august 2004 archives

Tuesday, August 31, 2004

German company buys Dutch mapping website

Locatienet has sold all its shares to the German company PTV. PTV already has a presence in the Netherlands in the logistics industry. Through this acquisition, PTV now owns Locatienet, ensuring a strong position in the LBS industry.

PTV is also the owner of Map&Guide, that supplies the mapping and route planning applications that underpin Locatienet's web portals for mapping, travel directions, and traffic information. Mapping websites in Europe have a strong relationship with a software company. Netsolut demonstrates the capabilities of its software on the Map24.com mapping portal and Maporama was founded by employees of GeoConcept.

Thursday, August 26, 2004

Locative revisited

Okay, Ben was right about it tonight: I haven't talked about locative media for quite a while and have steered clear of it ever since Transmediale in Berlin earlier this year. Wednesday afternoon and evening, the Stedelijk Museum ran a Locative Media workshop, co-organised by Socialfiction. It was great to catch up with Jo, Esther and to put a face to some names, particularly Pete Gomes and Schuyler Erle. 'Nuf names dropping for now. So what did these people have to tell? I have to admit I missed most of the afternoon session, and I caught up over dinner with some of the people on the panel for the evening session.

Admittedly I dozed off now and then, but having heard talks by most of the people before it was not too difficult to keep track of the topics being discussed. During the interval it was nice to be introduced to Sam Critchley. Thanks Wilfried for organising this event!

Thursday, August 19, 2004

Microsoft further extends its influence in the mapping industry

Really, I just can't believe how I missed this piece of interesting news. Microsoft and Multimap.com have teamed up to deliver geographic web services. There's been a mapping module in the spreadsheet package Excel that's part of the Microsoft Office suite for quite some time now. With the MapPoint service, Microsoft entered the online mapping arena. Since the US market had been saturated with online mapping providers, Microsoft literally bought its way in and took out MapBlast.

The UK market for online maps had been gridlocked for quite some time too. Furthermore, the European players all try to fish in each other's ponds every once in a while, but not very successfully. Instead of competing for these markets, Microsoft has found a way into these markets by signing an agreement with Multimap.com. I have to admit that it's not too much of a shock to me, really. I reckon it's a great match!

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

One month beyond

Indeed, it's been more than a month since I last posted here. Been on holiday and had dinner at the lovely restaurant of Tibits in Zürich, Switzerland that I first visited two years ago. Also there's been a lot of activity here at the RIVM, especially regarding the Atlas of Public Health and some new web sites to be realised by the end of this year that will feature some more interactive applications with a slight geographic perspective!

Returned refreshed to work, but also to some of my projects that have been going on in the background. For example, I added some more example to the map navigation widget gallery.

Socialfiction.org has cooked up a gathering of locatives in Amsterdam next week that is not to be missed. Enschede also seems to become the place to be these days. Not only will it host the SVG Open 2005 conference, also Tim O'Reilly has invited some people here in Europe to get together at Euro Foo Camp over the weekend share their works in progress, show off the latest tech toys and hardware hacks, and tackle challenging problems together.