Nike and New Balance have plans on making 3D-printed shoes, according to this article.
This kind of stuff excites me. It reminds me of the replicator in Star Trek. In fact, you can get your own replicator for a cool two grand. Next up, finding designs on Pirate Bay!
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.
Watch this talk from TED to understand the background and mechanisms of SOPA and PIPA.
Alex Reid is a Canadian who likes a lot of things. Welcome to my world.