Well I’m off to Whistler, BC and the 2009 FME User Conference. It should be a blast and if you are going as well lets meet up for some drinks.
They still play hockey up there don’t they?
Categories
Month: June 2009
I’m sure most of you have seen the news of Amazon hosting TIGER shapefiles in S3 and now in EBS. Sure I like TIGER being available for EC2 instances, but the real amazing stuff happens when you can work with OpenStreetMap XML data. That mounted up to either FME Server or some great open source tools running on EC2 really would whole open worlds up. TIGER is the low hanging fruit here, but OSM would be the icing. My mouth waters thinking about what people could do with EC2 instances chomping on OSM data. One could do the lifting yourself, but Amazon’s rates are lower than what it would cost to host it yourself and since you are already on AWS, the benefit would be huge.
Update: A couple people have asked, yes you need to have an EC2 instance to leverage the EBS TIGER data.
While waiting for ArcGIS Server to cut my tile cache, I thought I’d look at who is exhibiting at the 2009 ESRI User Conference. A couple caught my eye.
- BlackBerry – If only they were going to demo a real ESRI API on their phone.
- DeLorme – I’m really interested in seeing their ArcGIS Online map service. Great worldwide cartography is worth paying for.
- Microsoft – .NET 4.0, SQL Server 2008 Spatial and Visual Studio 2010 are much more interesting than Microsoft Maps for Enterprise. (side note for ESRI/Microsoft – Silverlight is dead to me until it can print)
- Pictometry – I’m a sucker for those oblique views
- Safe Software – FME is the key for really sharing ESRI data with the world
- TouchTable – Every year I look and wish I could have one.
Who is missing? Sun and I assume it is because they are now Oracle. I didn’t see Google either as well (nor SketchUp).