As usual, I’ve got a hard act to follow with Sean’s latest post about our wacky adventures in New York, but I might have an ace up my sleeve this time.

With all the GeoCommons discussion and interest of late, and with the first public release just around the corner, I thought I’d take the opportunity to share a little sneak peak with you.

I was wracking my brain yesterday trying to come up with some sort of real world, but not too serious and quick demonstration of GeoCommons.  Luckily for me, I didn’t have to look past my trusty RSS reader before I found my inspiration: the “Live: Schiphol flight paths + noise sensor web” post I saw yesterday on Ogle Earth.  They’ve written up the details better than I’ll be able to, but the long and short of it is that the Dutch company Geluidsnet has launched a new service that mashes up noise sensor data with radar data representing the current positions of planes in the area.  And luckily enough for me, they were kind enough to provide a KML version of this data.

In the interests of cutting straight to the chase, here’s a screenshot of a GeoCommons workspace with the noise data represented as a heatmap inside of Google Maps:

Read past the jump for the full details of what I did and how.

Technorati Tags: Google, Maps, GeoIQ, geocommons, geodata, Schiphol, KML

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Chris and I went to NYC for the Real Estate Connect Conference to try and learn more about the space and get some impressions on our technology. Since the release of the GeoIQ API we’ve gotten a good level of interest from real estate folks, and thought this would be a good opportunity to get smarter.

It was cool seeing all the interest in mapping and applications going on in the real estate space. Lots fo folks dropped by our pod and liked the idea of having data and analysis services for their mapping apps that would allow users to make better location decisions – good news for us. We did an integration of GeoIQ with Neighboroo.com for the conference that went really quick and smooth – just an hour or so worth of work. We’ll have some external examples of folks using GeoIQ for real estate shortly.

During the course of the first day booth visitors started asking us about pulling up the highly rated bars and singles heat map for NYC. Just so happened we had a KML files one of the Google Earth engineers sent us that mashed up bars and singles with our heat maps. After running through it with our conference visitors we decided to do a little field testing ourselves. Below is a screen shot from Google Earth of 600 bars (rated between 1 and 10) in NYC and the location of single women by census block.

From the high level it looked like the lower east side was where the action was at. Drop down another couple of zoom levels and we could see some specific hot spots pop out (the ability to export data and heat map analysis as KML, like you see above and below, will be part of the GeCommons release – we think it looks pretty cool):

Just so happened I was supposed to meet a buddy who lived down that way, so we now had the opportunity to see how hot the heat map really was. The buddy was Anthony Townsend currently at the IFTF. We’ve been doing various urban geography and technology projects for a while so it rounded out the field testing team well. We met up with Anthony at the Verlaine to grab a few beers and as we were walking out when we spotted Fat Baby next door. We’d been cracking jokes about the name since the NYC Bar data set was created. Just so happened it was right next door so we snapped a pic:

It was looking pretty dead on a Monday night so we headed on to get dinner at Schillers Liquor Bar – where according to Anthony you had to “cut through the super models with a machete”. It was a Monday but the place was still packed and definitely verifying the heat map. Between Verlaine and Schillers we’d gotten good beer and scenery. From Schillers we were off to meet up with a friend of Anthony’s (Justin Davila) at the Marshall Stack. We grabbed a round of beer and “holy double take Batman” Mike Myers and company sits down at the table next to us. 20/20 hindsight I should have snapped a picture, otherwise no one will believe Mr. Myers bought all our beers and said I could be the Austin Powers stunt double in the next movie. Ya – my camera phone conveniently did not work. None the less it definitely verified the heat map. So – the moral of the story is use GeoIQ and meet famous actors, super models, and become instantly cool with hipsters around the globe.

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We managed to survive the holiday break – which meant digging out of three Colorado blizzards for me. On the upside the skiing was awesome. While I was hiding in 15 foot snow drifts the dev folks here were busy building out GeoCommons – our data repository social network designer mutt. There was an informal naming contest and GeoCommons best epitomized what we are making a run at, although I really liked Where-dat.com for pure entertainment value.

We are starting internal testing and looking for early adopters that would like to join in the fun. If you have geographic data you would like share and mashup up with our data and others we’d love to hear from you. We’ll have the social network functionality going and you’ll be able to upload and download data from GeoCommons. In addition you’ll be able to take your data and anyone else’s in GeoCommons and make a mashup with our heat map action as well. So, please join the party – right now all the profile pictures are of Minh, and while he is a damn good looking individual we need some variety.  Just drop us a line at info@fortiusone.com if you are interested.

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