Interesting article here:

The City of Johannesburg is closing off its GIS data in a ‘cost recovery’ move that other South African municipalities are set to follow. This, say some industry players, is not in keeping with Joburg’s plans to become ‘a world-class African city’.

Go to the City of Johannesburg’s ‘e-services’ online mapping site on a Mac or on a Firefox browser and you’ll be disappointed. In bold red letters, a notice reads: ‘PLEASE NOTE: The online map viewer is only compatible with Internet Explorer 6 or higher…’

The problems don’t end here. Further along in the process, you’ll see a ‘disclaimer’ that reads: ‘The contents may not be copied, reproduced, redistributed to third parties in any form for any purpose whatsoever, or applied to commercial use without the written consent of the Council.’

Over the next month or so I’m speaking at some cool conferences you might want to check out:

• I’m on a panel at MetaPlaces – http://www.thewherebusiness.com/metaplaces/
• Location Intelligence – http://www.locationintelligence.net/
• Geomatics 2009 – http://www.geomatics2009.com/

Looks like it will be super interesting (Amazon US, UK), see the website.

Check out this review at the unofficial apple weblog of Roadee, a iPhone nav app which uses OSM:

Yes, all true. I’m talking about Roadee, an iPhone nav app that depends on the open sourced openstreetmap.com. That eliminates the high fees paid to license map data, and allows a nav app for under 2 bucks.

Read all about it here!