Spatially Adjusted

Tag: arcweb

  • Gjermund Weisz Talks About SportSim and ArcWeb Services

    note – see post update below

    I had a great opportunity to sit down with Gjermund Weisz of Sportsim at the ESRI 2005 User Conference and talk to him about his product and how ESRI ArcWeb Services is working for him. Sportsim is a free product that users can upload their GPS tracks from their workouts and view them over maps and satellite imagery. They only charge for downloading maps out of their product and as of right now Gjermund said about 10% of their users take advantage of their product. One of the great concerns for Sportsim is the lack of high resolution satellite imagery for the world. With Google Map and Google Earth, users expect and want great satellite imagery under their GPS tracks. Right now Sportsim is limited to basically Landsat and when you view a race such as the ESRI 5k run/walk you really see how bad the imagery is.

    5krun

    The business model of Sportsim is really interesting, they give away the program allowing you to use it without any restrictions. They way the make money is by charging users to download maps. Of course as I said above people really want high detailed satellite imagery so without ArcWeb Services providing these satellite imagery people won’t pay Sportsim. Take a look below at the ArcWeb Services satellite image vs Google Maps.

    LandSat

    Current Sportsim Satellite Image (Landsat)

    DG

    Current DigitalGlobe Satellite Image (From Google Maps)

    You can totally see how people would gladly pay Sportsim for that kind of high quality imagery. For Sportsim to be profitable, they need to provide services that people want so unfortunately unless ArcWeb Services can provide imagery that Sportsim needs, they will have to go somewhere else. No one is currently providing this service (at least at a price a small company like Sportsim can afford) so there is a huge opportunity for ESRI and ArcWeb Services to totally shake up the market.

    Update – Andrea Rosso reminds us that ArcWeb does have high quality imagery, but not for areas such as Japan (or am I missing something). I used the ESRI 5k run just as an example (I could have used any event in Japan or Europe), but Sportsim does have very high quality coverage for San Diego. It is the worldwide stuff that has Gjermund worried. Andrea, beyond the descriptions on the ArcWeb website, is there a “coverage” map people can look at to see where different services are available?

  • ColdFusion Users Discuss Public ArcWeb Services

    Link – ESRI webservices

    ColdFusion users (and you guys thought they were extinct) talk over the announcement of Public ArcWeb Services. Maybe they’ll check out some of the news about improvements to ArcWeb Services 2005 and ArcIMS 9.2 in some of the blogs about the User Conference.

  • Public ArcWeb Services are now Available

    Link – ArcWeb services sign-up is now available

    Brian announced that you can now sign up for free Public ArcWeb Services. Given how popular the Google Maps API has been I hope these programmer will take a look at the ESRI ArcWeb API and give it a try. I think ESRI needs to set up a section (forums maybe) for these Public ArcWeb Services and link to it from this sign up page. You can learn more at the Public ArcWeb Services FAQ page.

  • Brian Goldin Has Some Ideas to Get Started on ArcWeb

    Link – Public ArcWeb Services is HUGE

    This is HUGE opportunity for developers and something that probably hasn’t quite sunk in yet. Now you’ll be able to add some great services to your app and guess what you won’t have to worry about us slapping ads in there and later if you want to leverage some of more advanced capabilities you’re good to go. To make this a slam dunk it’ll have to be super easy to sign-up just like it is already for the eval. Now let’s start building some mashups with ArcWeb just like we’ve got with google.

    As I said earlier today, I was quite surprised that no one clapped over the ArcWeb Services announcement. Well I for one will start trying to get some cool mashups with ArcWeb services.

    I’m not sure if anyone at ESRI has thought about this, but releasing this for free is sure to help improve ArcWeb Services. How about adding an area at EDN for people to upload their code much like SourceForge.net? This would allow people to take collaborate on coding some really neat projects. The ArcScripts site needs to be updated. It was great for Avenue scripts, but not for posting code from today’s applications. Also, how about clearing out those “evaluation” products such at XTools Pro, everything on that site should be free and open and shouldn’t require people to pay for part of the product. I don’t think that was why ArcScripts what created in the first place. There should be a place on ESRI’s site to download such products, but it should be separate from the free and open scripts and code.

  • Andrea Rosso Talks About ArcWeb at the ESRI UC

    Link – ArcWeb at the UC Plenary

    ArcWeb Public Services announced – This is a collection of datasources for ArcWeb Services that can now be used for free, for non-commercial purposes. The availability of this is imminent and will allow users to use ArcWeb Services APIs without any credit limits. These are the production and stable ArcWeb v2 APIs but just a subset of the datasources that are usually available for use. Hopefully some interesting applications will get built off of these. You can start playing around with the eval right now to get started and switch over when the public services are available.

