Anyone found out how to battle monsters? Is this just part of the joke or is there a way to actually do it? :-)

The official Google Lat Long blog: "Get detailed directions to avoid dangerous paths, and battle your way through a world of powerful monsters and mystic treasures."

Thanks! I've been looking for this for a while! See http://slashgeo.org/2011/06/07/Whats-best-iOS-App-contributing-OpenStreetMap

From the article: "To enable all that, Google introduced a new standard in 2011 called GTFS-realtime. It builds on GTFS, but is a different animal, since it includes new feed types for trip updates, service alerts, and vehicle positions, as well as provisions for constantly refreshing this data throughout the day."

So the article does state that it's also for vehicle positions. I haven't checked if the article is right or not though.

The only thing I'd add to your entry, is asking our fellow canadians to tell their friends, family, everyone in fact, to send such an email by spreading the word on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, or any other means you have. Hey, we're in a connected world now, let's show them that we're able to use those connections for a meaning!

Siri doesn't do translations, it's more of an advanced voice recognition tool. Am I wrong? This would mean that at the moment, Apple's Siri and Google Translation would have two different strengths; Siri: usable natural language voice recognition (at least that's how they sell it) and Google Tranlation, well, multi-language translations.

Two truly open initiatives offering back the crowdsourced data to everyone (it doesn't seem to be the case with OpenSignalMaps): OpenCellID.org and openBmap.org.

Am I the first one to point to the full list of price changes?

And also interesting (at least for some) is Apple will allow business to sell custom apps to other businesses in volume directly.

I tend to believe it is easier for Apple to change their license and allow GPL software in the app store than having VLC move away from the GPL.

Despite the licenses compatibility challenges, you can tell Apple you want the 'VLC Media Player' app back in the app store. Color me utopic, but that's trying to be part of the solution.

I invite friends, and my friends know my name. I don't see the problem at all.

Actually, when I tried Game Center some time ago, the fact that I did not know who was "Weird Username Here" who accepted my invitation was kind of awkward. As much as usernames are cool, I also want to know which username is associated to which friend.

This change sounds like a improvement to me.

Okay, that's a bit off-topic, but not that much when we discuss virtual globes and the likes. Here's a dismissed submission last week that I think worthy of sharing: "It's a dream come true. After MapQuest and Yahoo actively supporting the Wikipedia-like map initiative OpenStreetMap.org. Microsoft announced that they hired OpenStreetMap's founder Steve Coast for their Bing Maps team. But there's more, they committed providing orthorectified aerial imagery and more to the project. From the official announcement: "Continuously innovating and improving our map data is a top priority and a massive undertaking at Bing. That's why we're excited to announce a new initiative to work with the OpenStreetMap project, a community of more than 320,000 people who have built high quality maps for every country on earth. Microsoft is providing access to our Bing Aerial Imagery for use in the OpenStreetMap project, and we have hired industry veteran Steve Coast to lead this effort. [...] As a first step in this engagement, we plan to enable access to Bing's global orthorectified aerial imagery, as a backdrop of OSM editors. Also, Microsoft is working on new tools to better enable contributions to OSM." Microsoft already added the OpenStreetMap layer to Bing Maps last August."

Clearly, this means to me that open data has won that round and that Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ are in deeper trouble today than a few months ago.

Now to go back to Google, at the moment, but it could change anytime, they're going on a different road away from OpenStreetMap with their Google Map Maker.