Month: March 2006

Bombay dreams

At heart I am a geographer, this IT stuff I do is really the hobby, and the geographer in me was really engaged by one of the best podcasts I have every listened too!

As part of IT Conversations excellent series, I came across the presentation of Suketu Mehta from last years Pop!Tech conference.

There is no real technology here, instead Suketu paints a very powerful picture of his home town, and as anyone who has visitied India will also recognise, he identifies much to be hopeful despite the difficulties. There is an interesting GIS message at the end, where the value of digitising Land Records is reducing rural corruption.

Find an hour or so to listen, you won’t regret it.

Outdoor Gadgets

I spent a very enjoyable Saturday this weekend, helping to man the Ordnance Survey stand at the Outdoors Show, a public exhibition for everybody who enjoys the outdoors.

Amongst all the stands showing canoes, sleeping bags, climbing ropes, and maps !! what really got my interest was the every growing number of vendors of “high tech” equipment that offer, in effect, consumer GIS software.

Doing very good business were Memory Map, Anquet and Fugawi all selling applications which provide the display of OS Landranger and Explorer mapping on PC’s, and most relevantly on PDA’s and Smartphones.

Garmin had a large stand with their wide range of consumer focused GPS recievers, including the nuvi, which I blogged about last year

But “Best of Show” for me was some real innovation from a small Cambridge company, Viewranger. The OS research team have demonstrated in the past a PDA prototype “Magic window”, which demonstrated the concept of using a mobile device and a geographic information to allow users to identify geographic features based on their location and the know location of the viewer.

Magic Window

It’s fantastic to see Ordnance Survey partners making these concepts reality, ViewRanger is an immersive mapping tool that displays a labelled representation of a view from any particular point on a GPS enabled, symbian based mobile phone.

Viewranger

It also allows users to upload “tags” or comments and photographs of particular locations onto a central server, where they can be shared, a very nice touch and another example of how important social networking techniques will be for geographic information.

Viewrangers’ Mike Brocklehurst, told me they are working on a windows mobile version of this application, so although its still early days – it clear outdoor gadgets are becoming very cool !

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

GIS GPS Thoughts

Satnav savvy ?

I got thinking last week about the actual impact of GPS navigation systems on peoples driving habits after reports of satnavs sending people through villages as short cuts. I’m not sure this is actually the case, why I’m uncertain was an experience on a Friday evening a few weeks previously…

I travel north up the M3 almost every night, and just after the Farnborough junction hit the end of a 10-15 mile tailback. Using the AA trafficwatch service on my mobile I discovered the cause of the queue was an accident at the M25 junction a few hours earlier which had involved a truck carrying livestock !! visions of cows and sheep on the motorway – the end result was the motorway was completely closed.

As I sat in the traffic in the darkness I could not but help to notice than at least 10% of the cars had the glow of a GPS navigation system on their dashboards, if you regularly drive in the UK at night you will no doubt have become aware of the rapid growth of satnavs over the past six months or so – well done tom-tom !!!

So as I switched my satnav to detour mode, to get me off the motorway at the next junction, I had the expectation I would be joined by many others making our ways through the A-Roads of Surrey. However when I came off the motorway and followed the route shown in the map below I was almost the only car on the road, it seemed many where happy to sit and wait on the motorway ?

Detour map

Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland.

With some smugness I rejoined the now empty M3 at the M25 Junction and drove home… so my question is, just how confident are people in using satnav’s to go “off route” ?

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