In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Slashdot discusses a story named Tool Reveals iPad and iPhone User Locations. Not the first time this happens to major location services providers. We can expect Apple to fix this loophole.

Their summary: "A researcher has found that Apple user locations can be potentially determined by tapping into Apple Maps and he has created a Python tool to make the process easier. iSniff GPS accesses Apple's database of wireless access points, which is collected by iPhones and iPads that have GPS and Wi-Fi location services enabled. Apple uses this crowd-sourced data to run its location services; however, the location database is not meant to be public. You can download the tool via Giuthub."

Here's recent Esri-related news.

• Yes, with the latest service pack, ArcGIS 10.1 runs on Windows 8 
• The latest SP also brings 64-bit Geoprocessing
• Esri shares several entries on map stories in Esri tools:
  • Be a hero in 15 minutes with story map templates (screenshot below)
  • Story Maps
  • Getting Started with Story Map Templates
• Here's what's new in Business Analyst 10.1
• There's a New Business Analyst iPad App too
• And you're not confined to iOS, the ArcGIS app is now available in the Windows Store
• ArcGIS for Local Government Fall 2012 is now available
• Silverlight isn't dead yet? ArcGIS Viewer for Silverlight 3.0 released

Bloggage update: Here is a small selection of mapping tools available on the iPad. Some are from the Appstore, others simply from the web. The upshot is that while there is a variety of apps available for iPads, web maps appear to work just as well. The advent of HTML5 will especially help in rendering vector maps on smartphone limited bandwidth.

For Immediate Release

HipGeo Launches "Trip" Features to Let Travelers Share their Journeys

 -- Anyone who travels with an iPhone can now instantly share animated trips with friends online --

Fullerton, CA - October 19, 2011 - HipGeo (www.hipgeo.com), a Los Angeles-based developer of a location-aware platform that records and displays the places users go and how they get there, today launched a new "Trips" feature. HipGeo users can use their iPhones to take pictures and track their travels then create, save and share their trips, micro-blogging their travels with active and passive features.

Users can download HipGeo from the Apple App Store at http://bit.ly/nB73Hw, and then record and share their trips through Facebook, Twitter, email, text or with an embedded HipGeo player on their blogs or web sites. Viewers of these trips can then see animated maps of the user's travels as well as slide shows of photos organized by location. Travelers can also share information such as locations, routes, places, comments, and photos.

"Our Trips feature adds context unique to HipGeo users," says HipGeo CEO Scott Daniel. "We deliver an automated way to capture and share photos, routes, and places, and it's the easiest way to create a compelling story with a smart phone. You can document any event, day, trip or travel, and then share it through popular social media sites, such as Facebook, adding a 'where' to your 'what and when.' This integration will not only improve the user experience, but will give people better ways to express their shareable moments."

About HipGeo

HipGeo (www.hipgeo.com) is a Los Angeles-based developer of a location-aware website and smartphone apps that automatically create a record of the places users go. APIs will be open to third-party developers by the end of 2011. The company was funded in May 2011, and its iPhone app was released in September 2011. The lead investor in HipGeo is Morado Venture Partners, a seed-stage fund run by former Yahoo! executives Ash Patel and Michael Marquez; other investors include Galen Buckwalter, former chief scientist of eHarmony, and prominent San Diego-based angel investor Robert Bingham.

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Lokeren, Belgium, September 22th, 2011.

Orbit GeoSpatial Technologies announce content update for of the free PanoViewer App.

The free PanoViewer App enables all Mobile Mapping content producers to make their content available on top mobile devices.  This content update showcases great new mobile mapping projects in a variety of environments: The Silverstone racing circuit, a golf course, a surface mine. This capability will directly showcase the intrinsic power of Orbit GT’s MoMa Publishing extension that provides remote access equally to the web as to mobile devices.

“We’re pleased to announce this content update as it demonstrates that mobile mapping is not limited to roads and rails”, says Peter Bonne, VP Business Development and Senior Product Manager at Orbit GT. “This content is directly available for all PanoViewer users, and others can download the free app from the App Store. We will be happy to demonstrate at the Nurnberg INTERGEO at our booth 7.A52.”

About Orbit GeoSpatial Technologies

Orbit Geospatial Technologies (Orbit GT) is located in Lokeren, Belgium, and operated since 1972 until 2010 under the name of Eurotronics.  Privately owned, Orbit GT has developed high level and multi-platform GIS solutions gaining market leadership in government, public safety and mapping industry businesses. 

