Month: October 2009

Categories
where 2.0

Where 2.0 Online Conference

where20online

Here’s an interesting idea, the first Where 2.0 Online Conference organised by O’Reilly – a online mini where 2.0 with a focus on LBS and AR developments on the iPhone.

This could be the future of conferences, after all for many the trek to the West Coast is both time consuming and expensive and something you can maybe justify once a year, but a year is a long time in the industry at the moment so there is also the potential for more frequent events.

If you can’t bring the people to a conference, bring the conference to the people…

For us in Europe the time difference could be a problem, but there again we can always sit back with a nice glass of wine or hot chocolate depending upon preference and watch in our pyjamas !

Written and submitted from the Googleplex, California (37.421N, 122.087W)

Categories
GPS

TomTom Go I-90 the end of the line for PND’s ?

The TomTom Go I-90 reports Engadget is a satnav that is built for permanent installation in the DIN slot of your cars dashboard. This immediately caught my interest as I want to replace the factory fit system in my 5 year old Nissan X-Trail, becase it is no longer possible to get map updates for it.

The new tomtom device sounds better integrated than my exsiting system and with the new mapshare terchnology promises more up to date navigation data, but it also I think represents the last generation of dedicated PND’s

The smartphone is becoming the converged device of choice for turn by turn directions, a fact recognised to their credit by tomtom  with their iphone app, although we are still to see the full potential of driving directions calculated in the cloud with real time data becoming a major compoent.

Perhaps the next generation of in car devices will become little more than monitors for displaying and controlling content from your smartphone? This is still I guess a few years away, in the meantime I will be looking at the I-90.

Written and submitted from the Googleplex, California (37.421N, 122.087W)

Categories
Android iphone Thoughts

Augmented Reality mashup* Event

Nearest Tube AR for real
Nearest Tube AR for real

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 highly if you are in London.

It’s early days still for AR and progress will be limited in the short term by both a lack of data and poor quality digital compass functionality but the potential is huge.

There has been a discussion of the need for AR standards to develop AR applications on the geowanking email list, and there are as usual many existing standards which could be adopted, but it may still be too early for a standardisation process as the real issues of interoperability are not clearly understood yet.

AR is clearly one of the technologies that is moving geospatial data and its representation away from traditional cartography and all its limitations, and it will become something we all take for granted within a few years.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network