Sometimes it seems like there is a Starbucks on every corner, and sometimes it’s true! It looks as if they have finally reached their saturation point and are now closing 616 stores throughout the United States. This Finder! dataset shows the locations of the closures. We also uploaded a dataset that shows the almost 9,000 Starbucks locations around the Globe. With this point data, you can see that many of the locations being closed are very near to other Starbucks locations. Perhaps it makes sense to close stores that would cannibalize your own market however, there are many other ways of looking at the problem. We aggregated the data out to the Zip code and to urban areas. In case you were wondering, here is a sneak peak of the locations most impacted by the closures:

By Zipcode
1. 89108 Las Vegas, NV (5)
2. 63103 St. Louis, MO (4)
3. 77102 Houston, TX (4)
4. 92101 San Diego, CA (3)
5. 63102 St. Louis, MO (3)

By Urban Area
1. Dallas Fort-Worth Arlington (25)
2. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana (22)
3. New York-Newark (22)
4. Chicago (18)
5. Las Vegas (15)

Lastly, we decided to map out some of the Starbucks locations with a competitor to see if perhaps that played a role in the closure decisions. Below is a map from New York to Philadelphia showing Starbucks locations (transparent green dots) and Dunkin Donuts locations (transparent magenta dots). The black dots are Starbucks locations which are on the Closure list.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Going green is taking businesses and consumers by storm. Yet, what is the role of GIS and GPS in renewable energy development? When GIS and GPS partner, they are ‘uniquely positioned to analyze and monitor earth system processes to make certain that renewable power generation sites are optimally sited and that the power that is generated is delivered efficiently.’ Through the development and expansion of the renewable energy sector, GIS and GPS will be able to capture ‘maximal energy creation at the lowest cost for the widest and the most effective impact in a sustainable sense.’

ERDAS is offering geospatial tools to assist with response during the 2008 Atlantic Hurricane Season. The company helps organizations harness the information of the changing earth for greater advantage. The ERDAS TITAN GeoHubs will allow organizations to ‘rapidly share imagery and vector data to develop a real-time common operating picture by allowing emergency management planners and responders to dynamically publish and consume geospatial data in a permission-based, collaborative online network.’ ERDAS has even partnered with MCH GeoPoints for more capabilities with medical facilities during these emergencies.

The BBC shared their Olympics map that shows where the 2008 Games’s venues are located in Beijing, Qingdao and Hong Kong. The map was created using Microsoft’s Virtual Earth API and MapCruncher. There are over 37 Chinese Olympic venues.

With the rise of GIS’s popularity, it’s no wonder that Radiohead decided to use the concept of the system as basis of their new video House of Cards. Released this past Monday, the band shared ‘data that they used to created the video so people could make their own clips to upload to Radiohead’s YouTube group.’ Google Earth and ArcScene are two of the platforms used to create the video.

After the long awaited iPhone 2.0 was released, reviews about the phone’s GPS feature came pouring in. Since the first version of the iPhone lacked this feature and the trends for location based services grew, Apple added Google Maps to the mix. Good idea or not?

Popularity: 9% [?]

Travel has put me a bit behind on getting up a post on the second day of “State of the Map”. However, having a few days to reflect on the conference it was really very impressive. Probably the single biggest differentiator between this and most every other conference I’ve been to is that every speaker had an element of passion about what they do. Whether it was mapping a country or applying OSM data to a new project, the speakers were very invested in what they were doing and it had little or nothing to do with money.

One of the most anticipated talks was Ed Parson of Google talk on their new product MapMaker. There has been quite a bit of consternation in the GeoWeb community over MapMaper, especially within OSM. Other folks have covered the highlights of the talk in more detail, so I will not regurgitate it here.

What the talk did make me think is that OSM has become the Fight Club of the GeoWeb. A quick recap on Fight Club, “The plot is based on an unnamed protagonist who struggles with his growing discomfort with consumerism… In an attempt to overcome this, he creates an underground fighting club as a radical form of psychotherapy.”

