By Angela Hey
About this blog: I write about technology companies, trends and events in and around Mountain View. Where else can you find startups nurtured by
Y-Combinator and
(More)About this blog: I write about technology companies, trends and events in and around Mountain View. Where else can you find startups nurtured by
Y-Combinator and
500 Startups working alongside multi-billion corporations like
Google,
Symantec and
Intuit? I like to write about software and systems that are changing lifestyles. Innovations like self-driving cars, on-demand limousine services and electric bikes are revolutionizing transportation. Smartphones help people find their way, manage their health and make new friends. In my articles, I like to include something for Mountain View residents, something for industry professionals and something for venture investors. I'm particularly interested in mobile apps and cloud computing. I came to California to find software applications for AT&T. I've worked in startups, advised venture capitalists and analyzed enterprise software markets. After getting a PhD at the University of London in engineering, I joined Bell Laboratories, analyzing over 400 telephone company systems. I also have an MMath degree in optimization from the University of Waterloo in Canada, and an MA in mathematics from the University of Cambridge. My husband John Mashey, is a computer scientist and trustee of the Computer History Museum. He also defends climate scientists by blogging.
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Last Wednesday, Dec 3, the Google Technology User Group - http://sv-gtug.org/ - and the WebMapSocial MeetUp group - http://www.meetup.com/webmapsocial/ - held a joint meeting featuring mapping applications - mainly from students.
The first speaker from Google showed how Google Earth can now be embedded in web pages. Get the browser plugin (which works on Mac Safari browsers) from http://code.google.com/apis/earth/. You can now have 3D maps in web applications. The National University of Singapore did a clever trick - they covered the globe image with a black background - then made a map of their university library. If you type in the number of a book you can find the shelf it is on.
Noah Wasserman, a grad student at San Francisco State had spent the summer in Yosemite taking pictures. He then compared them with historic photos and showed how tree coverage has varied over time. When sheep grazed the alpine meadows there were fewer trees. See http://www.ridgelinephotography.com/Yosemite.htm. Picture Source: Noah Wasserman.
The evening ended with a talk on the GeoEye-1 satellite that was launched September 2008 and takes detailed photos of the earth. It covers 750,000 sq. km. in a day, and can get info down from 425 miles high in the sky to earth in 15 minutes. Unfortunately, the US government doesn't let civilians have access to the highest resolution photos (about 16 inches per pixel) but this may change in the future. Google is the biggest commercial customer for GeoEye which currently supplies data from the IKONOS satellite. http://launch.geoeye.com.
