Zimbabwe election SMS and other TXT Messages

This weekend President Mugabe is doing everything he can to ensure that he is once again re-elected and it seems that while he is giving cars and houses to doctors along with other good will gestures, the radio stations are being heavily censored. For example, according to Zimbabwe Independant Weekly, last night, all ZBC radio and TV stations stopped normal programming to provide live coverage of Zanu PF’s election manifesto launch that lasted for four hours. Of course the others got no coverage.

Radio stations like SW Radio Africa tried to break through and provide independant coverage by Short Wav Radio and apparently this technology is also being jammed (purportedly and ironically by Chinese technology) so they and other stations are now using SMS technology to bring news headlines to those who want to balance the information flow.

SMS was conceived in the 1980’s primarily as a means to advise people that they had a voice message or had missed a call. The first deployments were in 1993 in Los Angeles, Norway and UK and by 1995 the average usage per GSM subscriber was 0.4 per month!

Today SMS is a way of life and used in so many different ways. Just for me in recent times I have used SMS to comunicate with business clients to confirm appointments and to communicate with coleagues. I have paid for car parking via SMS and this morning sent a woke up message to my daughter in Australia.

I have donated to many charities via SMS, voted for performers on TV and entered competitions by sending an instruction to a Short Code.

On TXT Tunes you can pay to buy and download my songs using SMS.

SMS has had a phenomenal impact on the written language as teenagers created shortcuts in an effort to fit more information into the 160 character messages. Sum adults cn find dis hard to read, but u r not r u? In business I have found this difficult finding young staff who can write a business letter and have found some CV’s on my desk with wrting that automatically precludes potentially very intelligent people from working with me.

In recent times I have been working with projects that allow people to send a SMS request to a GPS locating device, which in turn sends an SMS with spatial co-ordinates to our reverse geocoder that then facilitates sending the nearest street address to the originator again as an SMS message. A next step to this is emergency locator technology for elderly or sick people, where they can send an SMS with the calculated nearest street address to an authority or service if they are in trouble. Car navigation systems will soon be able to do the same when a car has an accident. In New Zealand it is not uncommon for someone to drive down a bank on a winters night and not be able to tell people on their phone where they are. Imagine a system where of airbags are deployed in a car, the bluetooth connection to the driver’s mobile phone automatically sends an SMS with their exact location to the breakdown service.

Watch this space!

Arthur C Clarke RIP

It’s almost as if you think that some people will live for ever, but at 90 years of age Arthur C Clarke has had a pretty good innings, but it is still very sad to hear of his passing today. I’ve written before of the importance of Science Fiction as a predictor of future technology and behaviour and Clarke is no exception.

As both a scientist and a writer of great and thoughtfull fiction, he has left a legacy of some importance as it is likely that many inventors and developers have been influenced by his stories. of course he did also write a considerable amount of non-fiction, but that wasn’t really my interest.

It is said that although he didn’t conceive the concept of geosynchronous satellites, he certainly propogated it around the end of World War ll, when he served in the Royal Airforce as a radar specialist. In honor of his writing and ideas about stallites which would follow the rotation of the Earth so that they stayed above the same spot for 24 hours a day, the International Astronomical Union named this orbit as a ‘Clarke Orbit’.

In my working world this is part of the legacy that we now enjoy in our GPS products, but also the Satellite TV I watch most days of the week, that gives me access to news, sport and entertainment from around the world in near real time.

He also gave us a lot to think about in 2001 A Space Oddysey which is still one of my favorite movies of all time, when the computer on his space ship Hal 9,000 was given artifical intelligence and thought of itself as a living being with emotions and which didn’t bow to the concepts such as Asimov’s 3 Law’s of Robotics that said that no Robot could ever hurt a human being, even if told to by one. I guess that was a little over the top, given that part of many human beings desires are to hurt and kill other human beings. Nevertheless I have no doubt that scientists developing artifical intelligence from nanobots to military jets will have cut their teeth on some of Clarke’s books.

