Categories
Apple Technology Thoughts

Is that a laptop in your bag ?

X-Ray of Powerbook

Peter Cochrane this week in his blog, talks about the potential of technology such as Iris scanning to spend up the process of security checks at airports.

As someone who has passed through Heathrow a couple of times in the last month, what I want to understand is what has gone wrong with the x-ray machines, that laptops now need to be screened outside of their bags. The BAA website is now warning of the potential delays caused by the change.

I know this has been the case in the USA since 9/11, but then the TSA also x-ray your shoes and confiscate plastic toy dinosaurs !!

You would think with the sophistication of modern x-ray machines a few millimetres of nylon bag would not confuse them – or maybe I’m missing something ?

Written and submitted from the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Dubai, using the hotels broadband connection.

Categories
GIS GPS Technology Thoughts

Outdoor Gadgets

Outdoors Show 2006

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.

Categories
ESRI GIS Technology

Origami useful for mappers ?

No this is not about folding maps, rather a link to Geoff Zeiss comments on the usefulness of the new generation of mobile devices.

The mainstream IT press seems to have really stuck the knife into these devices, comparing them unfavourably to laptops and even tablet pc’s.

But as Geoff points out such devices really are useful to mobile workers, particularly if the issues with battery management are fixed – the two hours possible today is just not enough.

Now if these devices were to ship with solid state storage as announced by Samsung at Cebit, then you have a potentially robust solution with good battery life – a product that professional mobile users would pay a premium for.

Add to the mix ubiquitous wireless network availability, and applications like ArcGIS Explorer which I saw demoed again today in Redlands, which allow access to server based data not only for visualisation but also analysis, and you have quite a compelling proposition..

So Origami like devices do have a place, but as vertical solutions for professional mobile users, not the consumer market where users want smartphones !

Written and submitted from The Hilton Hotel, San Bernardino, using the hotel in-room internet connection.