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Google unveiled Google Mapmaker: What the community think: - Jane McEntegart said, “you’re using it, you create it”.
- Google Want to be TeleAtlas : OpenGeoData
- Map communities and "openness"
paulytron says:
"The global economic/societal upside of this trend is that it allows new forms of businesses and applications to flourish on top of these more accessible and open (and yes, lower cost) commodity building blocks (many, many enterprises are taking advantage of the Linux stack for example), but the downside is that local business/corporate dislocations can and do occur. Some die. Some adapt (for example the IBM of today little resembles the IBM of 15 years ago).
I think it was the economist Joseph Schumpeter who deemed this process “creative destruction”, which I’d further note most often tends to be associated with the dynamics of capitalism…"
- Google Map Maker: Unleash your inner cartographer By Stephen Shankland
- Google Maps Cheaps out with MapMaker by Jordan McCollum
Snippet:Hmm, now you don’t need any sixth sense to see
small/medium GIS companies’ all over the world
look like spectators at Wimbledon?
 No doubt the big event of the past week was Mozilla's release of Firefox 3; within five hours, the Web browser had broken the record set by its predecessor. It didn't stop there - it went on to set an all new Guinness World Record - registering 8.3 million downloads in 24 hours. CNET's verdict: Firefox 3 remains "their Editors' Choice over Microsoft Internet Explorer and Opera". The obvious pros being the browser's improved rendering speed thanks to its new Gekko 1.9 engine, the clever new data mining tools for bookmarks and browser history, and the many security-related features baked right into it. Get the picture here. FOXNews' conclusion: Firefox 3 is "their Editors' Choice" (too), thanks to the browser's speedy performance, thrifty memory usage, and, in particular, the address bar referred to by Mozilla insiders as the 'Awesome Bar'. Read their review here. SiliconRepublic writer - Marie Boran - a user of Firefox 2 herself argues that the acid test of any good application upgrade is whether you'd want to go back to the original. As such, Firefox 3 makes the cut since she wouldn t think of going back to Firefox 2. She lists the Awesome Bar and the Favicon feature as some of the pluses of the new browser. Read her version here.
Evasion of property tax and construction of illegal buildings will no longer be easy in urban India. With the work on satellite mapping of 158 towns across India gaining momentum, the city managers will soon have easily-accessible evidence to nab tax evadors. Also, digital database and geographical information system (GIS) mapping, being undertaken by Survey of India (SOI), will help various cities preparing their master plans and executing detailed town planning, officials in the urban development ministry told SundayET. The towns include Port Blair in Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Adilabad and Nalgonda in Andhra Pradesh, Dibrugarh and Nagaon in Assam, Arrah and Bhagalpur in Bihar, Bhavnagar and Jamnagar in Gujarat, Shimla and Sonal in Himachal Pradesh, Samba and Rajouri in Jammu and Kashmir, Jamshedpur and Dhanbad in Jharkhand, just to name a few. Though bigger cities have not been funded by the Centre under this scheme, it’s expected that the local governments of those cities will initiate such mapping on their own. Delhi, for example, has launched a pilot programme on GIS mapping in some parts of the city.
 Brazil's National Indian Foundation announced the discovery of a new Indian tribe in the western Amazon rainforest. Researchers have spotted and photographed the indigenous tribe on the border between Brazil and Peru. The Brazilian government declared it had taken the images to prove that the tribe existed and to help protect its territory. Taken from a helicopter, the photos show red-painted men outside communal huts, pointing bows upwards. There are more than 100 uncontacted tribes in the world, with half of them living in the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazon. The Brazilian government believes 40 of the tribes are on Brazil’s territory, while another 15 are thought to live in Peru, and a few others in Paraguay, Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia, the Guardian.co.uk reports. A few more uncontacted tribes can be found in Indonesia, north Sentinel Island, Papua and the Bay of Bengal.
Survival International, a nonprofit group that advocates for the rights of indigenous people, said Thursday that this kind of tribes are all in danger of “being forced off their land, killed or decimated by new diseases.” According to scientists, two of the main dangers for the tribes are oil exploration and deforestation. In a released statement, the director of Survival International talks about the irrational way in which the “civilized” people treats the world, threatening “the natural world, the tribes, the fauna.” "The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law," said Stephen Corry, as quoted by Times Online. "Otherwise they will be made extinct." The foundation said it didn’t know which tribe the newly discovered Indians belonged to.
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