For more information, please contact

Mr. Peter Bonne

VP Business Development

Orbit GeoSpatial Technologies

Industriepark E17, 2021

9160 Lokeren

Belgium

Phone     +32 9 340 5757

Fax           +32 9 340 5750

www.orbitgis.com

Los Angeles – September 19, 2011 – HipGeo (www.hipgeo.com), a Los Angeles-based developer of a location-aware platform that includes battery-efficient smartphone apps and comprehensive website that record and display the places users go and how they get there, today announced the availability of the HipGeo app for the iPhone, which can be downloaded from the Apple App Store at http://bit.ly/oQkCRd. HipGeo lets users record their world with the app then share their trips and stories with its "HipGeo Player" that provides a dynamic recap of places, routes and photos in animated displays.

HipGeo's simple features reduce the need to check-in, call or text for updates and let people share what they want with whom they want - by providing privacy based on user preferences. Information such as location, routes, places, comments, photos, and other forms of user-generated content are archived and can be private or shared through integration with Facebook, Twitter, SMS, and email. HipGeo turns location data and photos into locations, travels, and slide shows. The app recognizes the differences between places and routes, and then automatically aggregates related groups of photos into short video like animations. These stories can be shared through users' social networks and embedded in web pages like personal blogs.

"We give people a way to capture and record their memories, and instantly create something interesting. Capturing and saving an interesting moment, day, or trip, then sharing it with the HipGeo Player is as easy as turning it on, going about your life, taking photos, and sharing a link to tell a story. It’s that simple," says company co-founder Rich Rygg. "The HipGeo Player animation you share with your friends is personal, unique and compelling."

HipGeo CEO Scott Daniel says, "HipGeo has the best passive tracking technology for the iPhone. I can throw it in my pocket and it creates a record of my day on a single battery charge. We think our technology will revolutionize the way people keep track of their lives and share their interesting stories with friends, family, or the entire web.”

About HipGeo

HipGeo (www.hipgeo.com) is a Los Angeles-based developer of a location-aware website and smartphone apps that automatically create a record of the places users go. APIs will be open to third-party developers by the end of 2011. The company was funded in May 2011, and its iPhone app was released in September 2011. The lead investor in HipGeo is Morado Venture Partners, a seed-stage fund run by former Yahoo! executives Ash Patel and Michael Marquez; other investors include Galen Buckwalter, former chief scientist of eHarmony, and prominent San Diego-based angel investor Robert Bingham.

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There has been quite a lot of noise on the geoblogs and blogs regarding last week's announcement that Apple's iPhone is recording user locations (see also this followup story). Via Peter Batty, I learned that this morning Apple is providing official answers, including confirmation that it's not user location that is stored:

"6. People have identified up to a year’s worth of location data being stored on the iPhone. Why does my iPhone need so much data in order to assist it in finding my location today?
This data is not the iPhone’s location data—it is a subset (cache) of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database which is downloaded from Apple into the iPhone to assist the iPhone in rapidly and accurately calculating location. The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below). We don’t think the iPhone needs to store more than seven days of this data."

If that's not enough for you, you can read more of what was published recently, on Slashdot regarding the associated lawsuits, Google's Ed Parsons entry named A smartphone without location is just not smart, O'Reilly's entry named iPhone Tracking: The day after and Additional iPhone tracking research. Keep in mind that these were published before Apple's official explanations.

It's not the first time privacy issues arise from mobile devices. Today at the Where 2.0 conference, there was a talk on the discovery that your iPhone, and your 3G iPad, is regularly recording the position of your device into a hidden file.

From the O'Reilly Radar: "Ever since iOS 4 arrived, your device has been storing a long list of locations and time stamps. We're not sure why Apple is gathering this data, but it's clearly intentional, as the database is being restored across backups, and even device migrations. [...] What makes this issue worse is that the file is unencrypted and unprotected, and it's on any machine you've synched with your iOS device. It can also be easily accessed on the device itself if it falls into the wrong hands. Anybody with access to this file knows where you've been over the last year, since iOS 4 was released. [...]

We have built an application that helps you look at your own data. It's available at petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker along with the source code and deeper technical information. [...] An immediate step you can take is to encrypt your backups through iTunes (click on your device within iTunes and then check "Encrypt iPhone Backup" under the "Options" area)."

