eeGeo Launches Global 3D Mapping Platform to Visualise Location-Based Services and Interiors

New Geospatial Meta-Mapping Platform Contextualises Data for Interiors and Places

eeGeo, the UK-based 3D mapping company, today launched its geospatial meta-mapping platform which enables organisations to build interactive mobile applications to deliver content and location-based information. The eeGeo platform enables businesses across a range of sectors to easily visualise complex data sets on a geospatially accurate representation of the interior and exterior world. The platform is disrupting the industry through enabling customers to deliver engaging, compelling and differentiated 3D map experiences.

“The world is a three dimensional space and our platform accurately represents this as a global 3D map, transitioning seamlessly from outdoors with detail of all terrain, roads and landmarks, to the interior of buildings, right down to office, desk or counter level,” said Ian Hetherington, CEO, eeGeo. “We are able to visualise any space in intricate detail, including airports, shopping malls, museums, offices, stadiums and whole campuses. We enable location-based services in the widest sense, encompassing many vertical markets. With our solutions, businesses can extract meaningful understanding and insight from big data, all on one single integrated platform. Our most powerful differentiator is our ability to engage and retain users, a legacy of our video game roots.”

Hetherington continues, “This is a platform of true scale; to date we have built the entire USA, Britain, Canada and Japan, plus a host of iconic cities around the world. Building whole countries is carried out in response to customer demand, the process taking only a matter of weeks to create a country-wide, cloud-based map. This dynamic, interactive world enables our clients to highlight key destinations and places of interest specific to their brand, enriching the end user experience. eeGeo has helped clients within the facilities management, travel, tourism, local media and advertising sectors to successfully launch applications to better visualise data, increase engagement with customers and differentiate as brands.”

“This is no mean feat – after four years of intensive development we are really excited to bring eeGeo to market. The applications and use cases of the eeGeo platform are endless. In an increasingly mobile-first world it provides the ability to present multiple real-time data feeds within one visually stunning app, enabling end users to visualise, understand and act on information instantly and intuitively,” Hetherington added.

“Often businesses have the ability to attract users but struggle to maintain engagement and retention levels,” said Jeremy Copp, Chief Commercial Officer, eeGeo. “Presenting information and services on our platform maximises user acquisition, engagement and retention. As an example, our users have been found to interact with the application nearly three times longer than the sector benchmark and over-index on the frequency of use. And, NTT DoCoMo has successfully attracted millions of consumers after launching its 3D Map application delivered using the eeGeo platform.”

The cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) platform can ingest raw map and GIS data from any source, creating integrated 3D maps of any building interior, city or country. The platform delivers high performance, real-time streaming of the 3D maps over wireless networks, eliminating the need to store map data in the application or on the device. Streaming is optimised for mainstream mobile devices and low bandwidth networks to deliver a dynamic, interactive experience to all users. The platform software development kit enables customers to develop applications on a full range of device architectures including smartphones, tablets, browsers, PCs and virtual reality headsets.

The eeGeo 3D geospatial meta-mapping platform provides its customers with the following advantages:

Clear differentiation from competitors through the ability to fully customise the appearance and functionality of the map, specific to brand preferences
The ability to map the interior and exterior of buildings, providing an instantly recognisable environment for orientation and information discovery and an engaging user experience
No restrictions on business models, data or service types means that customers have the freedom to include all types of localised search and advertising results, to including display advertising and dynamic content
Transparent and cost effective, per-active-user, monthly pricing models enable customers to control the services margin without any surprises
Recce, the eeGeo proof of concept application, can be downloaded through the Android and iOS app stores. Recce provides users with insight into the eeGeo experience and is an example of some of the platform’s capabilities. Users can explore and navigate their way through major cities in 3D such as London, San Francisco and New York, whilst discovering key points of interest around them.

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Where Britain's immigrants historically come from

from Niall McCarthy




Immigration is dominating the news headlines at the moment but where do Britain's immigrants actually come from? Historically, Ireland was the main source of immigrants to the United Kingdom but as time went on, that has been taken over by India, Poland and Pakistan. Read more on the Independent.





This chart shows the top five origin countries of British immigrants from 1951 to 2011.

