Linking Toucan Navigate and Zoho Creator

I have been reviewing Zoho Creator (www.zoho.com) recently and decided to create a quick prototype to illustrate how it could be used with our Toucan mapping tool to do something useful.

Here's a simple scenario taken from my college studies in Urban Planning - looking at the relationship between the location of Fast Food Franchises and major highways. My main objective was to accomplish this without a single line of code (no html, no javascript, no nothing) and yet provide enough functionality to answer some basic questions, hence making this potentially useful in the business world.

Specifically, I wanted to:

1. Have more than one person enter,update or view Franchise data (i.e. collaborate)
   
2. Dynamically filter the data (by Franchise or by State).
3. Display thousands of records on a map.

In less than ten minutes I assembled this (I did have the data). The form below is used to capture data.

The ZC View is used to filter the data by Franchise or by State and to save the Filtered or all the (aprox. 20,000 records) and save them as .csv file (needed by Toucan Navigate).

Toucan Navigate is used to display all or a partial list (i.e. filtered) of the records stored and maintained in ZC.

So here it is - a map clearly showing the concentration of Fast Food Places along the I-95 corridor.

You can check the ZC app here: Fast Food Tracker

And download a trial (full feature) version of Toucan Navigate.

Partner news

Congratulations to Asher at our partners Tech-Pro, who has made his first sale of Toucan Navigate 2007 to a customer in India!

Also congratulations to Jean-Michel Davault at Hommes et Process and Clive Davies at D2i - both have passed the new Microsoft Office Groove 2007 certification exam. If you're looking for a partner to help with implementing Groove, then you should consider J-M and Clive to be your "go to" guys, if you're in the UK or France.

Useful (and free) data for Toucan Navigate

Our main objective with Toucan Navigate is to help people create meaningful maps very quickly. If you're looking for readily-available datasets, try these two web sites. Both provide useful and free data that can be downloaded and displayed in Toucan Navigate. Once downloaded, with just a few mouse clicks you can start viewing them over the roads maps and satellite imagery from Virtual Earth. You can also edit these datasets to fit your specific needs.

• GPS Data Team. This website has a large selection of POI (Points of Interest) from many countries. The image below shows Wal-Mart stores in the U.S, which were downloaded from their bulk download page. You will need to choose one of the .csv formats available and add a header row (Name, Longitude, Latitude).

• ESRI. ESRI offers free map data from the Census Bureau, which are very useful. You will find water bodies, census tracks and many other GIS files compatible with Toucan Navigate. ESRI also provides a simple way to download World Baseline Data in .shp format.

Download Toucan Navigate and start mapping your data now.

Toucan Navigate 3.0.3 now available

The new release of Toucan Navigate 2007 is up. This release has some significant improvements to the Virtual Earth tile renderer, making for cleaner maps. We've also tidied up the UI and fixed a lot of bugs. You can download it from here

Toucan Navigate 2007 WebCast

October 18th, we're running a webcast in association with the Microsoft Virtual Earth team. We'll be talking about how Toucan Navigate 2007 integrates with Virtual Earth to make it easy to assemble maps from data in Excel spreadsheets, Groove Forms and SQL Server. We'll also be highlighting the options that using a web/desktop hybrid application offers over straight web applications.

If your work has a geographic element, and you need to work in a team with people who may be in different offices, or no office at all, or even different companies, then we believe we've got something interesting to offer.

Sign up here: Virtual Earth and Toucan Navigate for Offline Mapping & Collaboration

Toucan Navigate 2007 - Getting Started

Here's a quick tutorial on how to get started with Toucan Navigate 2007, which we've made available this weekend.

1. Download the bits by clicking on the download button here. It's only a 2 mb download (if you already have Microsoft's dot.net framework 2.0 installed).

2. Download, extract and save the sample files. There are three files (counties.dbf, counties.shp and fast food franchises.csv). These three files take up 1.5 mb of disk space.

3. Start the application and then select Add -> File from the Home (or the Format) menu and load the Counties file.

4. In the next step of the wizard, you will be prompted to select fields. Change only the Style field by selectingState_Name from the drop down list.

5. In the next step you can select a specific color for each or any of the States. Optionally you can just click Next and then finish once you have seen the preview. You should see all the counties now displayed on top of the Virtual Earth map.

6. Go to the Format menu. In the Object Style Section you should see one style for each of the States. You can now select a State and change its color by clicking on the Fill Color.

7. Now you can zoom in or out by scrolling your mouse wheel or dragging your mouse from top left to bottom right while holding the right button down (in) or vice-versa for zooming out.

