2008 Developer Summit Presentations Now Available

http://edn.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=conferences.gateway&selectedConference=ds08

2008 Developer Summit Presentations Now AvailableTechnical presentations from the 2008 ESRI Developer Summit are now available on the ESRI Developer Network. Slides and videos are available for each session along with comments from other site visitors.

ESRI Videos at YouTube

http://joesonic.com/blog/2008/06/25/esri-videos-at-youtube/

About four days ago (21.06.2008) ESRI joined Youtube with a profile. At esritv they want to publish official ESRI company videos.

ArcGIS Explorer 480 Has Been Released!

http://blogs.esri.com/Info/blogs/arcgisexplorerblog/archive/2008/06/24/arcgis-explorer-480-has-been-released.aspx

Tuesday, June 24, 2008 10:00 PM - ArcGIS-Explorer-Team
ArcGIS Explorer 480 Has Been Released!

The ArcGIS Explorer Team is pleased to announce that ArcGIS Explorer 480 has been released.
If the ESRI servers are your home servers, you'll be notified that there is a new version available the next time you start the application. Just follow the instructions to download and install this new release.

For those that deploy Explorer from your own home servers, you'll need to swap your versions and update your version.html file to push out the new release to your users. With this release we've reorganized the home server folder structure. Please refer to the Migrating from a previous version of ArcGIS Explorer Home Server documentation included in the new ArcGIS Home Server Help.

This release has lots of new features, check out the What's New in ArcGIS Explorer 480 document for a detailed list of all the new features and enhancements. At the top of our list are improved performance, E-mail capabilities, support for GeoRSS feeds and enterprise geodatabases (ArcSDE), improved dashboarding, GPX file import, and there's a lot more. We'll be covering these in more detail here on the blog.

Feel free to send us your feedback, and let us know what you think. We'll also be monitoring the Explorer discussion forum to help you with any questions that you may have.
- The ArcGIS Explorer Team

gSpatial Toolbar 2.06.14

http://www.topdownloads.net/index/software/view.php?id=155580

gSpatial Toolbar 2.06.14 description:gSpatial Toolbar allows you to import, display and manipulate ESRI shape file data in Google Earth. Annotate your data and perform thematic queries on your Excel spreadsheet data or ODBC data sources, visualize results in Google Earth.

Version 2.06.14 includes unspecified updates.Google Earth, Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc., GIS, Google Inc.

ESRI Javascript API is FREE

http://gisprog.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/176/

ESRI Javascript API is FREE
The JavaScript API’s are not part of the ArcGIS Server installation, but are being made available (for FREE!) to any JavaScript developers out on the Web. You can start using them right now with your 9.3 RC1 ArcGIS Server.
They are available at:http://resources.esri.com/arcgisserver/index.cfm?fa=JSAPIsThe new resource centers have all of the downloads for the JavaScript API’s, Samples, SDK, and documentation.

Glostrup Kommune vælger Google Maps til borgerinformation på hjemmesiden

http://www.geodata.dk/?id=636

Glostrup Kommune vælger Google Maps til borgerinformation på hjemmesiden

Glostrup Kommune har indgået aftale om en komplet GIS-løsning til Kommunen. Løsningen leveres af Geodata Danmark og indeholder både en løsning til sagsbehandling og til borgerinformation. Løsningen er baseret på en central geografisk database, som alle brugere har adgang til fra såvel desktop programmer som WebGIS. Dermed sikres, at brugerne altid har adgang til opdaterede data.

Som en af de første kommuner i Danmark vil Glostrup Kommune anvende Google Maps indlejret i kommunens hjemmeside. Google Maps vil blive suppleret med kommunens egne data. Kommunen anvender i lighed med en række andre kommuner Sitecore som Content Management System (CMS). Visionen er, at kommunens web-redaktør på egen hånd, kan publicere geografisk information baseret på Google Maps.

Løsningen sikrer, at offentligheden kan få adgang til den nyeste og mest brugervenlige teknologi samtidig med, at kommunens egne data kan præsenteres som en del af løsningen.