Clarke will not be forgotten, he has left a legacy in science and techology, in film, in books and has had an impact on the world as we know it. Thanks for the ride Arthur:)

It’s almost Easter – Does anyone even remember who Brian was?

On Sunday I was driving home from Whangarei on a nice sunny afternoon when all of a sudden about 2 km before Puhoi, the traffic just stopped. There didn’t seem to be any reason, we just suddenly ended up in a line of cars that turned out to stretch for about 7 or 8km. I suspect that many of them were people returning from their holiday home where they had been preparing for the Easter weekend which is coming at the end of this week of course. On the way North on Saturday I had been driving behind a steady stream of cars towing boats and caravans, although ironically the traffic flowed pretty well.

It made me think about Easter, because the long weekends heading out of Auckland are diabolical for traffic. Pretty much every Easter half a million Aucklanders try to escape the hustle and bustle and head North and South. A third go north and create chaos, another third head for the famous Coromandel where they stop in a huge line at the notorious one way bridge in Kopu and if they are lucky, might get a free Red Bull for their trouble. The others head further South along State Highway One which is less of a problem until they meet the Coromandel people coming back on Easter Monday.

One thing I really like about Kiwi’s is that they are polite and know how to queue and are strong supporters of fair play. Just about anywhere in NZ, people will find the end of a queue and stand in line and wait their turn, unlike many other countries I have been where it is survival of the fittest. Unfortunately their are exceptions and heading south that exception always happens just south of Waiwera, famous for its hot pools. You see, there is a passing lane. Everyone knows when the traffic is travelling at 5km per hour, that there realyl isn’t any point in using the passing lane, because it just unfairly pushes people backwards who have waited patiently in the line of pollution spewing diesels and other assorted vehicles. But there is always someone who has to be different. On Sunday it was a SUV with the number plate TMAG who decided, “Here’s an opportunity, I’m going to race past those suckers and move ahead a good 40 car lengths”. So he did and now it wasn’t just the car radiators that were boiling, but also the people who had been sitting in their cars in the end of summer heat. Hey how about yet another sin, thau shalt not begat your fellow motorist’s position in the traffic jam.

And I got to thinking (I know you don’t start a sentance with a conjunction, but this is my blog ok? lol), that guy must be a pretty miserable person. Easter’s coming, doesn’t he remember Brian? Brian Cohen was put on the cross at Christmas in Judea in 33AD when he was mistaken for the Messiah and really, for many of us life hasn’t been the same since. Even though he wasn’t the Messiah, he really tought us something about good spirit and making the most of your lot. He brought us that famous hymn ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life‘, known by some as The Song Jesus Whistles.

Now I don’t know if Jesus ever whistled, I don’t recall ever reading about him doing such a thing, but I’m sure there is relevance in the attitude that no matter how bad things get, there are aways better times ahead. I took that in as Trag, sorry TMAG raced up the empty passing lane on Sunday and other than flipping him the bird, I resisted the impulse to race after him and tell him what I thought. He got the message anyway when further up the road noone wanted to let him back in the line.

I won’t be joining the mass exodus on Good Friday. I’ll sleep in and do some chores around the house and relax while I’m looking on the bright side of life and on Saturday I’ll check out the Herald and read about and see photos of the 20km line of frazzled drivers waiting to cross the Kopu Bridge on their way to a relaxing long weekend.

Are you serious about being carbon friendly?

Are you serious about your business being carbon friendly? Are you really making a difference or are you paying lip service to the concept. Do you have company vehicles? What can you do to reduce their carbon footprint? What are you doing about it? Here are some thoughts from a New Zealand perspective (where I have shown URL’s you will have similar services in your own country):

1.       In order to measure improvement, you need a baseline. Let’s start by measuring how many km you travel per month. Measure this over a year because there are always fluctuations. In addition to measuring km travelled, measure fuel consumption, i.e. km per litre of fuel. If you use fuel cards, you probably already have this information in your monthly reports. If you don’t maybe you should, fuel cards usually also offer discounts.

