Saw this whimsical little video on Gizmodo, and had to share. In Japan, everything is cooler, and Google Street View is no exception!

If you play this video at an appropriate volume you will either get yelled at by your coworkers to turn it down or to turn it up…ignore the former and share a pint with the latter. And hey, with is more geographic than a band from Newfoundland being used to highlight a holiday we all connect with beer Ireland.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently highlighted an interactive map of state spending on higher education institutions and how federal stimulus monies are being used in each state. The focus is on three themes: Percent of higher ed budget from stimulus monies (FY 2009-10), change in general fund spending (FY 2008-2010), and budget gaps as a percent of the general fund budget (FY 2010). It is interesting to see which states are in the best position to support state schools and which ones will have significant issues when federal stimulus monies begin to disappear in 2011. The image below is the % budget from stimulus map, click through to play around with the interactive map.

We will have some representation at the ESRI DevSummit next week and while the focus will be on covering some of the presentations and getting an idea of what will be changing in the dev area in ArcGIS 10, there will be some time to catch up with anyone interested in highlighting their work. If you are interested in sharing your thoughts and work of the podcast contact us to touch base and make a plan to meet.

A VerySpatial Podcast

Shownotes – Episode 243
March 14, 2010

Main Topic: Our conversation with Brian Wienke of Accela

Click for the detailed shownotes

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For all you students out there whose maps are greeted with a “That’s bizarre…”, I’ve got the perfect map challenge for you! Our reader Keith M. sent us a heads up about the Bizarre Map Challenge, a map design competition open to high school, college, and university students (only here in the US). The maps submitted by students are supposed to be “bizarre” in the sense of being out of the ordinary but still using real-world data, so thinking outside the box will pay off!

The deadline to submit your map is March 22nd, and you can find complete contest rules here

First Prize is $5000 and the top ten will all get cash prizes, so start designing those maps!

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Apparently lots of people have been asking Google for biking directions and now they get their wish!  The directions get added right along with the driving and walking directions we’ve all come to know and love.  They’ve even added the ability to avoid hills (good luck with that in West Virginia)!   Like the walking and driving directions, the biking directions report total miles and estimated time.  I’m not a biker, although I’ve considered trying to bike part-way to work this summer.  It’s nice to know how many miles it will take and how long I should budget in the morning to do so.  It also seems to do a pretty good job of planning the route to avoid major roads with no real bike support.  I did my house to work and a large section of it is basically a county highway with little to no shoulder.  It routed me through a residential area for part of it so I avoid the traffic.

This is a pretty cool example of a map that shows aspatial information – the Rock and Roll Metro Map.  It looks like a metro map, showing the connections between various rock artists.  You’ve gotta love the combination of two of my favorite things – maps and music.

You can quibble with a few of their linkages, but it’s a pretty cool idea for a map!

via http://www.albertoantoniazzi.com/ and flickr

Wired news is reporting that modern GPS sensors have be able to determine the Chilean city of Concepcion has been moved 10 feet to the west from the recent earthquake.  Apparently this area is prime area for seismic activity due to its location over a subduction zone.  The hope by researchers is to quickly get more GPS stations on the ground in that area so more precise movements can be detected.

Today at lunch we were kicking around some ideas on connecting various content with other content or to a location in a user friendly way and I couldn’t get past the thought of a touch interface. The problem is that we are still tied predominantly to a few things in the tech arena that makes this a limiting factor for deployment. Some of the main issues are interface, hardware, and SDK/API.

Interface is fairly obvious since touch apps are fairly new on the scene, especially well designed interfaces. Apple iPhone OS has the ball rolling well on the mobile side with Android looking to catch up, but Windows 7 is the only route to go right now for a broad audience app for laptops or desktops, though there are some Linux options if you aren’t worried about wide distro. Either way, the Win7 and Linux interfaces aren’t necessarily the most robust at this point since developers are just beginning to take advantage of what is available in the OS. On the upside it means we don’t have to wait for devs to roll out a driver and app compatibility for their device since they can probably use OS native libraries, but now we have to wait for software manufacturers to roll compatibility into their software for more than mouse input.

On the hardware side, especially the desktop (aka large[r] screens), there is still a long time to wait for device manufacturers to add a touch screen across their product lines. Cell phones are there, the upcoming tablets look promising, but if you want more than 2 people to look at your screen at once you have to jump-up to research $$ to afford a device or expect folks to Make a multiuser, larger display themselves. We have really liked some of the interfaces like the MS Surface, Diamond Touch, or TouchTable we have seen at various conferences, but they have the same limitations as something like a VR Cave or other stereo viewing device…they are meant to stay in one place so that people have to come to them.

Looping back around to developers and native OS libraries…YAY! It is phenomenal that we have access to hardware and SDKs that allow us to create whatever touch apps our imaginations can think up. There are limitations in the software SDKs available in GIS applications. Just as above, we are limited to the input methods that applications and OSes allow. We have applications from Autodesk that support Windows 7 multitouch (Mudbox for example) and ESRI is demoing an iPhone app, but will we be able to build apps with these libraries or will we have to recreate the functionality of these types of apps? It is a question that we will soon see the answers to as more users acquire touch capable hardware which will encourage developers to create for them in ever more interesting ways.