If we take this in turn, Steve gets frustrated with commercial and government control of street data (Ordinance Survey, TeleAtlas, NAVTEQ) and that it cost him 50,000 quid to put some bicycle theft data on a web based map. So, he starts up an underground group of similarly frustrated guys and starts having “mapping parties”. These “mapping parties” become increasingly popular across London. Steve starts traveling to other cities and throwing “mapping parties” and new chapters of OSM spring up in the these cities. Steve soon has a small army of 47,000 mappers.

Now we have “State of the Map” conference, which is awfully similar to “Project Mayhem”. You have presentation like “OpenStreetMap vs. the World” and all the the stuff you can do in Google Maps we’ll provide as free open data to the community. Direct attacks on consumerism. Then there is the physical proof. Several OSM mappers dressed in official “space monkeyuniform of all black:

”

Second bit of evidence after the BBQ on Saturday the hotel staff asked the OSMers to leave the nightclub because they were afraid of altercation breaking out with the locals. Finally I was challenged to at least six arm wrestling matched by OSMers - all orchestrated by Steve…. Who will also be leaving Ireland to fly to Scotland, then fly to Denver, then Seattle, then San Diego (sounds awfully familiar).

Never wanting to miss out on a good thing we thought we’d add our bit to the cause as good diligent space monkeys. Nestoria and others brought up how tough it was to get selected data out of OSM. In Nestoria’s case they specifically wanted train stations in Germany, so we thought we’d help out a bit. Bill took the massive shapefile the Germans have created then sliced it and diced it to get out some of the specifics like:

German Subways
German Beer Gardens (beirgarten)
German trains stations

If you want to find other OSM data in GeoCommons just check out the OSM tag.

Popularity: 10% [?]

With the MLB All-Star Game winding up I decided to write about the annual midsummer classic and other All-Star games from other sports organizations. All-Star games are a chance for the world to see the best compete against the best. Since All-Star games represent the best of the best, I decided to map the locations of all the hometowns of every 2008 All-Star in every major sports organization. By doing this I was trying to locate an “athletic hotspot” that all major sports had in common. The four sports organizations I chose were the National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Baseball (MLB), National Football League (NFL), and the National Hockey League (NHL).

• NBA All-Star Hometowns
• NFL Pro-Bowl Hometowns
• MLB All-Star Hometowns
• NHL All-Star Hometowns

After viewing all the datasets mapped a few conclusions can be made. The first is that there is not really one central location where all-stars from these four major sports organizations grow up. Instead, hotspots are usually more sport specific. For example, Several MLB All-Stars are from the Dominican Republic. There happen to be ten from the Dominican Republic but not a single All-Star from any other sport is from the Dominican Republic. So it is safe to say the Dominican Republic is a hot spot for baseball, but only baseball.

A few trends can be made when looking at All-Stars who grew up in the USA. I have also decided to leave out the NHL in this study due to the fact that only three NHL All-Stars are from the USA. When looking at where NFL, NHL, and NBA All-Stars grew up in the USA, you can see that there are arguably a few hot spots. The state of California is one. Roughly 13% of All-Stars come from the state in the three sports. You can also see that when looking at strongest regions in the country the South is clearly the strongest. When you look at the amount of All-Stars who grew up in a southern state (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, TX, VA) you see that roughly 41% of all All-Stars come from one of these southern states. This is interesting when these states only make up 24% of all the states in the USA. One last conclusion is the lack of All-Stars from certain regions in the USA. Weak spots include; New England States, Midwest, Mountain States.

The reasons for All-Stars coming out of certain areas are hard to find. It is possible that the nice year round weather of the Southern USA and California allow athletes to train outdoors for longer periods of time. It could also be that an active sports culture is much more prominent in certain regions. Or perhaps the reason is simply that there is just something in the water.

Popularity: 7% [?]