1.  Get your vehicles regularly serviced and tuned up. It’s easy to see the ones that aren’t, by the smoke and soot they trail behind them and especially trucks and buses that have huge black patches covering someone’s expensive advertising material.
2. Car pool. How often do you and your colleagues go to the same event in separate cars when you could have shared?
3. Drive by the most efficient route. There are many way to do this. If you have a car navigation system, you can usually select the fastest or the shortest route.  Note that the fastest route will usually have fewer stops such as intersection controls. You use far more fuel stopping and starting your car than you do when cruising. If you don’t have a car navigation system such as Navman or TomTom, the most reliable is to use a quality web site that offers driving directions such as www.aamaps.co.nz or www.wises.co.nz.
   
4. If you have multiple locations to visit, try to plan the most efficient route to visit all of them. One option for this is to use a site such as www.aamaps.co.nz that not only lets you create via points for your trip, it also allows you to re-order them to create a more efficient sequence.
5. When you are travelling to visit a client, see if there are other clients or prospects you can visit in their vicinity to save future trips. In the freight industry everyone knows that you should always try to find another load for the return trip.
6. If you have a vehicle doing multiple deliveries, using Route Optimisation you can establish the most efficient order to do them in. A furniture delivery truck using Route2Go from GeoSmart, could not only reduce travel distance, but also load the truck in the correct order to minimise the drivers workload. If you have multiple trucks, you can set a range of rules that decide which trucks do which jobs in which order and eliminate guesswork.
7. Using a Fleet Management system, fleet operators can view the location of their vehicles and ensure that the closest vehicle gets the job. Fleet Management solutions also monitor driver behaviour such as ‘clutch riding’ and excessive acceleration to assist in driver training.
8.  Trip planning on websites such as Wises and AA Maps can also assist with things like petrol and lunch stops, making sure they fit into the route rather than having to drive out of your way when the time comes. The same applies to finding a convenient car park rather than driving around in circles around your destination.

Simple proactive measures can have a huge impact on your carbon footprint and consequently on your profitability.  Vehicle service costs will be reduced along with the inconvenience of not having the vehicles on the road with reduced maintenance costs. Fuel costs will reduce and you will be able to fit more business into the same amount of time thereby increasing productivity. You will also earn the right to announce to the business world that you are genuinely playing your part in reducing your company’s carbon footprint.

What is it about Facebook?

It amazes me how many people have said to me “I don’t get it” and “What is Facebook?”  Next thing I know I am receiving notifications and whether they get it or not, they are using it. In fact people are spending a fair amount of time every day using it. In December and January ‘Active Users’ exceded 8 million and page views were over 18 Billion in one month! No wonder Microsoft want in!

One thing that continually amazes me and many of the people that I talk to is that unlike many other social netowrking applications, people typically use their own names and provide incredibly detailed information about themselves that they wouldn’t dream of doing on other sites. They complete quizes and compare information with their friends such as their personal goals; would you ever, have you ever, personality tests, what music you listen to and much more. In effect giving people the ability to find out perhaps more about you than you know about yourself.

One thing that many people are still doing is collecting loads of friends like they do on sites where they might be a little more cautious. Perhaps as they play games and talk to people they are interested in or find attractive, suddnely they are laying their souls bare to total strangers.

Obviously this becomes hugely popular and various brands are starting to use Facebook as a way of marketing to and interacting with customers, for example when I search for Facebook applications I find a couple for BMW, 1 for Coca Cola, 37 for Microsoft, one for LG, 162 applications around Google, 12 for Nokia and the list goes on. I’m not making any judgements here, I love the idea of genuine personalised marketing. If companies can figure out how to market products and services that I am genuinely interested in, I am all for it and Facebook applications as marketing data acquisition tools make a lot of sense.

