Location-based Services

You are journalist. There’s breaking news across town. How do you tap in to citizen journalists already on the ground in the area? Geofeedia. The feed offers location-based content from Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr and Picasa based on an address or a polygon drawn on a Bing map. The for-fee service was launched last week after quite a bit of testing. 

Bike Score is the biking equivalent to Walk Score; it’s a measure of the bikeability of cities. 

Mapping of potential retail outlets is one of the first steps in putting a distribution channel in place while launching a telecommunications brand. This is the second article in a two-part series on utilizing location intelligence to organize and understand information through a geographical perspective, enabling informed decisions about retail marketing. Author Abhishek Bhardwaj, associate consultant for Infosys, uses Bangalore, India as the setting for his analysis.

Unlike the board game, the Map of Life lives online and as its name suggests, maps out life on earth. To be more specific, it provides location information for a selection of living things on earth.

What should the satellite companies DigitalGlobe and GeoEye do now that ongoing talks of mergers and acquisitions are a well-publicized fact? It’s a pretty fair bet that something has to happen soon since it looks increasingly like the government will cut spending for commercial remote sensing satellites. Editor in Chief Joe Francica writes an open letter to the CEOs of both companies with some "free" advice.

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Advances in online mapping are making maps almost commonplace on news websites and blogs. Some sites even analyze the map, providing that “value add” that goes beyond “dots on a map.” Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg shares three websites worth watching that help identify the power of maps to provoke discussion and action.

OpenStreetMap has been making the news quite a bit since last fall. Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg asks, do you know everything you need to know about this important data project?

Let us introduce you to another of your colleagues in GIS. This week, you’ll meet Carolyn Hodge, chief marketing officer for Locaid Technologies, the location as a service company.