News Roundup - Bilski, Google Phases Out Windows (Maybe), GeoData.gov

First up in this month’s news roundup is the Supreme Court’s decision on Bilski. The SC took its traditional narrow ruling approach (i.e. “punt”), invalidating Bilski’s patent but not invalidating software patents in gen

Read More...

News Roundup - Android Rises, IE Falls, Charlotte gets 3D Love

The big winner this month: Android. Android passed the iPhone in sales in the first quarter of 2010, becoming the #2 smart phone with 28% of the market. Blackberry is still #1 with a whopping 36%, with a big thank you co

Read More...

Google Google Google

There was so much news coming from or around Google I/O this month I decided to recap some of the salient points. Here’s the Geo related stuff: Google has hired 300 temp workers to work on their map data. Several, m

Read More...

The Open Video Codec Has Arrived

As was highly anticipated, Google has released a free, high quality video codec at the Google I/O conference. This is what everybody was hoping for after Google acquired On2 and their VP8 codec for $100M+. The new codec

Read More...

Drive the A-Team Van in Google Earth

Via the Google Earth Blog. Seeing this movie is on my ToDon’t list, but this is still too cool. Just hit the Drive the Van button and off you go (provided you’re on Windows or Mac with the Google Earth plugin). Send the

Read More...

Dam!

Beaver dam that is. Via Slashdot, a group of beaver families in Alberta, Canada created a dam so large it’s visible from space. (It’s the top-of-a-heart shape.) The dam is 2,790 feet in length and took several beaver fa

Read More...

News Roundup - Google Earth in Maps, OpenLayers 2.9, and No More Spock

First up in this month’s news roundup is the addition of Google Earth (or the Google Earth plugin to be precise) to Google Maps. I’m surprised it took this long to integrate the two, but cool beans nonetheless. Now they

Read More...

Developer Demographics Favor Linux, Dynamic Languages

CNET has an interesting piece based on some Forrester research. It’s a brief article so I won’t rehash the whole thing here, but the conclusion is that as developer shops turn over and younger developers move in .NET and

Read More...

Google Maps Government Requests

Google has been on a anti-censorship tear since getting highly pissed at China over an alleged hacking incident. The latest salvo is a map showing the details of government requests for either data takedowns or for infor

Read More...

Google Earth Helps Find New Member of Our Family Tree

Via Slashdot (and numerous other places), a group of researchers using Google Earth to spot good hunting sites for fossils found parts of two skeletons that “fill an important gap between older hominids and the group of

Read More...