GeoCompetition and Innovation

Last week I was invited to give a talk at the annual AGI Scotland event on the subject of Geo competition and innovation.

I have been asked by many for a copy of the slides, so here they are.

To summarise the message of my talk: "even in a time that many may consider to be doom and gloom there are many many bright initiavtives and innovations happenning across the world. These innovations are driving competition and this competition is delivering savings and improved services to the end user.

Organisations, particularly government ones, that have strategies that see them fixed into one technology or one supplier will find it increasing difficult to test and adopt such innovations and naturally will not see the savings that such innovations and competition bring with it."

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.