SHODAN LIVES

Generating a real-time topographic map with a sandbox, Kinect,...

Sun, 06 May 2012 21:13:00 -0400

Generating a real-time topographic map with a sandbox, Kinect, and a projector.

This is the kind of thing I want to see more with augmented reality.

Why We Need Storytellers at the Heart of Product Development

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 12:36:00 -0400

Why We Need Storytellers at the Heart of Product Development:

A great article from UXMAG making the case for “product storytellers” on product teams, instead of more marketing or product management. A must-read for creators trying to bring products to market. This statement gets to the heart of the problem with struggling products — the what and how of the product get put above the why:

The root cause of these symptoms is the fact that execution focuses on the how and what of a product. But in a world where consumers are inundated with choices, products that want to be noticed and adopted must be rooted in the why.

A product is more than an idea, it’s more than a website, and it’s more than a transaction or list of functionalities. A product should provide an experience or service that adds value to someone’s life through fulfilling a need or satisfying a desire. The ultimate question then becomes: who identifies that value? After the executive or stakeholder identifies the initial idea, who in the organization ensures that the product and experience deliver value to the user? Maybe it isn’t the product manager, marketer, technologist, or designer; perhaps what we need is a new role: the product storyteller.

Mapping Kabul

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:49:00 -0500

We’ve just posted a map of Kabul, Afghanistan built from spatial networks GIS datasets. I built this a couple of months back (with TileMill) for some mobile field collection project work we were doing with Fulcrum. This is the sort of challenging work that our company is out there doing, bringing high-tech (yet cheap and simple) solutions to up-and-coming communities like Kabul.

Photo

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 23:13:06 -0500

Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer have a conversation about adventure...

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 11:00:05 -0500

Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer have a conversation about adventure games.

This was just before Double Fine raised $2.2MM on Kickstarter to fund a new adventure game.

My talk from Ignite Spatial at WhereCampTB, talking about the...

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:44:13 -0500

My talk from Ignite Spatial at WhereCampTB, talking about the OSM Tampa Bay meetup group. Check out the slides in better detail here.

It was a fun event a couple weeks ago — great participation from folks in all sorts of industries involved in mapping or using GIS tools.

surrogateself: CHIBA concept art for NEUROMANCER.

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:53:08 -0500

surrogateself:

CHIBA concept art for NEUROMANCER.

new-aesthetic: Beautiful Streets — hot or not for Street View,...

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:35:40 -0500

new-aesthetic:

Beautiful Streets — hot or not for Street View, via @matlock.

Stetsasonic - Talkin’ All That Jazz. Pure 1988.

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 23:23:18 -0500

Stetsasonic - Talkin’ All That Jazz.

Pure 1988.

Books of 2011

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 15:31:00 -0500

A list of books I read in 2011:

Soccernomics, Simon Kuper
Count Zero, William Gibson
Debt of Honor, Tom Clancy
The Wise Man’s Fear, Patrick Rothfuss
In the Plex, Steven Levy
Connected, Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler
Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Robert A. Pape
Snow Crash, Neil Stephenson
How Soccer Explains the World, Franklin Foer
A Dance With Dragons, George R.R. Martin
Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson

You can see more of what I’m reading and what’s on my reading list, too.

GIS in education

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 20:05:00 -0500

GIS in education:

I wrote a blog entry for the spatial networks blog with my thoughts on the current state of GIS and geospatial technology in education. There’s been some great feedback to the post so far, from both students and educators alike.

As one who went through a university program for geography not too many years back, I know the kinds of things I was exposed to during that time — and even with the massive growth of the geo industry since then, there’s been little perceptual shift in focus for many of these programs.

osmtampabay: New ways to look at OpenStreetMap data. A new...

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 10:10:29 -0500

osmtampabay:

New ways to look at OpenStreetMap data.

A new Transport layer has been added as a new renderer layer to OSM. The new tiles come courtesy of Andy Allan (of OpenCycleMap) and include things like bike routes, bus routes, subways, rail systems, and train stations.

Even though the Tampa Bay Area doesn’t have quite the vibrant public transit systems of some cities, rendering data for custom use-cases like this shows the real power of the detailed data beneath the surface of OSM. It shows the value of adding things like route information, bus stops, and bike paths. You can see from the map that Tampa has pretty decent coverage of route information, while Pinellas has hardly a thing.

Let’s get in there and change that!

callmeaaron: Amazing story about hand made knives that goes...

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 13:19:17 -0500

callmeaaron:

Amazing story about hand made knives that goes deeper into the “Made by Hand” story.

Beautifully shot film about someone making great, quality products.

If the Nazis conquered America. Also see the related Strange...

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 12:56:45 -0400

If the Nazis conquered America.

Also see the related Strange Maps post.

"Gentle reader, thou must learne the Alphabet, to wit, the order of the Letters as they stand,..."

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 09:00:50 -0400

“Gentle reader, thou must learne the Alphabet, to wit, the order of the Letters as they stand, perfectly without booke, and where every Letter standeth: as b neere the beginning, n about the middest, and t toward the end. Nowe if the word, which thou art desirous to finde, begin with a then looke in the beginning of this Table, but if with v looke towards the end. Againe, if thy word beginne with ca looke in the beginning of the letter c but if with cu then looke toward the end of that letter. And so of all the rest. &c.”

- Robert Cawdrey, explaining how to use his Table Alphabeticall, one of the first English dictionaries.

Amazon introduces a mobile browser, Amazon Silk. With their...

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 09:23:07 -0400

Amazon introduces a mobile browser, Amazon Silk.

With their recent successful entry into the consumer products and software markets with the Kindle devices and the marketplace, I knew they must be cooking up something to utilize their crazy behind-the-scenes infrastructure services.

Silk uses their EC2 platform to decouple the rendering of web pages on mobile browsers from the hardware limitations of lower-power devices. They’re doing some amazing smart stuff to offload page rendering, image optimization, and caching to EC2. Amazing.

Mapping the Intangible

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 23:52:48 -0400

Mapping the Intangible:

My latest post on the @spatialnetworks blog — on the challenges of mapping socio-cultural fabrics.

standupkid: The darkest, most hopeless moment of the entire...

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 20:34:37 -0400

standupkid:

The darkest, most hopeless moment of the entire weekend crisis in the NYPD Joint Operations Center. (Photo by @anxiousjimmy)

Spot on. Hardest weekend ever for an Arsenal fan…

Why Arabic is terrific

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 23:06:29 -0400

Why Arabic is terrific:

Maciej Cegłowski on his summer studying the language.

A dymaxion projection — a sphere projected on a flattened...

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 10:12:39 -0400

A dymaxion projection — a sphere projected on a flattened polyhedron.