Cultural differences..

This one very rare tweet from Andy Rubin, lead on the Android Programme at Google in 140 characters perfectly embodies the open and geeky culture at Google. This is of course not always initially a great advantage when building consumer facing products, for my non geeks readers “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git …

Augmented Reality mashup* Event

Hot topic of the moment if you have been tracking application development on the iPhone and Android platforms is Augmented Reality (AR), the ability to display annotated views of the world using a smartphones video camera and GPS. The excellent team behind the Mashup* events are holding an event later this month and I would recommend it …

Contextual Computing and The Informed Traveller

I’m speaking next week at the Location and Timing Forum who are holding a special meeting on the informed traveller, in other words providing contextual services to travellers. Next week the meeting is at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, so I won’t really be needing much in the way of contextual services to get me there …

Went for a walk, came back with a map

  Early this week to test a new Android application and to walk of the Google Christmas Lunch, I went for an early afternoon walk near the office. The application I was testing was My Maps Editor and Android application to create and edit Google My Maps, and it pretty much worked first time as expected allowing …

Wikitude : Practical Augmented Reality

Earlier this week I was talking to a group of travel journalists and demonstrated wikitude, one of the hottest applications available for the new Android powered G-1 phone. Wikitude uses the GPS, Digital Compass and camera on the G-1 to deliver one of the first really practical augmented reality applications, excellent for travel and tourism …

The Mobile Future

We can expect to see numerous stories from Barcelona this week as the The Mobile World Congress 3GSM as was takes place, and is the focus of much of the industry interest. As we all increasingly access the network online, shows like this are becoming more important, the battleground for market share is moving from …

Android and LBS – in the stack at last…

So maybe now Mr Balmer is reconsidering his comments of last week.. For me and my interest in geographic information the key detail about the Android SDK is the LBS component, and where is appears in the whole android stack. I have often argued that LBS would only really make sense as an underlining infrastructure …