I’m not crazy about Java, but this video is great.

I’ve been working on a GIS project for the last few years, and the one challenge that doesn’t go away is how to easily collect Latitude & Longitude coordinates for locations.  Today I discovered LatLng Marker within Google Maps Labs.  Here is a description from the tool author:

Adds an option to the context menu that lets you drop a mini marker showing the latlng of the position that the cursor was pointing at when the context menu was evoked

Thanks Marcelo C for creating such an awesome tool.  I’ll be using this in my GIS projects.

At Large: The Strange Case of the World’s Biggest Internet Invasion (Paperback)

Written by David H. Freedman

I’ve been doing online meetings for a few years now, mainly using Microsoft Live Meeting and Webex from Cisco. While these 2 products are excellent tools for conducting online meetings, they have a cost associated to them which can be difficult to handle if you are a freelancer trying to work with a shoestring budget.

Today, I’d like add a free alternative to your toolbox. Yugma web conferencing allows anyone, anywhere to instantly share their desktop and ideas online with others. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux and it’s free if your meetings have less than 20 users.

Of course they also have a professional version that you pay for, but I’ve been really happy with the free version so far.  I highly recommended it if you need to share your desktop with someone else far away.

flip video

Today I had the opportunity to attend Cisco tech days to get the inside scoop on network technology straight from the network experts. One interesting thing I learned is that Cisco puts back 12% of their revenue into research and development (R&D) each year; this translates to approximately 5.2 billion this year alone.

The hot topics were voice over IP (duh), virtualization, unified communication services and TelePresence. What exactly is TelePresence? think of it as video conferencing on steroids! Imagine a conference room table with seating on one side and 3 large 60 inch screens on the other.  The idea here is that you can see the people you’re meeting with in high-def. (it allows you to see their face reactions when you propose your new plan). Overall, it was a very informative session and I even walked away with a little gadget. a flip video.

thanks Cisco!   BTW Peter did a great demo