional, more mundane limitations, such as an inability to directly compete as a “small business” (non profits are not businesses), and the difficulty in raising capital as a not-for-profit.

 

Slashgeo: Does this change allow OpenGeo to become even better competitors to other commercial and open source geospatial solutions providers?

OpenGeo: It allows us to better execute our “Spatial IT” initiatives, so “yes.”  We will be hiring more staff to enhance the user experience of our software, increase documentation and build additional capabilities. We believe all aspects of our work will benefit from our independence and increased funding.

 

 

Slashgeo: Do you foresee any impact on the diversity of the solutions you're offering? Do you plan to build capacity and expertise for other currently popular open source services that OpenGeo doesn't currently offer?

 

OpenGeo: That is something we are looking at very seriously. Many of our customers have asked us to develop capabilities that go well beyond the web mapping and related services we’re known for now – stay tuned!

 

 

Slashgeo: Will there be any impact on your relation with the Open Geospatial Consortium and your support for modern and efficient geospatial standards?

 

OpenGeo: Our greater independence and funding will enable us to be even more effective in working with the OGC.  Our founder, Chris Holmes, was recently named to the OGC Board. We’re also founding members of LocationTech, with several other key OGC players, which is helping broaden adoption of location aware technologies that leverage geospatial standards.

 

 

Slashgeo: Any long term plans associated to this change that you'd like to share with our readers?

 

OpenGeo: Our goal remains the same: to build the highest quality software for location and mapping, available to all. This important step gives us a stronger base of resources to support the open source communities we work with. We remain committed to open source principles and look forward to continuing our develop the best geospatial tools while supporting the open source communities and our customers alike.

Google Plus One

Chet Van Duzer's Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps does what it says on the tin: you really will find out more than you ever wanted to about the sea monsters that appeared on medieval and...

(Click through to read the entire post.)

@gletham GIS, Social, Mobile Tech Images posted a photo:

Trimble Next Generation Unmanned Aircraft System for Photogrammetric Aerial Mapping - Trimble UX5 is the first complete UAS photogrammetric mapping solution specifically designed for surveyors and geospatial professionals - www.gisuser.com/content/view/30201/2/

Landsat-8 captures more than 400 scenes per day, and as of early June 2013 more than 20,000 scenes are already available. New from Geosage, free tools for working with Landsat 8 imagery. GeoSage has...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Something interesting from the Earth Day Data Challenge as they are looking for creative uses of the public ocean data available on marinexplore.org. For example, the use of historical sea surface...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

@gletham GIS, Social, Mobile Tech Images posted a photo:

The use of the Riegl VZ400 proved to be very helpful for capturing the high resolution 3D data that was either out of range or not in the line of sight of mobile LiDAR sensors. www.gisuser.com/content/view/30195/28/

Have you ever wanted to contribute to the National Map? Well, now that the USGS has embraced the crowd there’s an opportunity for you to do just that! If you have access to the Internet and are...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

I realize it’s been some time so once again I’m pleased to share a fun and hopefully useful 5 Things on Friday.. enjoy and sorry about the delay! ;0) This edition gets a little geeky for...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

A week ago MapBox released the excellent and nicely designed 2013 OpenStreetMap Data Report. Here's the blog entry about the report. Really worth looking at the report, even if it's just for appreciating its superb presentation.

From the entry: "We've looked back on the project's 10 years in the making, the skyrocket growth to over 1 million users, 21 million miles, and 78 million buildings, and tried for the first time to tell the story of OpenStreetMap as a whole in data. We have traced through OpenStreetMap's 67,629,368 roads and tallied up the incredible sum of 21 million miles - that's 40 years of driving at 60 miles per hour."

Other OSM-related news:

• The beta version of iD 1.1, tuning OpenStreetMap editing
• Here's a scientific article named Towards generating highly detailed 3D CityGML models from OpenStreetMap

Google Plus One

Foursquare has teamed up with Samsung to launch what they’ve called the Time Machine. Simply put, Time Machine accesses your foursquare history to build and mashup a very creative and fun...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Nelson Minar has created a vector tile map of all the rivers in the United States. It's an amazing map, one that is being compared with Ben Fry's All Streets (previously) or this more recent map of...

(Click through to read the entire post.)

@gletham GIS, Social, Mobile Tech Images posted a photo:

Initial Norwegian news reports predicted that the impact from this year’s spring flooding would be extensive; the damage would propagate down the rivers and reach more central areas. Blom reacted quickly, mobilising their aircraft over the affected waterways and rivers to acquire aerial imagery and document the results of the flooding www.gisuser.com/content/view/30184/2/

Some interesting data being shared by the Denver Post as they track the devastation resulting from the wildfires near Colorado Springs, Colorado. Note, a KML file is available from HERE for use in...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode.

