No, Not The "Birds" Is Coming, But Instead Great Ways To Use GPS/GIS and Maps
recently one of my blogging friends, Tim Hibbard pointed out a new face in this segment of the blogging world and a new business with some interesting plans on the horizon. A forward-thinker name of Ken Hoetmer has started his own business called Spatial North Technologies Inc.
Ken’s “thing” is making maps (and the geographic sciences and information behind them) useful and accessible to the “non-mapping” person. I looked through ken’s portfolio and this is one of the interesting tools he’s already had his hands on. http://geobirds.com/
As you can see (visit the site to see it live and in color) one use is simplistic yet elegant … let birders (those who search for and record bird species sightings) put their data on amp, themselves, and share it with other birders of the world.
But since there’s already an easy to use live tracking interface built into the Google Maps foundation structure behind the GeoBirds site, it’s no problem or huge investment to add features that might become useful to both hobbyist level birders and ornithologists.
What if instead of having to send out dedicated teams to tag and track birds, researchers could just send tracking devices on loan to interested parties in their area of concentration and then see the results come to life on the map? That’s just one of a whole host of thoughts that come to my mind looking at this tool, and I don’t really even know anything about birds.
A do know a useful application when I see one though, and more importantly I know an attitude of openness rather than “professionals only, closed shop” attitude that sometimes crops up in all of the sciences from time to time. Press on ken, we wish you well.