Blogfade and Android Mobile

First of all I must apologise for the Blogfade. Over the last few weeks I’ve bought a new house and sold my own one which has caused a lot of stress and taken a lot of my time. Assuming that my sale goes through tomorrow, I wil be moving this weekend and life will get back to normal.

I’ve been busy on a lot of projects lately, one of which has been working on developing channels for GeoVector’s World Surfer product.

Worldsurfer is a location based application that runs on iPhone 3GS and Android mobiles which incorporate both GPS and Compass, which opens up a whole new world of possibilities.I have to say that even though the G1 I’m using currently is 1st generation Android, the combination of GPS and Compass is remarkably accurate. I suspect it is also using cell tower triangulation. It has my street address exactly correct even though I am inside my lounge, whereas my old phone using just Vodafone cell towers had my kitchen in one suburb and my lounge in another and I assure you my house is not that big.

The concept for this solution is that it provides for Location Based ‘Channels’ which allow you to search for Points of Interest based on your present location. A Channel is typically a category of POI (Points of Interest).

On the G1 that I am using at the moment I have the New Zealand channels that are currently available here. The first is GeoSmart, for whom I am the Sales & Marketing Manager.

GeoSmart is the company providing API’s, web services and web maps behind many leading web sites in NZ and services in many other countries. The best known site is AA Maps, which also now features real time traffic covering all of New Zealand. The GeoSmart Channel on Worldsurfer for NZ includes a nationwide set of categories and subcategories currently covering Accomodation,  Banks and ATM’s, Entertainment, Parks and Gardens, Pubs Taverns and Bars, Restaurants, Takeaway Food and Public Toilets.

You can set it to only look in a band in the direction you are pointing your phone or in a 360 degree radius from your current location and it will locate POI up to 5 miles / 8km away. So in effect you can look for a Japanese Restaurant in the direction you are currently travelling. When you select one, the compass will point you in the direction of that venue and show a running distance calculation as you travel towards it.

You then have the option to call them for a reservation with one touch of the screen, get turn by turn directions and a map to guide you, mark the location for future reference, check Flickr, YouTube or Google for more information about the location.

World Surfer is as it sounds an international product and will automatically open the options available for the country you are in. Some are subscription channels whilst others are available free of charge.

Other channels available in New Zealand currently are Google, Zenbu, Wikipedia (which looks for information by location, based on pointing your mobile), Starbucks, and Vodafone Stores. I am currently working on developing many more channels for NZ. There are other exciting projects on the way, but if I tell you what they are, I’d be in big trouble, so watch this space.

As a footnote, I’ve said before that I would like to create an application called Where’s My Car, because everyone has a story of not being able to remember where they parked their car. I often see people in shopping mall car parks, at rugby matches and other spots wandering up and down trying to figure out where their cars are. When I got this Android phone (on loan) I found an application called CarDar Light.

This application lets you ‘mark’ the location of your car as you park it and will then guide you, even inside a car park, to your car. You can enter the level number or colour of the floor as an assist, but after that you will never lose your car again.

For a demonstration of WorldSurfer check out the YouTube video below:

Another step of the future which pretty much dates back to the original Star Trek TV programmes has become not only reality, but is becoming mainstream. Now to get the company to buy me that iPhone 3GS!

eLearning, So What’s New?

This morning when I read the Herald, there was a story in a supplement on Education about eLearning. The supplement is obviously focussed on students heading for Uni for the first time and Abcd – e – learning was well written and researched, and it was a supplement, but I was also thinking, that it was ironic that it was presented as if it is something new. It was interesting that while I couldn’t find a link on the Herald’s website, I guess because it was a commercial supplement, I did find a story about using podcasting (which was key to this morning’s story) written in July last year called Pupils book place in world with podcasting, by Martha McKenzie-Minifie.

The story was largely about universities including MIT, Berkeley UC and Yale posting lectures as podcasts on iTunes U. It was about the benefits of students being able to listen to podcasts and make sure they don’t miss anything.

This was interesting timing because I have been having discussions with Massey University about eLearning for sometime and last month launched the Location Innovation Awards, which runs until February 16th 2009. I was considering adding eLearning to one of the categories, but given that the Awards are in fact a learning experience and the categories of Location Based Games, Social Networking, Proximity Based Marketing and widgets for AA Maps all provide scope not only for learning, but offer the opportunity for supporting education that is location based. For example a location based game music elearning could involve a treasure hunt in a community based around learning about the history of the area, which could be cultural, historical, ecological, environmental and so on.

In a recent blog I wrote about Music eLearning on the net and made reference to Gordon Dryden’s new book, Unlimited – The New Learning Revolution (which is totally about eLearning) which he told me will be on the retail shelves within a week or so. I feel I relate well to Gordon because I was also frustrated and bored with school as a teenager.

The problem for me was that I wanted to be a songwriter and musician and my parents sent me to a school where the major subject was rugby and music was a 40 minute session 3 times a month or so. By the time I got to 5th form I was bored to tears with subjects that I felt (and still feel) were irrelevant (although I guess there were a couple of exceptions, being French and Latin which have both served me well.

I didn’t pay much attention in class, was bored, found other ways to amuse myself. At the end of the year come exam time, I used a form of eLearning. I got all my school notes, typed them up on a typewriter, read them out loud into a tape recorder and played them back to myself while listening to Led Zeppelin in the background. Now I was aware already that Baroch music is far more conducent to learning, because it has a tempo that your brain matches into a state which is good for absorbing information. However, it wasn’t cool and this still worked and I did pass my exams, except for Geography which is ironic given that I speak a number of languages and have travelled aorund the world several times, it was just hard to record maps:)

I have been using audio tapes for many years to enhance my learning. I recorded radio shows and learned about cosmic string theory, and also bought and used Psychology tapes to learn about NLP, negotiation and other skills.