From the open source / open data front:

• Here's an excellent and funny presentation of Leaflet: Past, Present and Future
• GitHub just added mapping capabilities: any GeoJSON file hosted on GitHub can be mapped with MapBox Streets 
• Mapnik 2.2.0 has been released
• Here's CLAVIN (Cartographic Location And Vicinity INdexer) is an open source software package for document geotagging and geoparsing that employs context-based geographic entity resolution (via O'Reilly Radar)
• A new book available, The QGIS Training Manual, by Rüdiger Thiede, Tim Sutton, Horst Düster, and Marcelle Sutton
• Here comes QGIS Enterprise, it's QGIS Desktop + Server + Web Client along with support and maintenance contract
• Yes, in QGIS 2.0 we'll get data-defined symbol properties, and here's on the new QGIS 2.0 APIs
• Mapbender has been resurrected into Mapbender3: "the back office software and client framework for spatial data infrastructures" 
• Something new, GeoThink.ca - Canadian Geospatial and Open Data Think Tank
• Here's some nice javascript examples dealing with projections and other geostuff, mostly from D3.js, some are pretty impressive
• Here's all OpenGeo presentations videos from FOSS4G-NA 2013, and why not, here's the GeoServer presentation from GeoSolutions
• About the same time, OpenGeo also launched MapMeter, a monitoring tool for spatial deployments such as GeoServer
• From the gvSIG blog, I learned about available Emergency mapping symbology

From the Esri front:

• An entry named From ArcMap to ArcGIS Online: well-prepared geographic information for the web
• Here's the OGC summary of what happened with the GeoServices REST API standard submitted by Esri
• There's now ArcGIS Online admin tools available on GitHub
• News that Esri looks to link CAD Software to ArcGIS Online

From the Google front:

• Google announced today nothing less than 1,000 new Street View locations to Google Maps
• Road traffic information is important to Google, Google To Buy Waze For $1.3 Billion and the official Google announcement
• There was a Google ocean bathymetry update earlier this week
• Wonder what Google Glasses looks like inside? Via Make, here's What's Inside Google Glass
• That's a topic we mentioned before, recently discussed over Slashdot, How Google Street View Keeps an Eye on Things Where There Are No Streets
• A book's voyage recreated in Google Earth: “Sailing Alone Around the World” in Google Earth
• I tried the new Google Maps interface, and I admit, this is an excellent improvement

In the miscellaneous category:

• Via APB, the well known Stamen Design launched their Map Stack that makes designing maps free, easy and fun
• APB links to an article named The Revolution Will Be Live-Mapped: A Brief History of Protest Maptivism
• In case you missed it, Landsat 8 data is available for download since May 30th
• Earlier this week, Microsoft announced 270 terabytes of new Bird's Eye imagery
• Geoff mentions that the Time required to create 3D city models dropping rapidly, now less than a week for a textured 3D model of a whole city
• Google Glass will have competition, Atheer Offers a Wearable Display That's Glasses, Not Glass, but it's clearly not as sexy or wearable
• In Apple's iOS new 'Today' feature, there's Traffic Information on Frequently Visited Locations
• A quick one on 3D printing, "Anti-Gravity" 3D Printer Sculpts Shapes On Any Surface
• A generic article on drones / UAVs gathering location-based science data easier and cheaper than ever
• And now those drones can be accurately guided by thoughts 
• Frank at VerySpatial offers a long entry on the geography of cars
• The same site made me aware of the course on Teaching World Music with Geospatial Technology

In the maps category:

• Here's 5 Maps That Show How Divided America Really Is: median income, poverty line, inequality, food stamps, and diplomas
• Here's a Map of All American Rivers
• Funny name, WWF's ArkGIS: mapping the changing Arctic landscape
• Here's bedmap2, an ice and bedrock map Antarctica

Google Plus One

Maptorian is a vector map pack created thinking about the work of graphic designers, journalists, computer graphics and, in general, people who need to create visually appealing maps easily and quickly. Thanks to the maps distributed by layers of Maptorian, any person who knows how to handle a current vector graphic design program, especially a program like Illustrator, can easily shape their own maps.

Everything in Maptorian maps is editable. The distribution of thematic layers is designed to quickly create different types of maps through the activation and deactivation of the same, the change in distribution and, of course, in its edition. Yes, all in Maptorian is editable. The thicknesses, colors, text, fonts, everything can be changed easily to reach the desired map. And all this without leaving your favorite vector drawing program, without having to resort to complex mapping tools.

Maptorian pack maps are created thinking in graphic design in the visual, to communicate information easily. For this, there has been shaped with public domain cartographic databases, like Natural Earth, following as reference the CIA World Factbook maps, from a dumping of raw data into a GIS, later distributed in layers with Illustrator. Each vector object created this way has subsequently been edited “by hand” when the occasion demanded it, as it happened with text labels, elements of color, thicknesses and other graphic aspects. The result is a vector map pack created just to have on hand a number of ideal quality templates when designing visually appealing maps.

 

Google Plus One

There’s no arguing that the topic of drones (also known as unmanned aerial vehicles  or UAV)  are a huge topic, particularly when it comes to data collection. Naturally, UAVs are also of...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Sadly, another wildfire season is upon us and already we’ve seen some tragic events in California and now in Colorado.  A reminder that Esri has a useful news map that shares data and updates...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

The latest in the Landsat series of Earth observation satellites, Landsat 8, officially began its mission on May 30. The purpose is to extend an unparalleled four-decade record of Earth’s land...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]