Many years ago I visited Arthur Anderson in Chicago and saw a demonstration of a retail system which kept images and vital statistics of customers. The concept was being able to send an email saying “Luigi, our latest summer fashion shirts are in and here are some pictures of what YOU would like like in your colours.” My future vision for that is that they will send that message with the image in a video so I can see a panorama on my mobile phone, only when I am in vicinity of the store and with an electronic coupon. The issues here are more about trust, but I’m getting into mobile marketing again and digressing as I am wont to do.

The thing I love about Facebook is that they have created an evolutionary product that keeps changing as more and more people add content and concept. You can look in the search area almost as you would in Google. Thinking about things I am interested in, I entered ’song competition’ and found 19 events. I entered Texas Holdem and found 8 applications, more than 500 events and much more. If you are more of a golfing person, there are 47 facebook applicatins and countless events, the list goes on: politics – 95 applications, religion 25 applications, philosophy 25 applications, 14 applications for theatre and well I can go on indefinitely because while I write this blog, more applications are  being posted.

Then of course there are interest groups, discussion groups, activity groups, fan groups and being silly I even got more then 700 results doing a search under groupies!

I’m starting to get a picture of how much time this amazing environment can take up, but just as interesting how much, used wisely, Facebook could empower and entertain you. It can open doors and lead to all sorts of opportunities. Most of all, it is different. Most social networks are focussed around an activity or group, like photography, music, dating. Facebook is multi faceted and multi dimensional mirroring most people and having an endless array of new things to experience.

I’m still not sure that I can give an elevator pitch of what Facebook is.  I guess it can be whatever you want it to be and more. The question is what is it to you and what are other sites going to do to compete?

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course http://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

7 Deadly Sins, but wait there’s more! 7 new Sins!

The NZ Herald had an interesting front page story this morning. The Headling went 14 Deadly Sins – we haven’t a prayer. The interesting thing was that when I went to link it for you, I couldn’t find it on their digital section. I thought they were hiding and decided it shouldn’t be on their net page in case they had too many complaints or perhaps a lightning bolt or some other form of devine pestilence. The interesting thing was that they did have a story about catholic priests who steal other people’s sermons off the Internet.

Anyway, did you know that The 7 Deadly Sins as we know them were drawn up by Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th century. I guess that gives Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti who is a close friend of Pope Benedict XVI the right to come up with 7 more Deadly Sins. I wonder if they will be going into the next bible version. His 7 additional Deadly Sins are:

• Genetic modification
• Carrying out experiments on humans
• Polluting the environment
• Causing social injustice
• Causing poverty
• Becoming obscenely wealthy
• Taking Drugs

Now I don’t want to be irreverent here, but you have to wonder about this. I don’t know if he made the list exactly like this, or whether it has been abbreviated by the media, but here are some thoughts:

GM. We have been doing this for years. At what point is it a bad thing. For example we have been growing wilt resistant trees for many years and a very large percentage of our crops have minor genetic modifications. I suspect that the survival of some parts of the world will depend on GM.

Experiments on humans. If you are talking Hitler style, then I am in total agreement, but if you are talking about lifesaving drugs, body implants and even my contact lenses after they have tried everything else, hey its improved my standard of living.

Polluting the environment. Well yes, I don’t have a problem with that, but where do you draw the line. Will you suffer “eternal death” because you tossed a cigarette butt out of your window? Don’t get me wrong I hate it when people throw things out of their car windows and I’m forever picking up other people’s McDonalds wrappers from my front lawn, but who decides where you draw the line?

Causing social injustice. Again no problem in principle, but does the Vatican draw the line for us?

Causing poverty. Who causes poverty? Are the droughts in Africa man made? Do I cause poverty if I unknowingly buy cheap manufactured product where the workers are underpaid and poorly treated? If I don’t donate to charities for the poor, am I causing their environment?

