What is special about Geospatial?

O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference 2008 starts today. It takes place in California and became one of the most important conference about GeoWeb. All important companies like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Nokia or Navtech will be there.

The official homepage: http://en.oreilly.com/where2008

Form the year 2007 all sessions are available as videos. I hope also for the actual conference videos o all talks will be available.

Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.

Google has recently updated their StreetView data for Manhatten. Beside some improvements in image quality, Google has implemented automatic face-blurring technology.  Form the screenshot you can see that it works really nice. It blurs the faces, but doesn’t detract too much from the imagery. Here is the quote form the official Australian Google Blog:

At Google, we take our users’ privacy very seriously. Street View only contains imagery that anyone can already see walking down a public street and we’ve always had in place image removal tools. In addition, today, on the Google LatLong blog, we have just announced the first public test of our new face-blurring technology on the busy streets of Manhattan. This effort has been a year in the making - and we will continue to work hard to improve it as we roll it out for our existing and future imagery. Here’s an example from the bustling streets of Manhattan:

In Australia (and New Zealand), Street View will also feature face-blurring, as well as image removal tools.

This new technology indicates that Google is working on technologies to fullfill the legal requirements to introduce StreetView in Europe as well. I think StreetView Europe is comming soon…

[via GWB, google-au.blogspot.com]

Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.