A Frontrunner for the Coolest Google Mashup.... Ever

location based services

like to count myself among the Young Turks of Internet geography. There was a small group of PhD students in the late 90s that I hung with who did a lot of pioneering work figuring out where cyberspace connected to the real world.
The most technically gifted one in the bunch was Sean Gorman. You'll remember him as the guy whose dissertation was classified by the CIA, which meant his review committee didn't have the clearance to read it! We've gone our separate ways, but Sean started a company called FortiusOne which does all kinds of what-if analysis to large infrastructure data sets to help companies assess their exposure to public network failures. Like what if you blow up the Holland tunnel - how does that affect the movement of your people, goods and information locally, nationally and globally?
Sean and company have created a super-cool google mashup that lets you create "heat maps" of network data and overlay them on Google Maps. This is a huge leap for Google mashups because its really the first time I've seen them used for spatial analysis, not just information display. That is, you can answer questions like "is location A better than location B?" Over at Moving Past Push Pins, the company's aptly-named blog, you can see some screen shots and an article showing off the new tech. Very soon, Sean tells me, there will be a public demo.

Posted by Anthony Townsend on October 11, 2006 at 01:51 PM in Geospatial Web del.icio.us this!