For pilots and flight sim fans, the Google Earth Blog have post that highlights an update to a flight simulator that based on Google Earth. This, of course, means that you fly into realistic airports, and over realistic terrain.
The Borneo Post have an interesting article wherein villagers in Malaysia are being encouraged to survey their own land, in order to have their native customary rights documented. The idea is that the government is taking too long to do it, so villagers should just do it themselves, after receiving training on how to use the GPS equipment.
PC World have a piece that tells us of 10 ways that your smartphone can assess its location – this goes way beyond GPS. Nice to see that Australian startup Locata gets a mention.
Further to this, Spatial Sustain have a post on a new chip for smartphones from Broadcom that fuses input signals from GPS, WiFi, and Bluetooth with information from sensors such as gyroscopes, accelerometers, and altimeters, to provide precise indoor and outdoor location. The post also discusses ways that such chips could help out in commercial geospatial applications.
More smartphone location news comes from AnyGeo, which has a post stating that location-based smartphone apps are growing in popularity, despite privacy concerns.
Fuzzy Tolerance have posted a link to (the always excellent) xkcd webcomic that shows a map of the relative depth of lakes and oceans from around the world. Well worth a look.
In the latest switch from Google Maps, TechDirt have a post that talks of the Wikipedia mobile apps “nearby articles” function being based on Open Street Maps, rather than previously using Google Maps. Open Street Maps have likely never been so hapy since Google Maps announced pricing for heavy users. But will OSM be able to handle the traffic that Google wanted to reduce?
