Yes indeed, another Friday is upon us and that means time to share 5 cool and awesome things that I’ve stumbled onto this week… enjoy, and as usual please share your tips and things that are full of awesomeness – ping me @gletham…
670 million smartphones ship in 2012, 67 million Samsungs in Q4
Some interesting stats coming out of Juniper Research this week from the mobile industry and they do confirm what we suspected… Android is hot! According to the latest figures more than 670 million smartphones shipped Globally in 2012 and in Q4 of the 200 million devices that sold, over one third of them were Samsung devices whereas about 47.8 million were iPhones… great news for Android users and in particular, Android app developers! Nokia shipped 6.6 million smart devices in the fourth quarter (although Symbian based devices really lagged and many are predicting the demise of Symbian as an OS) , with the new Lumia device line still to make a significant impact with shipments of 4.4 million – have you spotted a Lumia in the wild yet??
See more details on the latest from Juniper HERE
LiDAR as Art – the competition, Round 2
I love this one and I’m also a huge fanatic of maps and "Geo" Art. Those of you into LiDAR and likely headed to Denver for ILMF in Feb will be all over this one I’m sure. GeoDigital International has announced the ILMF 2013 “LiDAR as ART” Contest. To enter, submit your outstanding example(s) of an airborne LiDAR image to them by January 1, 2013 – oops, I guess its kind of late! Each submission will create an entry for you and your employer. You can see the winners at ILMF event…
See more http://s.tt/1z6PH
SuperBowl FanMap
Super Bowl week is here so that means more cool data visualizations.. best BBQ, tail gate hot spots, and those awesome NFL fan maps! Here’s details of a cool fan map – I’m not sure I can agree that its the best fan map “ever”, however, given that its been created by mashing up data scraped from facebook it is pretty cool! So how was this one done? Well, they used data… LOTS of it! Details… Facebook’s Data Science team has combed the more than 35 million users who have “liked” a team’s fan page, and put it into graphic form, down to the county level. Some interesting spatial patterns emerge once you look at the data.. for example, Patriots fans tend to spread out far and wide, as do fans of the Cowboys and Steelers. Overall the data indicates that geography plays a huge role in defining the fan. Too bad it doesn’t include Canada as you’d see a little orange Broncos fan dot here on Vancouver Island where I am!
CropSpace – 2012 Cropland Data
The 2012 cropland data layer (CDL) product for the Continental United States (CONUS) was released as CropScape (http://nassgeodata.gmu.edu/CropScape) on January 31, 2013. This categorized geospatial product at 30m resolution is produced by U. S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service from satellite observation data and ground truth data. CropScape was developed in cooperation with the Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems at George Mason University, Fairfax, Va.
See more details HERE
Indeed, it isn’t called the continuity mission for nothing!! The Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) is a collaboration between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey that will continue the Landsat Program’s 40-year data record of monitoring Earth’s landscapes from space. LDCM will expand and improve on that record with observations that advance a wide range of Earth sciences and contribute to the management of agriculture, water and forest resources.
For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/landsat and http://landsat.usgs.gov
BONUS
Finally, a bonus event tip… FedGeoDay 2013, Washington D.C. Feb 28 – Check out details of this cool, opensource focused event taking place in Washington DC later in Feb.
See All the 5 Things on Friday Features HERE