Becoming obscenely wealthy. I’ll bet Bill Gates is pleased that he is no longer the wealthiest man on the planet! At what line are the wealthy obscenely wealthy. Now hang on, what about the Vatican, what could they do to help the situation with their riches?

Taking Drugs. I’m not even going to get into that one. Let’s start with the holy wine, isn’t alcohol a mind altering substance that the Vatican not only condones but in certain situations requires. Don’t they have ‘holy vineyards’?

So the final point? After all this sinning, there is always absolution. All you need to do is go to confession, confess your sins and beg forgiveness before you die and you will be able to happily go on your way.

Amen.

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course http://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

Carbon Tax on petrol, yet another great idea?

The New Zealand Government has once again raised the prospect of a Carbon Tax on Petrol, rated as 7 cents in the litre. The concept I gues is based on a user pays scenario, so the more you drive, the more carbon you burn. Given that in most parts of New Zealand our public transport systems are pretty substandard, it looks like most of us will pay the price.

They have talked for a long time about measuring exhaust emissions and setting levels below which you can’t pass your Warrant of Fitness tests, but that still hasn’t come in. Of course that doesn’t generate significant revenue and the NZ Government has just announced a significant budget deficit, not that these 2 things are in any way related. I’ve also noticed that many of the ‘greenies’ drive diesel cars that blow black smoke and are often covered with soot, as are many of the buses I follow on the motorways. I suspect that the black soot on the bus I saw recently covering an advertisement on the back of a bus which said “we are drivers too” is a carbon waste product.

Currently, according to Caltex NZ, 41.6% of the price we pay for petrol in NZ is tax, so why not just round it up to an even 50%? The story was good though and I was impressed with Caltex’s excellent suggestions on how to use less fuel, some of them are very good. I suspect though that most people will continue their normal lifestyle. It’s like the old story of putting a frog in a pot of warm water and bringing it to boil slowly. We still love our big cars and we want to enjoy the great outdoors which is why many of us love in New Zealand.

The thing that amazes me is that we are still so slow with introducing alternative fuel engines. Toyota and Honda have done very well with Hybrid engines and they can’t seem to get enough to meet demand. Maybe the government should do something to encourage these vehicles and lower the import taxes on them. It’s yet another example of why the things that are good for you cost so much more. Give businesses in the cities an incetive to buy Smart Cars, but of course we have a problem with renewable energy as well, especially after a long dry summer. But wait, what about solar power? This is another tangent, but I read a couple of years ago about people in the USA getting major rebates for installing solar energy in their homes, plus the ability to sell their surplus power into the grid. We have certainly had more than enough sun this year, well actually I wouldn’t mind if it lasted all year round, but the point is we aren’t harnessing it and we aren’t offering people an incentive to help with the cost of making it happen.

So, we continue to encourage the use of fossil fuels (yes I know we are starting to include small amounts of biofuel into the mix, but all that will do at this stage is allow the oil to last a little longer. We know oil is a finite resource and once we have run out and the Middle East has caved in, what then? My prediction based on current consumption is that fuel will become incredibally scarce, travel and tourism will become incredibly expensive and this could have a disastrous effect on economies like ours.

So lets see what happens. Petrol prices go up because of oil scarcity, whether through resource depletion or through wars and terrorism. Oil prices also go up because of carbon taxes as oil companies have to buy carbon credits to meet their obligations. Taxes go up because they are based on a percentage of the price, whether through excise, GST, carbon, road user and others. The cost of living goes up because this impacts on everything we do, all goods and services involve transport. Domestic tourism and entertainment will suffer as people decide it costs to much to go anywhere. We all become a nation of obese couch potatoes because it’s cheaper to sit at home to watch sport or cable TV instead of going out and getting some exercise.

One day it will be too prohibitive to go anywhere except for special occassions and we will we end up living virtual lives, never leaving our homes at all.

