Stanfords: The Future of Mapping

[MikeB]

Stanfords Maps held "The Future of Mapping" today at their London store in Covent Garden. This was a hands on event with live demonstrations of the Anquet Maps products and also there was a sales assistant seen lurking outside the store with a TomTom Go in hand.

If you missed this event then you can see the same demos in the Stanfords Bristol store on December the 4th, or the Manchester Stanfords on the 11th. Attendees will be able to get a 20% discount on Anquet CDs and there will be some other offers too.

Contact Stanfords on 0117 927 7772 (Bristol) or 0161 831 0251 (Manchester) for more details, or check out the website at www.stanfords.co.uk.



As can be seen from the above picture and the one below it was a well attended event with two representives from Anquet demonstrating the features of the latest Anquet Products.

It is quite amazing to see the look on the faces of people who have only seen paper maps when they come face to face with a PC and PDA showing how simple it is to create routes and waypoints and then view them at different scales, in 3D and from a variety of angles. Then to be told that they can track thier position in real time by connecting a GPS, well jaws needed to be picked off the floor.



This visit to Stanfords was interesting as I met Peter Johnson who heads up the Digital Mapping section hidden in the basement. Peter was keen to show me around his realm, one of the things he showed me was new Ordnance Survey Select service. This allows you to create custom OS maps centered on a position of your choice. The picture below shows the selection of standard OS maps the Stanfords sell, but what happens if the area you are interested in is right on the border of the map? Do you buy two maps then have to flip between them as you move around?

Not any more! OS Select lets you decide on the scale and area of your map.



Once the map detail has been decided the actual data is downloaded from a dedicated network feed and the image is sent to one of two massive inkjet printers (shown beloe). The printing of the map takes about 5 minutes and produces a result as good as a standard printed map, but this one is now customised to your exact needs.



Apart from the Anquet and OS products Stanfords also sell Memory-Map, and stock a limited amount of continental and American digital mapping.

All in all this was a good day out and shows that GPS is now breaking into the areas of traditional mapping. It has taken a long time to reach this stage, but when major map dealers start gearing up for digital mapping and GPS then we are really starting to take off.
_________________
Mike Barrett
Editor, PocketGPSWorld.com

[richard2004]

It might be worth pointing out that there was a 1-25000 map of East
&West Sussex available which covered the whole of the South Downs Way.

I bought it and very good it is too.

Richard
_________________
Richard

We see you’re using an ad-blocker. We’re fine with that and won’t stop you visiting the site.
Have you considered making a donation towards website running costs?.
Or you could disable your ad-blocker for this site. We think you’ll find our adverts are not overbearing!