Source: Statista

In Focus: Mapping Britain’s Super-rich

George Osborne’s autumn statement on the government’s budgetrekindled the ongoing debate about the fairness of the coalition’s spending cuts. How does it look like if you take a look at the richest and the poorest parts of society? In an article for the “In Focus” section ofPolitical Insight (December 2012, Volume 3, Issue 3) Danny Dorling and Iplotted the geography of the wealthiest of the wealthy in the United Kingdom in comparison to poverty.
The map that I created for this feature displays the distribution of the top 1% of the wealthiest 1% according to information published by the agency WealthInsight, one of the companies trying to gather information on this part of the publication that is a prime target for exclusive marketing. Displayed in the map are data on people with assets in excess of US$30 million and where they have their prime address registered in the UK. The extent of the data is very limited because WealthInsight releases data for only 20 UK cities and regions based on postcode areas (Northern Ireland is a single postcode area which is why we did not correlate that data with Belfast’s overall population). 

Here we have superimposed that data on a population cartogram of the country, drawing circles with an area in proportion to the numbers of super-rich (in red) over people living in each city (in blue). Where they overlap, the circles turn into a purple colour. Where there are more super-rich people than population alone would predict, there is an orange ring around a purple core, as shown around London. Where there are fewer super-rich than the population of a city might predict, there is a blue outer-ring, as around Birmingham. The underlying map shows the distribution of poverty in the UK in five shades of grey.
Cities such as Leeds, Birmingham and Nottingham have fewer super-rich than might be expected – partly because they are not especially affluent urban centres but also, most probably, because their postcode does not include nearby areas such as the North Yorkshire stockbroker belt or the Cotswolds. Aberdeen, in contrast, has some multimillionaires: beneficiaries of the oil boom with an Aberdeen postcode who live some distance from that city. With Manchester it is hard not to speculate that a few extra footballers may have tipped it over the limit.

Here are the bibliographic details:
Hennig, B. D. and Dorling, D. (2012). In Focus: Mapping Britain’s Super‑rich.Political Insight 3 (3): 42.
Article online (Wiley)

The content on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig. You are free use the material under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details. I also appreciate a message if you used my maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

Source: Views of the World

Inequality and Sustainability

“We should … dethrone the idea that maximising the growth in measured prosperity, GDP per capita, should be an explicit objective of economic and social policy.”

Adair Turner, Chair of the UK Financial Services Authority, 2007

Today I gave a talk at the meeting of the Sustainability Knowledge Alliance and theEnvironment Audit Committee (EAC) of the UK Parliament at the British Academy in London. The event aimed at discussing the relationship between growing inequality and sustainability. As the meeting’s announcement explains, “in so many ways inequality is a backdrop to many features of modern political, economic and social arrangements where structures of self-reinforcing power and influence combine to buttress non-sustainability. We see this in the lobbying for the perpetuation of a carbon economy, in the promotion of the “war on terror”, and in the huge biases built into the interweaving connections between business, politics, regulation and consumerism.”
In my talk I explained how inequality and a consumption correlate. I looked at the issue mainly from a global perspective, using evidence that Danny Dorling and I compiled to find out to what extent inequality and (un)sustainability correlate. The following series of charts give in insight into how the level of inequality and a range of indicators related to consumerism and consumption compare:

Inequality and the ecological footprint

Inequality and air travel

Inequality and meat consumption

Inequality and water consumption

Inequality and waste production

I concluded my talk with reflections on whether growth is the ultimate goal to pursue in the wealthy part of the world (see the introductory quote above). As data shows, happiness of societies and income levels are only correlated to a certain level, while it then begins to stagnate once people have achieved a certain standard of living. Inequality then feeds into this: To consume less, you need to feel you have more in common with other people. If success is about having a lot of money, success is about consuming more and wasting more. Consumption by everybody is less in countries where everyone is more equal. All affluent countries need to reduce their levels of consumption by reducing social inequalities. Through their dominance of global media and marketing the rest of the world usually looks up towards richer countries. What example are we providing?

The following slides provide more context and show further data and visualisations (and maps) related to my talk, including some recent findings related to inequality in the United Kingdom and how this relates to the ‘super-rich’ within society:

View on Slideshare


The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. You are free use to the material for non-commercial purposes under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details. I also appreciate a message if you used my maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized visualisations are available on request.