    Great news for everyone who has been looking at Google Maps and their API. What is great about ArcWeb is when you are ready to start making money off of your mapping solution, you can easily change the license. With Google Maps you’d be at a dead end (at least for now).

    ArcWeb Map Viewer shown – This is a sneak peak at what’s coming in our ArcWeb 2005 product. It’s a very fast vector based Flash viewer. Our services will generate Flash files which are then rendered by the Macromedia flash viewer. This is not available yet but you can come by the island this week and take a look at it. It actually has a lot more functionality than what was shown so make sure you take a look at it. It’s really fast and for now nothing is cached anywhere… each pan, zoom, etc. is a new .swf file.

    This was the most “Google-like” GUI I’ve seen from ESRI yet. Very simple and nothing to get in the way of the user working with the data. Hopefully ESRI will get a demo of this up on the web so people can see what is in store for them with ArcWeb 2005 and start programming today with the current ArcWeb Services.

    You’ll want to check out the rest of Andrea’s post to see when the ArcWeb sessions are going to be this week or at least stop by the ArcWeb Island on the main floor.

  • ArcWeb Services Update

    The new ArcWeb Services update looks great. It is all vector based using what looks like Flash inside the browser. The user interface is very “Google like” in its simplicity. In the past most ArcIMS and ArcWeb sites were overly complex, but now it appears that they will be as easy to use as Google Maps. I love it!

  • ArcExplorer and Free ArcWeb Services API

    Since we’ll go into ArcGIS more later today I’ll focus on two announcements that I think are huge for ESRI.

    First the new ArcExplorer. No its not really like the old one, but more like Google Earth (in fact at least the demo blew Google Earth away with functionality, but we’ll see how easy it is to use in the real world). The demo was pretty impressive because unlike the one stream that Google Earth uses for their application, it was able to pull from multiple servers for different datasets. It is free and no announcement was made to its release (the application on screen said ArcExplorer Prototype).

    Second was the new individual ArcWeb Services package. This will be free for individuals and programmers. Jack announced that there would be a “robust API”, but I was very disappointed to hear no clapping at his announcement. I’m not sure if anyone got what Jack was saying, but you’ll be able to create your own ArcWeb Services applications. I hate it when something as big as that announcement doesn’t get a rise out of the audience, but I guess we’ll just have to evangelize it ourselves. The first thing I’m going to do tomorrow is seek out some ArcWeb Services team members and better understand how this will work and when it will be available. I’ve played around with ArcWeb with our EDN subscription, but now I’ll be able to play with it at home.

  • Inaugural ArcWeb User Group Meeting

    It is a shame that the inaugural ArcWeb User Group Meeting is being held the same time as the blogger meet-up. Well I could go to the first 30 minutes and then run over to Dick’s Last Resort.

  • ZDNet – Google Map API transforms the Web

    Link: Google map API transforms the Web – ZDNet.com via PubSub: Google Maps.

    “We are getting a great demonstration right now of open source power, as applications using the Google Maps API begin to appear. Mapquest, owned by AOL, has been around for many years, but it’s a proprietary offering. Yahoo Maps has been around for years, but it has been late to this party. It’s Google, using the open source process, that has blown the field apart. The code has only been out a few weeks but already we’re seeing several really great applications.”

    Yea, yea Google Maps API is great, but yet another article that doesn’t mention ESRI or their API. It isn’t open source, but they’ve had it much longer than Google has had theirs. But the point they do make at the end of the article is very true.

    “And remember, this is just the start. I guarantee that hundreds of programmers are now poring over the Google Map API documentation, thinking about applications that will drive both them, and Google, to new heights.”

    I hope we’ll hear an announcement at the ESRI UC that ESRI will release a version of their ArcWeb Services API that these programmers can freely use. If it is features these programmers need and what for their applications, it is ArcWeb Services that can deliver it today, not Google Maps.

  • The Cost of ESRI Products Causes Potential Users to Turn Elsewhere

    Link: Guns, Germs, and Steel and GMaps Census (dead link).

    “A quick word on GIS software: ESRI’s ArcGIS is the industry standard, but it can be a challenge to learn and costs way too much. My wife, who does some GIS in her research at the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley, has recently become a big fan of another software called Maptitude. It’s extremely intuitive and an order of magnitude cheaper than ArcGIS.”

    I posted about this a couple weeks ago as well as my posts about opening up ArcWeb Services to more users. People want to use ESRI products, but the first word out of their mouths is always it costs too much and in many cases it does. ArcExplorer is about the only free tool that ESRI offers to get into GIS. Compared to products such as Google Earth and the many open source GIS tools, it is very weak and not worth mentioning.

    It appears that most users are willing to spend about $500 for a professional GIS system, but their choices are very limited.