The new ArcGIS.com from ESRI is officially online as a public Beta version. We have successfully moved from a dark background to white, as can be seen on the right.
ArcGIS Online Beta Screenshot
Executive Compensation Mashup by Dave Bouman, winner of the 2010 ESRI Mashup Challenge
ESRI announced the winners of their 2010 Mashup Challenge. 1st place goes to Dave Bouwman and his executive compensation mashup available here.
Second place winner was a social media mapper, that presents real time results from social media websites to a map (see it live here), which seems like a great time killer to me.
Congratulations to all the winners and applicants, and many thanks to ESRI for running this challenge and allowing people to be creative with their products.
Google Maps introduces some nifty new features for its users in the form of Labs (as in their famous Gmail Labs). The new features are accessible on the toolbar on the top right of the screen, labeled as “New” (look like this: 
). There are many features for all map geeks available, including Drag and Zoom (allows you to draw a rectangle on the screen to zoom in it), Aerial Imagery (a much finer resolution imagery than satellite), Rotation (rotates the map, making up South or East), and others. My favorite one is of course the option to introduce the Beta label to Google Maps, for those that suffer from nostalgia.
Oct 022009
Many people out there insist that Google Maps and Google Earth is killing the GIS industry. I had a number of students circulate that idea with me, always wondering if there is still a future for GIS. In a short simple answer, Google Maps/Earth is not a GIS, and GIS will be around for the foreseeable future.
Coming from various discussions I have had in the GIS and ESRI Users groups in LinkedIn, I decided I should write a log entry describing the three technologies that people discuss frequently, without differentiation between them: the geoweb, web mapping and web GIS. While there are multiple definitions of the three, mine defines the three based on their functionality, differentiating them and drawing clear distinctions. Continue reading »
