Yesterday I had the pleasure to present at the ENTER2012 eTourism conference in Helsingborg, Sweden. The ENTER conference is an excellent combination of academics and practitioners, a mix that other industry conferences would do well to replicate.
My presentation was on the continuing innovation is geospatial technology and how the addition of both social and curated content may impact on destination and travel solutions.
Here are my slides, as usual not that useful if your were not in the audience!
Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)
One of the benefits of getting comprehensive public transport information fully integrated in Google Maps is the potential to include public transport in all forms of local search. An example of this is the experiment launched over the weekend to search for hotels based upon a travel time from a location. In the example below searching for Hotels within 25 minutes of the Google Office by public transport…
The use of travel time or isocrone maps is of course not new , Mapumental really pioneered they use on line with their public transport map developed with Channel 4, the next step for Google was greater integration of this analytical capability with local search in near real time !
The areas you can easily reach from your point of interest are spotlighted on the map, and you can modify the search criteria using different maximum travel times or methods of travel, perhaps you only want to find hotels only within 10 minutes walk, the map will update automatically to show a new spotlighted area and the nearby hotels.
You can also drag the red pin to find hotels near other places you might like to visit and agin the map will automatically refresh.
Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)
This has been a very long time in coming, finally national travel planning become easier as Google Maps now includes information on National train routes and timetables. The National Rail information joins local transit data, to offer true national multi-modal travel planning to users of Google Maps on the web, and more importantly mobile via Google Maps for Mobile.
This is a great example of the benefits of opening up public data sets, the national rail timetable data is been provided via the people at thetrainline.com who have great expertise in dealing with the complexities of the unique railway system in Britain.
It’s now possible to get step by step directions from your Hotel in Bristol to Edinburgh Castle only using public transport, a combination of walking, bus and train travel delivered to your mobile phone.
Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)
If you are a tech-savy parent and are wondering how you can help your children learn useful ICT skills after the well deserved criticism of the GCSE IT curriculum, buy a Raspberry Pi when they go on sale and let your kinds discover computers perhaps in the way you did ?
Oh, did I mention they will only cost $35 !
I’m planning to order a Raspberry PI, when they go on sale, but the latest update from the team producing the cheap hobbyist computer should be required reading for UK politicians trying to restart manufacturing capacity in Britain.
Bottom line, UK companies are too slow, too expensive and perhaps most importantly it is more tax efficient to import a device manufactured outside the UK than it is to build one here !
Freedom is in Peril
A sister to the more famous “Keep Calm Carry on” World War II poster, this version seems a most approriate message to all users on the internet in 2012.
Interestingly according to the people at the Imperial War Museum, neither version was actually used, although the simplicity and directness of both messages in these days of social media status updates is very effective.
#blogpost
Ed Parsons