links for 2009-11-09

3D Landscape provides developers with ways to use and display high quality 3D maps in phone applications.

Probably the best analysis of the acquisition I've read.

Cartography 2.0 is a free online knowledge base and e-textbook for students and professionals interested in interactive and animated maps.

Loopt is already taking advantage of the new Blackberry app features.

"New location services: RIM is launching three new location-based services for developers: cell site geolocation, reverse geocoding and travel time. Cell Site Geolocation is very standard today and is commonly used as an alternative to GPS. Reverse Geocoding helps people convert their location coordinates into a specific address for use in BlackBerry applications. And finally, Travel Time allows developers to incorporate estimated travel time within their apps for destinations in the US and Canada. The travel time calculations will be based on distance, speed limits and aggregated traffic conditions. The service returns values for an estimated arrival time, total travel time and total distance that can be used in an application."

"The one feature request that we've heard over and over, however, is
"what's going on where I am?". To answer that, we wanted to give you
all a heads up regarding the new "Trends API" that we're launching.
This API will open up trending information that is specific to a
number of locations around the world.

At a high level, there will be two new endpoints:

* an endpoint to give a listing of all locations that trends are
available for, and
* an endpoint to actually allow you to query by a specific location. "

The Trends API will use Yahoo's Where on Earth IDs from yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet which I've written about here before.