This morning in the shower I was learning about SPIME, which is very pertinent to my current focus of Location Based Services. I learned about it from a podcast interview with David Orban on the podcast of The Future and You by Stephen Euin Cobb. “A Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities.”

This technology is very relevant to my work in car navigation and future driving safety. Imagine if every car had SPIME technology and independant of any internet or cellular telecommunication technology, cars could communicate with each other, ensuring safe driving in terms of car proximity to each other, safe following speed and distance and the ability to react to an emergancy. For example, if the car in front of you engages its ABS and brakes suddenly. A SPIME technology could potentially tell your car which is following it, about the situation and have it react potentially seconds before your brain and foot can engage with your brake pedal. This could be a marvellous development of ADAS.

Anyway, I am heading off on a tangent, but the thing is that eLearning continues to keep me abreast of the latest developments in the fields I am interested in and you do not have to be a university student to access the information.

I often listen to University Lectures at iTunes U and so can you. If you are interested in a topic and want to follow the lectures whether you are studyig at a university or not, they are as close as your iPod.

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 https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

The GeoSmart Location Innovation Awards

During the day I work for GeoSmart Maps Ltd, a subsidiary of the NZ Automobile Association.

We have just launched the Location Innovation Awards. I’m hoping that if you are in New Zealand you will join in the fun and get your thinking juices flowing.

The background is that we know that LBS (Location Based Services) will become commonly used technology in 4-5 years and people will participate as if they have been doing it all their lives. GeoSmart has the tools to facilitate this type of technology now, so we have launched a competition to get people to develop concepts today.

There are four categories which are explained on the website (which went live today) and they have the potential to have a significant impact on people’s lives.

For example:

Imagine you are a tourist hopping off the plane at Queenstown Airport and as you head to the luggage conveyor area you see a billboard with a promotion offering you amazing deals on various local attractions. If you text ‘Queenstown Live’ to a short code, you will have $20 deducted from your account and will be offered a range of services at huge discounts. When you get to the main town pier in Queenstown you get a text message saying that if you get down to the ticket office within the next 10 minutes you can enjoy the 4P.M. jet boat experience for only $25, a saving of $70. Without the promotion, the jet boat might go out half empty. This way they sell more seats and make a profit on the trip and the tourist gets a great deal.

Or

You are a member of a jogging club on Facebook. You are in Nelson  on business and decide to stay over for the weekend. You are interested in finding a jogging buddy to go for a run with. Through an application on your phone or a map application on Facebook, you are able to locate someone to go for a run with who is also in the area.

The story we have sent to the media today is as follows:

Bringing the future forward with the Location Innovation Awards

In the near future, location based applications will be commonplace, with electronic coupons being sent to your mobile because you are near a service you have opted-in for such as a Happy Hour deal for the bar you are walking past, or a promotion from your favourite fashion retailer (with whom you have signed up and given your colour, style and size preferences) which knows that you are in the mall.

GeoSmart Maps Ltd wants to bring that future forward to 2009 and has established a competition to encourage people to come up with concepts in 4 categories, being Social Networking, Proximity Based Marketing, LBS Games and widgets for the AA MAPS website. There are prizes for each category and the overall winner will also win a trip to San Jose in the USA to attend the Where 2.0 Conference in May 2009.

The competition isn’t pitched just at developers, a proof of concept demonstration would be great, but a great concept document has just as much chance of winning great prizes from a list of sponsors including Geekzone, Tomizone, Sony Ericsson, TomTom, Vodafone new Zealand and the NZ Automobile Association.

The judging criteria are documented in the entry packs and on the official website at http://www.locationinnovation.co.nz. The judges themselves are well qualified and represent GeoSmart, Massey University, Geekzone and the Wireless and Broadband Forum.

The competition runs from 16 October 2008 and entries are to be in by 16 February 2009. The Awards will be presented at the annual Wireless and Broadband Forum Convergence 2009 event at the Alinghi Base in Auckland’s Viaduct Basin.

Northern Motorway Truck Crash

Was I lucky or what! I drove through the Northern Motorway into Auckland City on my way to the airport around 6:30 AM. The first I heard about the crash was reading a NZStuff story on Twitter after I finished my presentation to the Intergraph Forum in Christchurch.

It’s interesting in this day and age how few people know about some of the information resources available to them. I probably knew about it before a lot of Aucklanders did, at least the ones that weren’t already stuck in the chaos. NZStuff has a great info page on Twitter. They do repeat their ‘Tweets’ a bit too often for my liking, but I guess that’s how people find out about their service and so far they only have 75 people following their free service. Crazy. It’s a great way of catching the headlines. I catch the Tweets on my Blackberry and can click on the links for the rest of the story.

People aren’t yet used to going on the web to check out traffic information. The last time I was in the Netherlands, we used to check the traffic site on the net to see if there were any problems we need to detour around. The site is pretty old fashioned in it’s mapping technology, nothing like the web mapping on the AA Maps website.

You might well find it worth checking that site in future before heading into the traffic. If you had done that this morning if you left after 9 AM you would have known not to go into the city via the Northern Motorway and if you check it now you will see that after 8PM tonight they are going to close it again to finish the job that the truck driver did crashing into the overbridge this morning. I’m glad I managed to get on an earlier flight!