2D driving simulator on Google Maps

http://geoquake.jp/en/webgame/DrivingSimulatorGM/

This is a top down view automobile simulator (well, something like that) powered by Google Maps API for Flash. You can drive around the world without gas :)

Discover the world from your sofa

http://www.locr.com/

Discover the world from your sofa June 13, 2008
Company: locrIndustry: Internet/Web Mapping/Web ServicesLocation: Braunschweig, Denmark

Photo sharing site locr.com takes stock of initial success

Braunschweig -- For over a year, locr has offered users the possibility to tag photos with geographical data, to archive photos, to save them in albums and to share them with friends, relatives or any other user. In addition to many other innovative applications, this photo sharing community, with an emphasis on geotagging, has made a platform available where users can supplement the information given about the location of their photos and can interactively exchange information about pictures, locations and experiences. Since the site went live in January 2007, the offering has expanded through various collaborations, for example with major manufacturers of cell phones (Nokia), dataloggers (Leadtek), GPS chips (SiRF) and the WPS provider Skyhook Wireless.

The 50,000 users now registered at http://www.locr.com/ don't use the platform just for archiving and sharing geo-indexed photos. They can also access a range of tools for automatic or semi-automatic tagging of their photo files, such as the locr GPS photo software: this software can georeference photos taken with a device without GPS capability. If the photographer used an external GPS datalogger while taking the photo, the software automatically saves the location coordinates to the graphics file.

Electronic mapping material differs for some regions with respect to quality and coverage. After the first few months, when users could only access maps, aerial photos and satellite information from Google EarthTM, locr expanded its offering at the end of 2007 to include the services of Microsoft Virtual EarthTM und Yahoo! Maps TM.

http://www.locr.com/ not only displays the photos saved to the site and the location they were taken on a corresponding map; in addition, more photos of the local vicinity, the postal address, keywords, commentary and the appropriate Wikipedia entry also appear. Of course, by request, photos may not be published at all, or only within a certain group, or they may be displayed publicly to all site visitors.

After concluding numerous collaborative deals with datalogger manufacturers, most recently locr extended its services in cooperation with Skyhook Wireless, a provider of the WiFi positioning system (WPS). The groundbreaking combination of WPS and GPS will help users access locr offerings with cell phones and smartphones, also in areas that have been previously problematic for GPS, such as in buildings or the narrow alleys between.

Keeping their goal of continually offering users new, innovative features in mind, the creators of locr are now working on expanding their services to more cell phone platforms.
"With locr we are revolutionizing modern photography", says Malte Schloen, CEO of locr GmbH. He is looking resolutely toward the future: "Due to our pioneering work, locr has succeeded in professionally meeting the requirements for georeferencing with innovation. Because geotagging no longer functions just with GPS, but can also be used with WLAN capable cell phones, our popularity has risen markedly."

About locrlocr is a photo-sharing community with a focus on geotagging. The locr software (for cell phones, digital cameras, GPS data loggers and PCs) automatically tags photos with GPS data, shows their position on digital maps and generates for each photo descriptions of the locality. The locr online community enables users to upload photos, archive them in albums and swap them interactively with friends and acquaintances. For more details, see http://www.locr.com/

Google's New PDF Viewer

June 15, 2008 By: Peter Smith Category: Bicycle Maps

Many of us have seen and used bicycle maps—those pretty PDF documents with bike lanes and whatnot drawn on them. (Here is the Austin Bike Map) They help us get from Point A to Point B in relative safety.

Well, now we can almost view them using Google Docs. I say almost because the new feature is still pretty limited— you can’t zoom in on the PDF yet, for instance, making it pretty much unusable as a potential online bike map viewer. And you also can’t share PDFs publicly yet; to share you have to send Google Docs email invites out. But I suspect these things will (may?) change in the not-too-distant future.

This feature could make getting bicycle directions just a bit easier, because we could avoid having to download and install and figure out how to use Adobe Reader - the free-but-bloated PDF viewer that I suspect most folks are familiar with. (Adobe created the PDF file format)

Viewing a PDF can sometimes be a hassle. You may have to save a PDF to your hard drive before you can open it. You can get different “Download” vs. “View” behavior depending on which browser you’re using, or which computer you’re using. You can get annoying popups from Adobe telling you that you need updates, or that you’re missing some piece of their software, and so forth. In short, viewing PDFs can be a royal pain. I figure it’s possible that Google Docs’ new support for PDFs might help alleviate some of these issues. At a minimum, it could be one less piece of software we have to install on our computers to get the information we need.

So what does this mean for our efforts? Well, not necessarily a whole lot at the moment, but it does represent something: one more step that Google has taken to help “organize the world’s information,” and it could help us bikers in several ways.

