Links: Ipoki + Qik = georeferenced mobile phone video webcasting

  • Finally! Live georeferenced mobile phone web video: Live mobile phone video streaming site Qik and live GPS phone position site Ipoki have collaborated to let you live stream video from your mobile phone to the web while also showing your location in real time. Here’s the obligatory YouTube showing it off:

    This is the first instance I am aware of where you can publish live georeferenced video to the web from your mobile phone. (Seero lets you do it from your GPS enabled laptop with video camera.)

  • Where is Captain Bill? Virgil Zetterlind of EarthNC writes:

    Captain Bill Foster and EarthNC have partnered to live-cast the delivery of a 46′ cruiser from New Buffalo, Michigan to Marco Island, Florida starting today the 22nd of July. Capt Foster and his crew are presently in the Chicago area and will begin to traverse the city via the Chicago River at approximately 2pm EDT this afternoon.

    Via cell-phone aircard, Capt Foster is uploading his position and a webcam image approximately once per minute to EarthNC.com. You can watch his track in Google Maps and Google Earth and see his latest photos here. His position and images will automatically update so long as he has an available cell data connection

  • One Man Resting: A few days ago Craig Stanton finished his walk across Japan, which he documented on georeferenced video using Seero.
  • Near real-time aerial imagery? Perhaps the most-heard complaint about the free aerial and satellite imagery in Google Earth and Virtual Earth is that it sometimes is a few years old. If an Australian company gets its way, this may soon change. From an ITWire article:

    According to [Perth-based] Ipernica, “NearMap’s technology enables very high resolution aerial photomaps with multiple angle views to be created at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions… For the first time, people will be able to see the environment change over time, as NearMap’s online photomaps allow users to move back and forward month by month to see changes occur, such as the construction of a home or development of a new road. [And] with NearMap’s revolutionary approach to high resolution photomaps, it has achieved its objective of a 20-fold operating cost reduction over current industry practices.”

    Panning not just through the X and Y axes but also through time would definitely be cool. Let’s just hope it’s as scalable as advertised. There’s more details in the ITWire article.

  • Afghan archaeology redux: The Sydney Morning Herald has an article on David Thomas’s use of Google Earth to map Afghan archaeological sites, and it comes with another fine aerial shot of a Ghaznavid fortress in the Registan desert. This one I couldn’t locate at all, however. Does anyone else have any better luck?
  • Virtual Earth update (including Berlin): Lots of new imagery for Virtual Earth, especially for Europe, and including bird’s eye imagery for all of Berlin, where I happen to be summering. Check out that architectural wonder of an airport, Tempelhof, smack in the middle of the city, to which I walked a few weeks ago to take a flight. That very same day was also the 60th anniversary of the start of the Berlin Airlift. I made a small portfolio of photos on Flickr of Tempelhof, as the airport is slated to close soon. (PS, looks like I still can’t embed Virtual Earth maps on a web page, or I would have done so here instead of giving you a URL to the airport.) See comments.

  • QSL2KML: Amateur radio operators use QSLs as a way of confirming reception of a broadcast in faraway places. As they are by nature georeferenced, they’d make a great KML file. And that is precisely what KML My QSLSs does, for free.
  • Geonames unplugged: The Map Room points to a 1930s globe “with a complete index and gazetteer inside it.” Just in case we start to take Geonames for granted.
  • Satellite imagery primer: Discover Magazine on the rise of ubiquitous free satellite and aerial imagery on the internet. Interesting primer on much of what this blog has covered the past three years. One excerpt makes an ironic point:

    Indeed, while the U.S. government prohibits sale of satellite imagery with ground resolution better than a half-meter [of the US by US-based companies], no such rule applies to images from nonsatellite sources. So while a satellite company may be forced to “fuzz up” an image of, say, CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia, to meet the half-meter standard, that same picture is available in even sharper focus from aerial photographs on Google Earth.

    In the rest of the world, the situation is the other way round. US satellites can take as much imagery as they want from space (with the sole exception of Israel and the Palestinian Territories), but aerial photography — such as that of the Netherlands used in Google Earth — is subject to censorship by the sovereign power because it is taken from the national airspace. (Via All Points Blog)

One thought on “Links: Ipoki + Qik = georeferenced mobile phone video webcasting”

  1. Regarding your problem “PS, looks like I still can’t embed Virtual Earth maps on a web page”

    The easy way I have found it’s to use “Map Channels for Virtual Earth” tool http://www.mapchannels.com/VEChannels.aspx

    BTW the VE images update for some cities in Denmark are quite good – and more up-to-date than the images from Google. A Dual Maps from the Örestad (a new area in Copenhagen) can be found here to compare VE and Google Maps

    http://www.microformats.dk/kort/latlon/dualmaps1.html

Comments are closed.