Author: Ed Parsons

Happen to be passing the Gizmondo flagship store on Regent Street on Friday and poped in. Gizmondo are a UK based company and are trying to establish a handheld games platform similar at first glance to the PSP or Nintendo DS.

What makes the Gizmondo interesting is that is that it is a network device with an GPRS modem and is location aware with a in-build GPS receiver. These are not just add-ons, Gizmondo seem to be serious about delivering location based games, their parent company in the US Tiger telematics has a solid telematics backgound developing vehicle tracking solutions, and a game soon to be released “colors” is a street gang games played in a virtual model of the street you are actually in !

Gizmondo are also developing more familar LBS like applications mapping, geo-fence creation etc to exploit a powerful device, under the hood Gizmondo runs Windows CE, and the backend is powered by MapInfo technology similar to that employed by vodafone.

This could be a interesting new market for Geodata taking its first steps, but as Gizmondo must be aware “content is king” and they need to get some outstanding games behind them to compete in a established market dominated by others. The trick may be to extend the market really making the most of the GPS and WAN capability of the device, the competition may actually be the next generation of smartphones rather than current games platforms. The Gizmondo is available now in the UK and will reach the US in August.

Whatever… I think I need to get one to try it out – Question do I expense a games device ?

Written and submitted from the garden on a warm evening, using my home 802.11 network.

In my last post I commented on the potential of demand based road pricing and drew a comparison with the low cost airline pioneers of this. As Wired reports this is already reality. A section of Interstate 15 North of San Diego ( a busy section of road familar to me from trips to the ESRI UC) has a toll lane whose cost to use varies with traffic conditions. If it can happen in the wide open spaces of Southern California it can happen on the M25 !

Yesterdays announcement, that the Government in looking into a system of road usage charging has resulted in the usual doom vendor calls of another government IT disaster in the making.. it is easy to agree with this based on the track record of delivery of big IT projects so far, but here I believe there should be more optimism.

Installing black boxes with GPS and GPRS modems in every car in the UK will be a major logistical challenge, as will the development of the backend systems to support this and a potentially complex pricing system to allow temporal change in charging perhaps even pricing models based on demand (EasyRoads anybody ?).

But… The technology here is actually already robust – GPS vehicle tracking and the associated telematics infratrucutre already exists for niche markets such as high value parcel tracking, and there is already considerable experience in building complex billing systems from the mobile phone industry; and of course in the UK we have the necessary underlying geograhical data.

So lets not kick this project before it has even started.. we can in the UK lead the world in developing this technology – the real challenge will be politically making this happen !!

Written and submitted from the Roadchef at Northampton on the M1, using a BTOpenzone 802.11 network. (Glamorous eh!)

As this announcement suggests at some point in 1998 we may finally see the last Landline tile leave Southampton on a CD marking the end of the first generation of digital mapping in Great Britain. At that point Landline as a nationally complete product will be 13 years old and based on a production process that started nearly 30 years previously !!

During this period of time Microsoft will have introduced at least 7 PC operating systems, assuming of course Longhorn will have been released by 2008 🙂
Oracle meanwhile will have introduced perhaps five major releases of its database.

So this begs the question why do data products develop so much more slowly than application software? In some ways the old idiom “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” might be part of this, but I’m rather afraid the lack of progress here is more to do with the perceived value of geographic information and how it has been applied.

The first generation of digital data products were developed to automate the map production process before sophisticated GIS tools became available – they were drawing files with information relevant to how the features represented should be drawn rather than having information about the features themselves. So when accessible GIS tools such as MapInfo and ArcView became widely available, products like Landline were used only as a graphic backdrop, there was little point linking to features which did not exist.

To a large extent the current use of geodata has been constricted by this, so with the introduction of the second generation of truly intelligent feature based products like MasterMap, the industry needs to reset its expectations to really exploit the value of the information now available.
Mastermap and a spatially aware database can answer questions that it was truly impossible to answer with products like Landline, with one SQL query I can calculate the number of residential properties within 500m of the new channel tunnel rail link and produce mailing labels – that is one step, maybe a couple of minutes processing – that really is progress we just need to recognise it.

Many of us of a certain age have fond memories of MS-DOS and Wordperfect and perhaps think we could actually use them productively today, but the reality is we would actually find it very constraining not to be able to cut and paste information, between applications running at the same time, on our pc’s which have access to almost unlimited amounts of memory.

We need to move on in terms of our perceptions of data and embrace the change.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

I have just download the latest update of my favourite podcast client ipodderX, which amongst other new features offers the ability to embed any digital media within a podcast.

The ability to add any enclosure to a podcast has been there from the beginning of podcasting many months ago !!!
A podcast is just a xml document in RSS format enclosing an mp3 file e.g.

<enclosure url=”http:///www.edparsons.com/test/podcasts/demo_podcast01.mp3” length=”563460” type=”audio/mpeg”/>

A podcast aggregator like ipodderX subscribes to the podcast file hosted on a server and downloads the podcast whenever it changes. The podcast can contain any digital media, videos are becoming more popular and this got me wondering – Is this a potential means of distributing geodata and in particular change only update data?

The technologies are well understood and quite robust, the sofeware already exists – I must experiment…

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Well with no great surprise the BBC has given into the 4,000 critical viewers (out of 10 million or so) and a few politicians looking for publicity and changed it’s weather maps.

The animated fly around the British Isles has been retained thankfully as this is the most effictive part, but have been ‘slowed” as not to make some viewers ill !!

It would be interesting to see the impact if the convention of putting north at the top of the screen was reversed – might keep the scots happy!

As a Nation we are just so conservative.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.