LBS and Fusion Tables and Vector Tiling, Oh My!

Another week has passed and we are all still alive and kicking. Humanity never fails to surprise me. Anyway, Geo (That is “Geo” with a big “G” vs “geo” with a little “g”) continues to roll on and keep us excited.

  • Skyhook Wireless and Sony are hooking up to give the next generation PSP some location capabilities. Good news for Skyhook, but aren’t devices like the PSP and Nintendo DS on their way out? I guess we’ll see this summer when everyone is playing the latest EA games on their iOS devices.
  • Work with R? Check out RStudio! IDEs are usually hit and miss with me but this has enough awesome to warrant a download. (HT: PHXGeo)
  • Protected Maps in Google Fusion Tables? Yes please! 2011 may be the year of Google Fusion Tables (oh and the iPad 2, right?).
  • Google Maps labels look better, but why? Justin again analyses how Google does this and compares it to Bing and Yahoo!. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you’ve got to be following Justin’s blog!
  • IBM puts out a weird blog series on the “The Case Against Google Maps in IBM Cognos Reports” (parts two and three). To me I’m left wondering where the content is on that case to use Esri map services. They sum it up this way, “In solid Boolean logic: NOT Cognos BI AND Google Maps.” Say whaaat?
  • Lastly, Matt Kenny brings us the awesome that is TileStache. Seriously now, why are we still using WxS and Esri ArcGIS Services? (Sure, you can give me thousands of edge cases where such overhead is needed, but rarely does one need such things. We need to break out of our bad practices and embrace the future). Read Matt’s blog and get cracking. Bonus points for rolling TileMill and TileStache together!

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