may 2005 archives

Monday, May 30, 2005

The geography of the French referendum

On Wednesday the Dutch will be voting on the European constitution. The outcome of the French referendum was being watched closely last night. Today, the French Non is being discussed all over the media. Of course, a French Non means No, but it's interesting to take a look at the regional variation of the Non-voters, or even more important, that of the Oui-voters!

This morning, Le Monde featured a simple map of the départements of France. The blue for Oui and red for Non reminded me of maps of the US presidential elections. Later today, the map was redone as a nice choropleth map, the shading indicating the percentage of people voting Oui or Non. Moving the mouse over the départements, the tooltip lists the name of the département, the result and the number of people voting Oui or Non. The Flash movie further includes maps of the overall turnout (70% on average) and the percentage of blank votes.

So what's the geography of the French Non? Of course, the overall image comes in various shades of red for the Non-voters. One would expect the majority of département closer to the borders to be more European than the département at the centre. Indeed, the Haute-Savoie, separated from Switzerland only by Lake Geneva, comes in a shade of blue as does Bas-Rhin, the département of the second European capital Strasbourg. Furthermore, all overseas dependencies, except for Réunion, voted Oui. Curiously, the département Pas-de-Calais close to Great Britain has the highest percentage of Non-voters (69.5%). At the other extreme lies the département Paris, the heart of French politics, with the highest percentage of Oui-voters: 66.45%. Other pecularities are the cluster of Oui-voters in Brittany and the Val de Loire and the cluster of Non-voters in the départements adjacent to Belgium and Andorra. There's enough food for thought for geographers!

Saturday, May 28, 2005

You have reached your destination

TomTom's management team must have heard a little voice in the back of their minds speaking these very words when their company raised €469/$740 million in IPO last Friday. Well, with that much money they've certainly achieved their goal: to become multimillionaires.

There's been a lot of talk about TomTom's IPO over the last couple of weeks. Some suggest it's indeed just the management team keen to cash in: as the company is making a good profit, it won't be short for money until 2010. Others point at the weak product portfolio and the easy entry to market: although TomTom has a market share of 52% in Europe, it relies heavily on one product, the TomTom Go. Its market share may decrease rapidly as cheaper products imported from Asia become available, a scenario common for consumer electronics, or gadgets for short. Even Microsoft is planning to enter the market of navigation systems with the TBox for cars that would offer navigation, digital music, hands-free telephone calls and Internet access.

Nevertheless, maps and route planning are on everyone's radar these days, which makes it easier to explain to your average person what I do for a living as a cartographer...

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

The mobile phone thing

Opening my email this morning, I was thrown back 5 years. The executive interview with Sean Phelan, founder of Multimap brought back memories of my job interview with him in May 2000. Karl'd just finished a travel directions app for a WAP phone. I was impressed, they were impressed with me. Thus started my career in online mapping.

Over the years, maps on the web have really taken off. Google's latest apps blow everyone away. So what about that WAP phone app? Have you got maps on your mobile? Route66 offers the Mobile 2005 Symbian S60 kit to turn your Symbian Series 60 smartphone into a powerful navigation system. Just as hardly anyone buys route planning software for their PC anymore, there will be a time you don't buy a separate navigation system for your mobile phone. Sean's even bold enough to state:

Mobile is interesting and exciting, perhaps this will be the year.

Maybe I should get myself a smart phone sooner rather than later, Especially as I launched my first mobile application last friday: Droombeek. You can download a walking tour through the Roombeek neighbourhood to your PDA. It's a bit like Annotate Space DUMBO by Andrea Moed.

UPDATE: Sean provides further behind the scene information on the technology and geographic data that drives Multimap and on how Multimap manages to deliver maps to client websites around the world.