Alex Reid

If you’ve been tracking Hurricane Sandy via social media or other sources, you might want to check out Instacane. It’s a mashup of photos from Instagram covering the hurricane, giving it a decidedly human touch.

The site is by Chris Ackermann and Peter Ng. It was originally developed last year for Hurricane Irene.

Say good bye to phones and computers.

Google has embarked on a new revolutionary front first envisioned by Steve Mann, the father of wearable computing. Google’s new physical product is called Google Glass, an augmented reality head-mounted display with the additional capability to capture video and take photos. This is the actual product version of the visual search application Google Goggles.

Google has announced that they will be selling the Google Glasses to US developers for $1,500 (USD) and may be consumer-ready by next year.

Here is what your day could look like next year:

Canada Post is suing GeoCoder.ca for providing a free online database of Canadian postal codes, claiming that its postal code list is copyright.

Canada Post’s claim is based on financial reasoning, as the Crown Corporation charges companies approximately $5,500 a year for the same information. The statement of claim filed by Canada Post says it’s losing potential clients and revenue thanks to GeoCoder.ca.

As reported in the Toronto Sun, the Canada Post spokesperson also claims they create new addresses which is a strange comment. I’m not sure how any one can claim they own an address. I’m certain it is a town or city that requires a property to have an address.

“We deliver to 32 million Canadians every day. Each year, we create more than 200,000 new addresses, and countless others are changed or removed from the database. We also process 1.2 million change of address requests annually for Canadians who are moving from one residence to another

“As you can imagine, we invest a significant amount of time, effort and money to maintain our address data, and ensure that it is clean and accurate. Only Canada Post has the breadth of network required to collect and update this information on a daily basis.”

- Canada Post spokeswoman Anick Losier

Geolytica, the owner of the website GeoCoder.ca, says in its statement of defence that postal codes are public data and not subject to copyright law.

This is a court case to watch, especially for marketers and political campaigners who regularly use postal code databases.

Last week, Jesper Andersen was talking at the Strata Data Conference about how to build a “data narrative” using social media and online information to tell a story about a neighbourhood.

He focused on San Francisco’s Haight Street and with the public information from government open data, mapping data, real estate, rental listings data with data from social services like Foursquare, Yelp and Instagram.

He looked at the safety element by finding the crime statistics from DataSF.org, and looked at an analysis of Tweets and found that, by distribution, people were more negative on the lower half of Haight. He was also able to see what people found interesting on Haight by mapping pictures from Instagram to the street as well to offer a creative Google Street View.

Story of Haight

It’s not the next Google Street View but it does offer hope inspiration to mobile application developers to use open data and social media data to tell a story.

Quadrotor Drones are the hippest machines these days.

French company Parrot has created an augmented reality video game using remote control quadrotor helicopters that you can use your iPhone or iPad to control. They act as mini unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), complete with video camera.

Last month a group of French engineers cum artists got together to illustrate a radically new way of building architecture; using flying robots.

The installation, called “Flight Assembled Architecture”, was conceived and built by teams led by my colleagues Fabio Gramazio & Matthias Kohler as well as Raffaello D’Andrea at the ETH Zurich.

Four remote controlled mini quadrotors landed on ”brick dispensers” (the bricks were actually polystyrene foam) and using “grippers” (three servo-powered pins to puncture and hold the brick), they then plucked one brick up at a time, carried each to the “building site” and began creating a warped tower wall. The software used managed control architecture, collision avoidance and freeway based flight.

The team claims this is the first architectural installation to be built dynamically by flying machines.