8. If you want to make the Counties file semi-transparent, click the Edit button in the Map Layers group and then change the Transparency value from 255 to 100 or so.

You should now be looking at a map similar to this one:

Try the same steps with the Fast Food Franchises .csv file and select Company as the Style. You should be on your way to taking advantage of Toucan Navigate by now. If you still have issues please log your questions in our Toucan Navigate Forum.

Introducing Toucan Navigate 2007

This month we will start delivering the new version of Toucan Navigate (2007) to our clients and also introducing a free version. Our focus this time around has been on delivering an application that combines what is most attractive about internet mapping applications (i.e. on-demand detailed maps and satellite images, address look-ups and routes) with what's attractive about desktop applications (i.e. privacy, offline work, rich user experience).

Here's a video of the new Toucan Navigate.

Launching New Products at NCGIS 2007

Today we are introducing our next generation of geocollaboration products at the North Carolina GIS Conference with Microsoft's Virtual Earth team. We have two new products, GeoBlogIT and Toucan Navigate 2007, which incorporate valuable lessons learned from working with our clients, the team at Groove (now part of Microsoft) and the Strong Angel excercises.

We'll be talking about both of these offerings in the coming weeks.

Toucan Navigate 3 - a sneak preview?

While we've been adding some new features to the next version of Toucan Navigate, the GIS world hasn't been standing still. The explosion of interest in GIS, engendered by WorldWind and Google Earth hasn't gone unnoticed, neither here nor at Microsoft.

While Toucan Navigate 2007 will maintain its high-speed two dimensional view of the world for most things, we're thinking of incorporating Microsofts new 'SpaceLand' 3D mapping engine for those that need it.

Here's a screenshot. It also gives you an idea where we're going with Toucan Navigate 2007. We've got some other surprises planned, so stay tuned!

Ten Long Term Lessons from Strong Angel 3

Here it is - ten long-term lessons learned during one of the most memorable experiences of my professional career. Strong Angel 3 is the second demonstration for us, but the first participating onsite.

1. Lead by example. As stated by the high ranking official from the Afghanistan government participating in the exercise, moral leadership is irreplaceable. Dr. Eric Rasmussen, with his amazing human qualities, accomplishments and real world experience in disasters worldwide was our leader this past week. He has earned the utmost admiration and respect not only from all the participants but from many people around the globe.
   
2. Listen to those who know. Once the Incident Command Post was established, Carla Boyce, (Information and Plans Chief at Florida Dept of Emergency Management), acted as Deputy Incident Commander and conducted daily operations and briefings. Carla received an outstanding ovation from the executive committee and all the participants for her accomplishments in this role at SA3. Her domain expertise was indispensable toward getting the job done and her requirements were translated into deliverables. In summary, subject-matter expertise continues to drive requirements.
   
3. Collaborate. The challenge of quickly assembling useful artifacts (otherwise known as STWs) to support any operation can only be accomplished by working together with others who complement one’s knowledge. Collaboration between teams who usually compete fiercely in the marketplace produced amazing results in very short timeframes.
   
4. Stop, Drop and Roll. We were guests to San Diego’s Fire Rescue Department, yet none of us seemed to remember that simple lesson we learned from fire fighters as children. Instinctively, everyone turned on their computer immediately and acted as we usually do under normal situations. Disasters are anything but normal and we quickly learned that it would take some time and plenty of effort from the communications experts to restore connectivity. We all had to stop (trying to connect to the internet), drop (our laptops) and roll out of our designated areas until communications were restored. This forced us to spend time discussing concepts that were later put to good use.
   
5. Leave something behind. Dr. Eric reiterated this to all at the daily briefings – “leave something behind” for the San Diego Fire Dept. This surely applies to everyday life and many circumstances.
   
6. Debrief, debrief, debrief. A cardinal rule for field teams during disasters, this means, let your superior know what you’ve done, call home to let others know you’re OK and in general, share what you’ve learned with others.
   
7. Think outside the box. Some boxes include our profession, our country, our language and our beliefs. Much was discussed about how our behavior can have a negative effect on populations we are trying to help. Much effort is required in order to understand the true needs of others.
   
8. Value and maintain relationships. The SA community has created significant bonds between many of its participants. I was very fortunate to spend some time with my friends Sanjana and Rob, to get reacquainted with many others with whom we’ve worked with and develop new ones - very rewarding.
   
9. Get involved. Many of the participants are amazing people who continue to actively engage in activities that make a difference in other people’s lives, in addition to their daily professional and personal responsibilities. Much to learn from many of the folks there.
   
10. Take a moment to thank others. A big thank you Dr. Rasmussen and all the participants and observers of Strong Angel 3.