Actually I wouldn’t mind the carbon tax if it was used on R & D for alteratives, for incentives for people to develop and commercialise alternative fuels and engines to run on them. The whole concept of carbon taxes seems to be punitive instead of constructive. What happened to Kiwi innovation? We’re still patting ourselves on the backs for inventing number 8 fencing wire, Hamilton jets and bungee jumping. Let’s pay people for coming up with new renewable energy resources instead of punishing people for using the only resources they have available to them, there’s a novel idea? There might even be international carbon credits in it.

Second Time Around

Last night one of my girls was on a dating site looking for a possible partner for one of my friends who’s husband died after playing a game of football. He was one of the good guys who died young.

So she is one of a huge number of people who is looking for love, 2nd time around. Most people have different reasons, the most common being a marriage break up. On this particular site there were over 10,000 men online looking for ……….. well various things I guess, but ultimately for a new ‘life partner’. I put that in inverted comma’s because it is no longer the norm for people to have one life partner even though most of us contend that we are monogamous, I think it has come to mean one partner at a time.

In my youth it was already becoming commonplace for marriages to break up and for people to start again and of course there are the elderly where typically the woman has a much longer life expectancy than the man, so naturally is going to want some new male companionship in her dotage.

Back in the day when life was simple, you stayed on the farm or at your job for 40 years and earned a gold watch, life was more about survival and getting enough money to be comfortable. The pace of the world was relatively slow and people were comfortable with that. Relationships were ‘until death do us part’.

Today life is fast, the world has grown smaller and there are opportunities to taste and try many things. Our standard of living is far higher leaving us comparatively with greater disposable incomes, and the world is our oyster. This opens us up to many more temptations and we go through many cycles of life. We move to new towns, cities or countries, we experience new cultures, we have many jobs, our social groups expand and for a much larger percentage of people, relationships fade away. They die for lots of reasons, but I think the fast pace of life in the 20th and 21st centuries is a major factor. As they say, change is the only constant.

Last year, one of the schools I went to, Auckland Alternative School had a school reunion. One of my old school mates who now lives in Australia was asking if his old girlfriend was coming and although he is in a relationship, that was the factor that would determine whether he was going to come, no one knew what had happened to her and neither of them came. The reunion was advertised on Old Friends which is also a site well known for people looking to find the old school girl or boyfriend.

Of those that did attend the reunion, only a few of us were still in long time relationships, most had split up and were single again or in new relationships. Whilst I have been in a long term relationship, married for many years, I had previously come from a 7 year relationship and I am my wife’s second husband. So I fit the mold as well.

Anyway, next month I am attending Song Summit Sydney S3 which is the first event of its kind for song writers in Australasia. I have applied to perform to a panel of songwriters, publishers, managers, broadcasters, producers and A & R professionals, which the blurb says is ‘not for the faint hearted’. Like American Idol in a way, but hopefully more constructive.

I’ll be performing my new song Old Flame, which to bring this blog to it’s conclusion was motivated by seeing my old school mate and so many other people, looking for that old girl or boyfriend that they lost track of, that could have been ‘the one’. When I look at websites like Old Friends and track the number of people who want a 2nd chance, I am amazed at how many there are. I hope my song goes down well and that they like it’s construction, because I think it is very topical and many will relate to it, which in my book is a key criteria for a good song.

If you’d like to hear it, check it out on my MySpace page and let me know what you think.

GPS Tracking and Navigation for Elderly People

The other day I read about a new invention, which is a GPS enabled walker for elderly patients. Apparently this is a student research product and being tested in Nursing Centres. It uses Wi-Fi communication and helps guide people around a complex such as a hospital or retirement centre. My first reaction was that this was a joke, but the more I think about this navigation for zimmer frames, the more it makes me think about solutions we will see soon.