Source: Views of the World

Electoral Doctrine: Thirty-nine maps of voting

The 2015 UK general election is history and it seems as all stories have been told about the unexpected victory of the Conservative party. But the picture of the election is far more diverse than it seems and the political landscapes are more polarised than a conventional map of the first votes can show.
This poster, submitted as an entry to the joint BCS-SoC ‘Mapping Together’ Conferencestarting tomorrow in York, presents the electoral doctrine of the 2015 election. It is a cartographic roundup of the beliefs of the electorate in thirty-nine images that tell the full story of a shift in political paradigms that will shape the debates for the elections to come:

(click for larger version)

These new perspectives of the elections provide a comprehensive overview of the voting patterns for the main parties that shaped the debate before and after the election.
The maps always show three different perspectives: A conventional map showing the land area, a gridded population cartogram showing an equal-population projection, and a hexagon cartogram in which the parliamentary seats are represented by hexagons. Any labels for place names are deliberately omitted to allow for a visual interpretation and comparison of the overall patterns that appear in these maps.

All three representations tell very different stories and are therefore useful to obtain a complete picture of the political landscapes of Britain. While most people will find it easiest to relate to the normal land area map, the population cartogram shows where people live and what they vote for – a much more correct picture when looking at the representation of people in democratic terms – and the hexagons provide the most accurate picture of how parliament is constituted, which not fully relates to the distribution of people as constituencies vary in size (ranging from just over 20,000 to over 110,000 people).

(click for larger version)

The three largest maps of the poster show how the parties scored in terms of winning the election compared to the previous 2010 election. These are followed with a map series of the winning and the second placed parties, complemented by an overview of the turnout which was at 66.1% at national level but – as the maps show – with high geographical variation.
The following two rows in the poster take a closer look at the two main parties, the Conservative (with 36.9% of the vote share, and 331 of the seats in Parliament) and the Labour party (30.4%, 232 seats) and how their votes changed since the 2010 election. The last column in these rows shows the vote shares of the national parties for Wales (Plaid Cymru, 0.6%, 3 seats) and Scotland (Scottish National Party, 4.7%, 56 seats). In the last row is a look at the distribution of votes of the remaining main parties which are UKIP (12.6%, 1 seat), the Green party (3.8%, 1 seat) and the Liberal Democrats (7.9%, 8 seats).
Dissecting the vote share of each of the individual parties gives an insight into how diverse but also how polarised the electorate in the United Kingdom has become in their political views which are no longer only represented by the two main parties. As these maps also show, Labour’s significant loss of votes in Scotland has resulted in losing a quite significant number of seats, while the vote share in the rest of the country did go up in many places, even thought this did not translate into parliamentary seats – yet another proof for the much more polarised voting patterns in this election.
Here are all remaining maps featured on the poster – the full cartographic roundup of the 2015 election in the United Kingdom:

Winning Party

(click for larger version)

Second-placed Party

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Turnout

(click for larger version)

Vote share Conservative Party

(click for larger version)

Vote share Labour Party

(click for larger version)

Vote share change Conservative Party

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Vote share change Labour Party

(click for larger version)

Vote share Scottish National Party

(click for larger version)

Vote share Plaid Cymru

(click for larger version)

Vote share UKIP

(click for larger version)

Vote share Liberal Democrats

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Vote share Green Party

(click for larger version)

The Thirty-Nine Maps of Voting are the defining statement of doctrines of the general election with respect to the controversies of the British political system.

The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

Source: I fucking love maps and Views of the World

Mapping smells of London

By Aleks Buczkowski



Smell is important yet the most unappreciated sense. It is the only sense which is almost impossible to imitate by technology. Look at our smartphones. They see, they hear, they sense our touch but they don’t recognise odours, and I don’t expect them to do it anytime soon.

A group of researchers from Cambridge University in consortium with Yahoo decided to map smells across London. Since it is impossible to measure it with any known technology they went for a totally different approach. First they asked dozens of residents in couple of cities in Europe and the U.S. to conduct “smell walks,” in which they walked around, identified distinct odors and took notes on what they were smelling. This exercise allowed to create a detailed urban smell dictionary.

Then researcher crunched geotagged data from social media searching for these keywords. In total they sampled 17 million Flickr images, 436,000 Instagram posts, and 1.7 million tweets published and geotagged between 2010 and 2014. The effect has been mapped using CartoDB and is kind of cool.



The data can be analysed separately per layer. Let’s compare smells of emission (red) and nature (green) on the first map with Animal odour on the map below. Unsurprisingly the animal smell and the nature concentrates in London’s zoo and in parks, and “emission” odours follow the city’s major roadways.

The researchers envision these maps being used in a variety of ways. Urban planners cloud use them to figure out which areas of the city smell the worst and manipulate urban green spaces to change it. Geo-geeks cloud create a wayfinding app that gives users the most pleasant-smelling path to their destination. Do you have any other ideas?

You can find some more info here and a research paper here.

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