Category: Android

Categories
Android GPS

Sometimes you just need to be found…

Remember in Thunderbirds where John Tracey would always be looking out for people in distress from his satellite Thunderbird 5 ? He never seemed to have to ask people where they were…

Something I have been working with the Android team on for the last few months is the Emergency Location Service, a feature on android phones that when supported by your network, sends a more accurate location from your phone to emergency services when you dial an emergency number.

To do this same location technologies available to apps on your phone, including Wi-Fi, GPS, and cell towers is used, to produce a more reliable emergency location both indoors and outdoors. Up until now in Europe only cell tower information has been used.

Testing in the UK has produced a order of magnitude improvement in the location accuracy made available to the emergency services.

More details on the Google Europe Blog..

http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/helping-emergency-services-find-you.html

If you are in the UK and have an android device this is working for you today !

Categories
Android Thoughts

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 ; repo sync ; make”

means you can download the source code that is android from the Internet and build your own version without asking google..

If you are missing the context, this tweet appears to me in response to comments made by Steve Jobs of Apple yesterday,  but so far in the history of IT Open always beats Closed…

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)
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

Categories
Android iphone LBS

Contextual Computing and The Informed Traveller

landt

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 ..

But in all seriousness I have become to rely at least on the mobile mapping services on both my Android and iPhone to get me to meetings, where once I might have printed off a map from a web mapping service, or in the more distant past used a street atlas, I now just use my phone.

This is of course the most obvious and simple application, the real innovation will come when in addition to location the other context clues about the individual traveller such as time and history are also used in applications.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
Android Context based computing Thoughts

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 be to create a simple map of my walk.

At the end of 2008 it’s quite difficult to get really excited by this as we have come to expect so much from mainstream geospatial technology.

But just think what I have achieved from my walk, not only have I created a multimedia rich database with potentially metre accuracy geospatial features, I have also created a distribution channel to publish the database within minutes to hundreds of millions of users.

All from a mobile device that costs a few hundred pounds.

 

So this type of technology may never be used to create base map data, but for many organisations who need to be able to do simple data capture outside of the office there is huge potential here.

Maybe over christmas I will complete my recycling map for Richmond 🙂

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
Android LBS

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 applications.

It was only a few years ago that I remember the efforts the Research team at the OS put into building a prototype of such a system to demonstrate the potential of such an interface although I don’t think my fellow directors really “got it” despite our efforts.

From the video below the potential of such an interface for displaying geospatial information is obvious.

Wikitube was another one of the Android developer challenge award winners, developed by Mobilizy a small team based in Austria who are themselves a validation of the open source approach to mobile development, a small team with a great development platform and user generated geodata content can create a truly innovative application.

Written and submitted from Vienna Airpot, using its free wifi network.

Categories
Android Thoughts

If you build it, they will come..

Eco2goSo the results are in for the Android Developer Challenge and is amazing to see how many of the nearly fifty winning entiries can be described as some form of LBS application.

As we have always thought location is a key component to the mobile applications of the future.

The example here eco2go, is an application for tracking your carbon footprint.

Take a look at the winners yourself, I can’t wait to get hold of my android phone and try some of these out..

Written and submitted from the Melia Barajas Hotel, Madrid, using its free 802.11 network.

Categories
Android LBS

Android competition entry demos augmented reality

From the Wired blog a demo of Enkin; still a work in progress, but potentially this is the LBS interface of the future..


Enkin from Enkin on Vimeo.

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
Android LBS Mobile

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 the desktop to mobile devices and there is an opportunity for new players to flourish in hopefully a more open marketplace than there has been up until now.

Mobile World Congress logo

Look for Hardware vendors to try and innovate independently from the network operators, look for a mobile device OS battle between established closed platforms and new open stacks (e.g. Google’s Android) and look for the network operators to try and hang on to their position on providing value added services beyond just network provision. LBS is becoming more mainstream, although it still needs to make the jump beyond providing maps on your mobile to provide context to all mobile services delivered by your mobile.

The iPhone has had limited market impact in Europe it seems, although how to design a mobile device from the point of usability and been redefined, and hopefully other manufactures must take note, just try and get someone who has used an iPhone for a week, to go back to Windows Mobile or Symbian.

The mobile industry is more dynamic this year than is has even been, the stakes for industry are much higher and hopefully the customer will benefit as ultimately mobile services should be an incredibly useful part of our lives, and will be if the industry can match the openness of the web in general.

So I will be an avid reader of all the news coming out of Barcelona this week.

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

Categories
Android LBS Mobile opensource

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 that is available to all applications, therefore allowing much higher levels of integration.

One of the key factors to the success of the iPhone is the great integration between its applications, it’s just a shame these are currently restricted in number, to the Apple supplied applications.

Android

With Android the Location Manager component is part of the core application framework, meaning that all user applications have access to the devices location. At a simple level this means that applications like the address book as access to the device location, so your contacts rather than sorted alphabetically could be sorted based on distance from your locations.

Or slightly more “left field” how about a security application which locks the device waiting on the user to enter a PIN if the devices location does not match the scheduled location from the calendar application.

For really the first time, the innovation which always comes from Open Source development can be focused on building LBS.. at last !!

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