Google Cancels The Earth... Sort Of

This is going to be the end of an era for me. One of the first things I did with the early versions of Google Earth was wire it up to Vodafone’s mobile network data, producing some genuinely unique–for the time, at least–visualisations of network usage over time. The hotspots were fascinating to actually see: high schools where kids saturated GSM cells with SMS, highways, sports stadiums, the places where 2G/3G hand-overs kept failing. It was extremely useful to us at the time–far more so than the normal GIS systems–because I could just have a CGI script spit out a .kml file and get “live” data straight onto the globe. I also used gps2geX with a Garmin GPS to build our own overlays.