In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Expect more Esri news soon since it's going to be the Esri International User Conference next week. James Fee made me aware that ArcGIS Online / ArcGIS.com has been significantly updated, amongst the new features:

• Drag-and-drop files
• Support for WMS services
• KML support
• Improved feature editing
• ArcGIS Mobile

and more...

This is more of an "end of year" geonews in batch mode! Everything pertinent found in the last two weeks that we haven't shared yet. I wish you an excellent holiday break. We'll be back in January. You can still send in your contributions.

From the Google front:

• A summary entry on everything Google Maps/Earth and Santa Claus and another one on holiday trees in 3D
• More details on Google Maps 5.0 for Android
• Paris gets major 3D enhancements in Google Earth
• Google Kills (beta) Location Alerts Feature in Latitude
• Google now offers a 3D Body Browser
• There also was an imagery update in the middle of the month

From the ESRI front:

• ESRI Confirms 400 million user-genenerated maps on ArcGIS.com in October

From the open data / open source front:

• Via the geodata list, I learned about the 2010 U.S. Census TIGER/Line Shapefiles starting to become available, and it's also available from WeoGeo
• OpenLayers gets a new Bing Tiles layer
• Natural Earth map data in the public domain
• An entry on Geocoding Github: Visualizing Distributed Open-Source Development
• An O'Reilly article on Ushahidi enabling crowdsourced journalism and intelligence
• rgeo, a new geo library for Rails
• Here's a new project named GeoApt Spatial Data Browser
• The OpenGeo Suite Community Edition 2.3.2 released
• An entry on QGIS 1.7's vector rule editor and polygon line styles

From the Microsoft front:

• Bing Maps REST Services now supports transit routes

In the miscellaneous category:

• SS informs us Russia Launched a Geospatial Data and Earth Imagery Portal
• V1 offers their geospatial top 10 of 2010, DM also have their own geospatial top 10
• Here's a new augmented reality app that translate text that you see
• Still in the AR topic, an entry on how Kinect democratizes augmented reality
• Two Slashdot entries on 3D printing: MakerBot Thing-o-Matic 3D Printer Assembly and Cheap 3D Fab Could Start an Innovation Renaissance
• Still on the 3D topic, Researchers Develop Genuine 3D Camera
• TanDEM-X is now operational

In the maps category:

• Here's visualization of Wikileaks mirrors around the world
• A colleague sent me a link to the BBC Facebook connections map the world
• An Interactive Map of Diabetes in the U.S.
• Don't we all dream, here's an Atlas of Remote Islands

And the almost-off-topic link of the week, an amazing 4-minutes animation of the last 200 years of global history

Here's recent geonews in batch mode.

On the ESRI front:

• ArcGIS Mapping For Microsoft SharePoint 2.0 Now Available
• ArcGIS API For iOS 1.0 Now Available
• Latest Software And Firmware Versions To Use With ArcPad 10
• And an entry on creating a web application using ArcGIS.com
• James Fee encountered a limitation of the ESRI's EDN developer licenses when trying to test on multiple OS

In the miscellaneous category:

• OpenStreetMap editor named Potlatch version 2 is almost ready to be the default OSM editor
• MapQuest launched the MapQuest Atlas
• An entry on New Features for Bing Maps REST Services
• Here's an interesting entry on comparing image compression formats such as MrSID, jpeg, jpeg 2000, GeoTIFFs and ECW
• The FGT blog offers a nice entry on online GPS satellite geometry error predictions tools
• APB mentions that SAP now have their own augmented reality app
• They also have an entry on tying a credit card to a cell phone location for location-based fraud protection
• The U.S. EPA GeoData Gateway website is now available to all

In the maps category:

• GeoCurrents shares an entry on the dangers of mapping religions, in an entry focusing on Islam mapping
• Here's a map of the gangs of New York