London Olympic Mapping Copyright Free

I am not sure if this is news or not but it is worth a post. Following conversations between the UKMap team and the Olympic Development Agency I received today an email (full text below) which states that they are going to make available mapping of the London Olympic site to all and it will be copyright free.

This is great news for the mapping and location industry. Although full details have yet to be released, if the mapping follows the email we can all base our work on one Master Plan.

Immediate questions such as content, layers, scale, updates, release dates etc are all to be confirmed but I think this is a big tick for the London Olympics.

We might not have the biggest stadium but at least we can make it best located one!

Email text below:
"I’m in the process of creating an OS Licence free map based on the CAD Master plan of the Olympic Park.
As part of this process we will be creating a “Masterplan” drawing that we will be giving out to not only yourselves, but all mapping companies that is free of copyright.
This masterplan will be converted to SHP and Adobe Illustrator.
I will know more about the delivery date by the end of November"

How green is my city?

I was invited by The London Tree Officers Association to show how UKMap can map the tree canopy of London.  The full presentation is here.

  One key fact we learnt was that in New York, the Tree Officer had shown that for every $1 spent on trees New Yorkers gained $5 of benefit.

Yet in London we don't even have a tree canopy map or even an idea of how the population of trees are changing. 

With a quick bit of UKMap analysis I showed that 11% of east side of London is covered with trees.

 Significant or not?  Too early to tell. 

But with climate change dominating our horizon, trees are an easy way to reduce our emissions.

New Geo Event Announced For 2010

David Rhind (Ex, DG of OS), Ed Parsons (GI Guru), Chris Roper (GI Entrepreneur) all on one stage at the Cities Revealed 2010 event.  Open to all.

This years event celebrates 10 years of Cities Revealed with a Smörgåsbord of GI activities, including Workshops, Seminars, User case studies and Key note speakers.

Topics include Mash Ups, Mapping, GPS, Map output, route finding and some insights into where the future for GI lies.

This year looks like being the best yet.

As with each year the event is always fully booked so make sure you book now, or soon to get a fresh perspective on the road ahead and some training to go with it.

UKMap countrywide flying programme

Yes, as you may have guessed we have just announced our plans to deliver a new countrywide aerial survey programme for the UK. Why you may ask are we doing this given that there are a few others already attempting to do this.

Well to put it simply we need high quality, up to date aerial imagery that is our copyright to be the base for our UKMap product.

Thanks to our friends at Aerodata we have in fact already started the process by flying the West Midlands, Yorkshire, and Nottinghamshire areas of the country, with a digital camera at 10 cm resolution.
One unique part of our plan is to fly all year round - obviously only in good weather - but we feel this will give us the ability to collect all the imagery we need in a few years and will give the advantage of imagery without the blanket of leaves that accompany summer flying programmes.

Keep an eye out for more developments soon.

UKMap Pricing Updates

We just launched an update to our UKMap price list following feedback, over 100 downloads of the pack so far, which we are pleased with.

The updates are related to the pricing guide:
1. You can now order up to four UKMap tiles for your minimum order fee (a saving of £400!).
2. We have simplified our pricing structure.
UKMap with maintenance is now only £200/sqkm a saving of £160/sqkm
UKMap without maintenance is £140/sqkm.
Both these prices are for all 9 layers of UKMap - bargin!
The price list is focused on the 1 to 10sqkm, not 20sqkm.
For those who want areas above 10 sqkm please call us.

Look out for the new UK National Map Reference system - need to wiki this to explain more.

UKMap - Every Little Helps

Alot I am sure is going to come out of the AGI conference over the coming weeks.

We at UKMap had a great time and were over whelmed with the reception we received and the positive comments we were given - more on that later.

So why the change of  logo?  In a conference 'boxing match' between Google and OS, UKMap was positioned similar to a well know supermarket, so our friends at STAR-APIC (Tom & Stuart) were quick to come up with this.

Yes we are happy with the analogy - as we are about competition and choice for the consumer and about value at a competative price.

But no we are not changing our logo.

More to come.

UKMap Prices Out

UKMap pricing now out.  Hope you all like it.  Feed back please.

To tired to write more after exhausting AGI 2009 conf - what a great event.  But more on that later