Firstly, people do get lost in hospitals and large complexes, and the people most likely to lose their way will be elderly patients, perhaps with dementia or simply struggling with stress, pain or under influence of medication that makes them a little dopey and disoriented. If they are in a wheelchair or using some other aid, a mapping or navigation device could well be useful. Hospitals will in future have WiFi networks for their and this could be a device that is supported by it.

I often hear stories about elderly people with dementia getting lost when they go for walks and understand this is quite common. If they remember that they do live in a village or rest home and have a navigation device, it could guide them safely back home.

The other side is far more likely in the near future and that is tracking of people. I had a discussion today with someone from a New Zealand hospital about tracking of staff who visit mental health patients in their homes and the value of being able to locate them if they haven’t checked in within a pre-aranged time. Small pocket GPS tracking devices with GPRS connectivity already exist commercially and some of them also have ‘panic buttons’ that send an urgent alert together with the current GPS co-ordinates. These are typically still quite expensive, i.e. over $500 but with volume the prices will come down.

St Johns and other organisations have solutions such as LifeLink which is a great solution for in and around the home, but what happens when people go further from home. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a solution that would allow you to locate your elderly or ill relative if they don’t return from shopping or a quiet walk. What if they just want to walk a few houses down the road to visit a friend? I would have gladly paid a rental for a service like that for my late grandmother who had a fall one evening and wasn’t found until the following day with a broken hip.

Although it’s not aimed at  elderly people, you will soon find walking directions on portable navigation devices (PND’s). You will be able to download a map that tells you where to park your car and then how to find your way around shopping malls, hospitals and unversity campuses, through parks and arcades. Maps of this nature will be commerically available within the next 12 months. They will also be available on map web sites in the very near future.

Most countries will also very soon have sophisticated navigation software and maps available to run on mobile phones, which will be as impressive as the portable Navigation Devices that are so popular today. Many phones have GPS built in and Bluetooth GPS Receivers abound for much less than $50.

It’s not a big stretch to see software being added that allow your location to be sent to other people on demand (with your permission of course). This isn’t Sci-Fi I’m talking about, it’s 2008 technology.

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course http://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

Carlos Santana Live Your Light Auckland 2008

Carlos Santana graced Auckland last night with an amazing concert at the Vector Arena last night. Starting with Jingo and ending with favourites such as Black Magic Woman, the man who is on a crusade for world peace showed that te decades have not slowed him down.

While most people probably didn’t get to hear the old favourites they were hoping for Carlos and an outstanding band of drummers, percussionists, brass, keys and bass got an Auckland crowd onto their feet and showed that he still has the magic. This isn’t a man living off his old songs, this is a musician, a master craftsman who constantly reinvents himself while still paying homage to his roots.

He and his band played for a solid 2 1/2 hours which for most of us could have happily extended for another hour or more. I can’t remember the names of his band, but would go and see any of them on their own. Carlos is not afraid of being outshone by his musicians, rather he brings the best he can find and gives them all a chance to show their chops.

The only negative is that the Vector Arena still hasn’t got their sound sorted. Sitting upstairs with one ear facing the speakers and the other ear getting the echo it was probably far more noticable than for the people sittingdownstairs facing the stage. Every beat started in the ear facing the speakers and then came back to the other one. This would have been novel once in one of the awesome drum solo’s, but after a while it got a bit tiring to a musician who likes to hear exactly what is happening. The sound people never got the vocal levels right either and it was often difficult to hear the lyrics and I don’t think they did the singers justice. Of course in general a Santana fan doesn’t go to hear vocals butwhat we heard sounded like they could have been very good.

Other than that, I now have a new Santana concert to remember and even more admiration for a man who not only keeps growing musically and spiritually, but seems true to his convictions and for all that he has achieved, remains a humble man.

A final note, Blue King Brown from Australia who were the supporting act couldn’t have been better for the job. Their music was authentic but in a similar vein and they warmed up the crowd superbly. I’ll be checking out their MySpace Page and looking out for an album. I’ll be watching out for their next visit here.