collaborate with GoogleMaps

New today (on the heels of yesterday's addition of terrain data) is the ability to collaborate you maps (MyMaps) in GoogleMaps with anyone who has a Google account. I think I'll give it a try with my students in class tonight.

Madison County GIS Day Postponed

The Madison County GIS Day WILL NOT BE HELD THIS SATURDAY. It will be rescheduled for sometime in January. Check back for details.

Cell phones and GIS

There's been a lot of buzz around Asheville lately wondering what the best cell phone solution is for those of us who are geospatially addicted. We've been wondering how we can use our phones to help us gather information about the world around us and incorporate it into the daily work we do - even if it's not necessarily work related. Who wouldn't love to have a phone they could map my rides via GPS and Google Maps as well as geo-tag photos along the way.

I currently use Verizon and can get a service call VZNavigator for $9.99 a month or $2.99 for a day. I have to say it's pretty cool. It has local search, voice activated turn by turn directions, I can see my lat/long and a map. It doesn't fully integrate with the rest of the computer world I live in though and it certainly doesn't geo-tag the photos I can take. I probably won't keep paying for it - I just wanted to check it out and show my classes however if I get lost I'll certainly pay the $2.99. Maybe I'll keep the service til I get back from

Nokia is obviously taking a big jump towards this with things like the Wireless GPS Module LD-3W and their purchasing of a major GIS data company . Today, I learned about the Helio Ocean that has a full qwerty keyboard and GPS enabled GoogleMaps and geotagging of photos. Pretty cool. This guy runs on it's own network and carrier. You sign up with Helio and they rent space from Sprint towers. I guess this will work on the new WiMax network Sprint and Google are dumping $3 billion dollars into.

This just get's me thinking about the future of it all. If you want to here it summed up in 23 minutes... check out the NPR segment last week - Phones of the future and Google's cell phone debut. Now these guys have the right idea.

GIS Day

HAPPY GIS DAY to all! Our GIS Day event last Friday was a HUGE success. We estimate 300 people came to the event throughout the day. A BIG thanks goes to everyone who helped out...

Hopefully we'll do something similar next year...

Other GIS Day events ...

If you haven't seen all the great GIS Day events going on in the mountains, Greg Dobson did a great job of summarizing them all on http://mrgac.blogspot.com. Check it out - see you Friday!

GIS Day event this week

We are a few days away from the 'Celebration of all things GIS in and around Asheville' GIS day event hosted here at AB Tech. Please come join us for this Open House highlighting GIS activities in and around our area. Come for a little while or stay all day.

FOLLOW THIS LINK FOR A SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

WHEN: Friday, November 9th, 2007 / 9:00am - 2:00pm
WHERE: AB Tech Main Campus / Balsam Computer Technology Center

• See a map of the campus here

Thanks to all our sponsors and presenters:

• Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College – GIS Certificate Program
• City of Asheville – GIS Department
• Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) (Charlotte Office)
• Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC)
• GeoMaxim
• Madison County
• National Climatic Data Center
• NC Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NC CGIA)
• Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI)
• Resource Data, Inc.
• UNC-Asheville / National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center (NEMAC)

Questions? Contact Pete Kennedy at 828.251.1921 x289 or pkennedy (at) abtech.edu

ESRI Web-based help

The ESRI site has some of the best web-based help around. Over the past several years I've gotten so used to using it that I never really open the desktop help any more. I guess my never ending ramblings to my students has been getting through to them because today a student point out the ArcGIS 9.3 Help online. What? you say... That's what I said too but it's there. Luckily it doesn't go anywhere except to a coming soon page. Coming soon but how soon?

nice eye adam...