This topic was also discussed over Slashdot today.

ikiMap celebrates its first anniversary giving away a free iPad 2 with the Map & Win Contest

It has been one year since the free service to create and share maps got on the web. To celebrate it, ikiMap launches this April the Map & Win contest, where users who publish their maps on ikiMap from 5th April to 22nd of May, can win a free iPad 2.

The maps uploaded between those dates will be assessed according to their originality, the information provided and aesthetics, by a jury made up of the following people:

·         Jaime Novoa (Genbeta editor)

·         Alejandro Polanco (La Cartoteca editor)

·         Diego Fraga (Bitelia editor)

·         Manuel Gago (Capítulo Cero editor)

·         Alejandro Lamas (ikiMap CEO)

Every user can create as many maps as they want to, increasing their chances to win the prize.

See the complete contest rules below:

 http://www.ikimap.com/basesconcurso.php

ikiMap, the service to share maps in a different way

ikiMap is a project created by the Sixtema company, which combines the concepts of maps and cartography with social networking, making easy to create, publish and share maps on the web.

During the last twelve months, more than 5,000 ikiMap registered users have created about 12,000 maps with this application. With tourism, environment and transport as the most popular subjects.

As for countries, Spanish users are the most active on uploading their maps, followed by Chilean and Indonesian.

These users have been, in great extent, the ones who suggested improvements and new functions that the application should hav. This has led to the application not only used by individuals but also by private companies and government agencies who find ikiMap an easy, quick and inexpensive way to create and share maps with both friends and clients.

Avenza releases PDF Maps update on iTunes App Store
- Geospatial PDF reader updated with new features and tools -

Toronto, ON, March 16, 2011 - Avenza Systems Inc., producers of MAPublisher cartographic software for Adobe Illustrator and Geographic Imager geospatial tools for Adobe Photoshop, is pleased to announce an updated version of PDF Maps, the popular geospatial PDF reader for Apple iOS devices including the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

"We are very excited about this update for PDF Maps. It improves on the previous version by adding new features and tools to make the experience of navigating and viewing geospatial PDF maps on Apple iOS devices even better" said Ted Florence, President of Avenza. "Since its initial release, we have received a lot of feedback about the app and much of it have been feature requests. We're listening to our users, developing new and exciting features, and pushing them out as the product evolves," he added.

This release of PDF Maps offers many features including:

• A new tool to easily find the coordinates of any location in the map; including the ability to type in a coordinate to search.
• A new option to display coordinates as Lat/Long (WGS84), Lat/Long (Map Default), Northing/Easting, or Military Grid Reference System (MGRS)/United States National Grid (USNG)
• New support for GeoTIFF files; create tiles similar to how a geospatial PDF is tiled
• A new option to render a map in higher resolution
• Improved map processing speed
• Minor bug fixes and usability enhancements

PDF Maps complements MAPublisher and Geographic Imager, the only available methods for authoring geospatial PDF documents within the Adobe Creative Suite. PDF Maps is available now on the iTunes App Store free of charge. For more information about PDF Maps, visit the Avenza website at www.avenza.com/pdf-maps.

More about geospatial PDF

With the release of Adobe Acrobat 9 and Adobe Reader 9, a new geospatial feature set was introduced to the Adobe PDF specification. Geospatial PDF files are PDF documents that contain geospatial information such as real world location and/or GIS attributes. Geospatial PDF documents can be created in some GIS applications such as ArcGIS and Mapinfo and from within Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop with the aid of the MAPublisher and Geographic Imager plugins, respectively. The geospatial data contained in a geospatial PDF document may be accessed and used (for example to locate a specific point or measure distances) without the aid of any additional plugins, using tools found natively within Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9.

More about MAPublisher and Geographic Imager

MAPublisher for Illustrator is powerful map production software for creating cartographic-quality maps from GIS data. Developed as a suite of plug-ins for Adobe Illustrator, MAPublisher leverages the superior design capabilities of this leading graphic design software. Geographic Imager is powerful software for working with spatial imagery in Adobe Photoshop that leverages the superior image editing capabilities of this raster-based image-editing software.

More about Avenza Systems Inc.

Avenza Systems Inc. is an award-winning, privately held corporation that provides cartographers and GIS professionals with powerful software tools for making better maps. In addition to software offerings for Mac and Windows users, Avenza offers value-added data sets, product training and consulting services. For more information visit the Avenza website at www.avenza.com.

For further information contact:
Tel: 416-487-5116    ●    Email: [email protected]    ●    Web: www.avenza.com