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The Weasley Clock and Google Latitude a mashup waiting to happen

In the UK there is a saying about waiting ages for a bus and then two come along at the same time. In the world of location based or context based computing it’s not exactly the case that there is little happening, but yesterday produced two interesting stories.

I had the pleasure on presenting at the AGI North Where2.0now event in Harrogate. It was a great event, but there was much joking from those who travelled from London and Southern England how far we had travelled.

Well now it’s possible to track exactly how far if you should choose too, as a Google Latitude user I can look at my history and see where I have travelled over a period of time.

As you would expect this is a service you need to opt in to, and by default your history will not be kept. But if you chose to store you history is makes a fascinating record of your travels here for example is my trip to Harrogate yesterday.

latitude

Tracking and storing you location is nothing new, John McKerrell has been doing so for a couple of years using his mapme.at service.

At the conference yesterday he showed the coolest piece of geo hardware seen since the Garmin GPS45, a location clock powered by mapme.at

If you have ever read any Harry Potter you will be familar with the idea of the Weasley Clock, a magical clock owned by the Weasley family which shows not the time but the location of members of the family and if they are in “Mortal Peril”.

Visit Johns blog to read how he has built a working Weasley clock using a Arduino kit, mapme.at and great imagination.

So cool !!

Written and submitted from my home (51.425N, 0.331W)

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