By allowing PDFs to be easily viewed online, we’ve taken the extremely valuable data that is locked in PDF-based bike maps and made it easier for people to access. For our particular efforts, of course, we’re most concerned with having easy access to bicycle route information. We want bicycle navigation on Google Maps, but there are plenty of things that can make our lives easier in the interim. This might be one of them.

If you use a mobile device like a Blackberry or an iPhone, this should make it easier for you to pull up a bicycle map when you need it. It seems as though there are PDF viewers available for those devices already, but again, this could be one less piece of software that we have to worry about installing (It’s possible this feature is not available for Google Docs on mobile phones, yet.).

I feel like this small feature of Google Docs also helps to reinforce this very positive notion of making public data freely available, and making it easier for people to use. We’ve talked before about how much free GIS data there is available, at least in America, and how Google is now working with companies like ESRI to make that data easier to access, understand, and use. We’ve mentioned efforts to push governments to open up public data to….the public.

In summary, a seemingly-small step, but a worthy one, nonetheless.

iPhone has GPS....Yaawwnn...Next

http://apb.directionsmag.com/archives/4400-iPhone-has-GPS....Yaawwnn...Next.html

Wednesday, June 11. 2008

iPhone has GPS....Yaawwnn...Next

I've steadfastly delayed comment on the addition of a GPS chipset (Broadcom chip according to Seeking Alpha) to the iPhone because I said a year ago they blew it when the iPhone 1.0 launched without it. So, now we have the iPhone 2.0 with GPS. Sounds like Apple is working from the Microsoft playbook: Launch a less than full featured product at a high price; wait for customer complaints, drop the price and re-launch a second version with better features. I guess Steve Jobs is now a student of Bill Gates. This is news?

So in a year's time what do we know? While Apple still holds only about 5% of the overall smartphone market according to InformationWeek it has picked up share on a quarterly basis since its launch according to CNNMoney. It won't replace your Blackberry which already had GPS capabilities. Why switch? Are you looking for the "coolness" factor or is it that you really like AT&T's cell coverage and speed (that's supposed to be a joke).

Maybe I'm just not a "Mac guy." I can't get excited about this particular news because the market has moved well beyond just GPS as a feature. We are now talking about what we can do with it and more LBS services have already been announced and launched by other phone providers that makes the iPhone news anticlimactic. This is not to say that the iPhone is not disruptive technology. I think it is. But the addition of GPS would have been in keeping with Apple's "coolness factor" to facilitate social networking and other location aware services at its 1.0 launch...not a year later.

What's next? An iPhone icon showing you where the closest Apple store is located? I guess you'll need GPS for that!

ArcGIS 9.3 Supports Geospatial Information in Adobe Acrobat 9 and PDF

http://www.esri.com/news/releases/08_2qtr/arcgis_pdf.html

ESRI and Adobe Collaborate to Provide Increased Interaction with PDF Maps
Redlands, California—ESRI announces support for Adobe Acrobat 9 software and new geospatial capabilities available in PDF with the release of ArcGIS 9.3. ESRI has collaborated with Adobe Systems Incorporated over the past year to ensure a seamless workflow for geographic information system (GIS) professionals using ArcGIS who wish to widely distribute maps in PDF. Recipients of PDF map documents can find and display a location in the file using x,y coordinates as well as measure features directly on the map. This enabling capability enhances both existing customer workflows and creates new ones because recipients without ArcGIS can directly interact in new ways with maps using Acrobat 9.

ArcGIS 9.3 users can author a map document and export it in PDF for wide distribution while passing along the ability for increased end-user interaction with the document beyond simple viewing. "We are excited that our collaborative work with Adobe allows our users to distribute their GIS maps to a wider audience," said Damian Spangrud, senior ArcGIS product manager, ESRI. "The portability and pervasiveness of Acrobat and Adobe Reader software allows ArcGIS users to better share their geographic information with their end users. The advanced features in Acrobat 9 mean users can now do more with PDF maps than ever before."

"The ability to effectively extend the reach of GIS information is something of great interest to enterprise organizations and government agencies," said Michael Folkers, Acrobat group product manager, Business Productivity Business Unit, Adobe. "Our work with ESRI and the advancements we've made in Acrobat 9 will enable customers to leverage the richness of PDF and reach of Adobe Reader for GIS workflows."

The enhancements supporting PDF in ArcGIS 9.3 will be available as a free download for ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Server, and ArcGIS Engine at the release of ArcGIS 9.3. To learn more about what's new in ArcGIS 9.3, visit www.esri.com/whatscoming.