Category: Technology

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Nokia N95 Technology

Stephen Fry and the iphone

I can now count the days until I get my sticky hands on a iphone, get ready to find out my new phone number in November as I and many others transfer to 02 – the only carrier I have not used so far in the UK funny enough.

Despite the fact that it is EDGE only, a closed platform and rather expensive I and my wife will be moving. Why because even though technically my Nokia N95 is superior – I still don’t like using it – the S60 user interface sucks and we all put up with out mobiles because we have no choice . Don’t even try to talk to Lisa about her N70 !!

To really appreciate the issue take a look a the first blog post by Stephen Fry. Yes it is the Stephen Fry, one of the great treasures of Britain, and it now appears an excellent technology writer and well as writer, actor, director etc. Stephen claims to have owned most smart phones and like most people have never found one he liked…

Well things are about to change at last !

Written and submitted from The Holiday Inn, Stratford-upon-Avon using a UMTS data connection on my soon to be retired Nokia N95.

Categories
Google Maps Technology Thoughts Transport

When the Propellor heads play with public transport..

Last week I was in Norway attending the annual InformNorden Conference, which is an event which covers the issues and impacts of ICT on Public Transport in Northern Europe. To some extent you might imagine this represents a culture clash between largely conservative public sector organisations administrating transport networks and technology providers.

Bus Stop

This is actually not the case, and in the Nordic region in particular, public transport makes excellent use of technology; from journey planning to card based payment systems like London’s Oyster. In most cities it is common to see electronic displays with arrival times of buses/trams subway trains etc.

This has, in most cities, had a noticeable impact on the use of public transport, with increased passenger numbers following the introduction of the technology.

My interest in the conference was in talking to these public transport operators to get access to their schedule information to include in Google Transit, a project to bring routing using public transport to users of Google applications, like Google Maps and Google Maps for Mobile.

This complements the operators own web-sites by providing schedule information alongside other points of interest data and imagery, users can always click through to the operators own web-sites for real time information and service updates.

Technology like this really can make a big difference in terms of making public transport a more acceptable solution for many, knowing a bus will be at you local bus stop in 6 minutes might just stop you jumping in the car to make the same journey. Or knowing that there is a tram stop 1 minute away from the cinema and that there is a tram arriving there 15 minutes before the movie.

Imagine your commute to work downloading tunes to your new iPod Touch via wifi using the pilot system running in Helsinki at the moment. This system which by providing broadband internet access on a proportion of the bus and tram fleet in Helsinki, means that it is possible to track these buses and trams in real time using a Google Maps application – very cool.

Realtime Bus map

Following along with the transport technology theme, this post was submitted from the 13:00 London-Edinburgh GNER train service somewhere outside Peterborough, using the onboard wifi service.

Categories
Google Earth Nokia N95 Technology

Put your pictures on the planet..

After the buzz has died down about the new sky feature in Earth, I personally think one of the most useful new features is the ability to place images in the landscape, matching the perspective of the location from which they where taken.

The new photooverlay element in KML 2.2 is used to great effect with the gigapxl images, which you just have to try out to really appreciate.

Gigapxl in Google Earth

You can just keep on zooming into these amazing images..

Gigapxl in Google Earth zoomed

And these are taken with a single exposure, so they are very useful for analysis of the images.

For me the most exciting development is the potential now for those millions of geotagged photos already online to be placed in the locations from where the pictures were taken, this would provide another great way of representing the “sense of place” of a location.

Phone pic in google earth

As a simple example, this is a picture of the Google Office in London, taken with the Camera in my Nokia N95. With its GPS, and the additional of a simple compass to provide the bearing of the shot, you have all your need.

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

Categories
Google Earth Technology Thoughts

Ogle Earth TV

Stefan Geens the man behind the fantastic Ogle Earth blog, has put together an amazing DIY TV show using Google Earth and Wirecast.

Everyday the tools that where once only in the hands of the professionals are now available to the professional-amateur, although I think Stefan may have another career on IPTV waiting for him! 

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
Google Maps neogeography Technology

Thames Valley Flood Map

A Great example of community mapping and the immediacy of tools like the My Maps feature of Google Maps is this map by Oliver Williams who is collating images, videos and reports relating to the current river floods in England.

When I looked this maps was less than a hour old !!

Flood Map

Not only is this a potentially powerful way of communicating up-to-date information quickly, it is also great at telling the human story of such events.

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
neogeography opensource Technology

State of the Map Slides

Here are my slides from the State of the Map Conference in Manchester, as is my way I’m afraid on their own they don’t mean a great deal, but in due course all the presentations will appear as podcasts, so you can follow along.

For me I got the feeling that the momentum behind OpenStreetMap is really building with interest from “Professional” GI companies increasing and in some cases beginning to either use OSM data or adopt similar methodologies. Which reminds me, Dominic over at Geometrybag has a great script to import OSM into ArcGIS.This week I’m at the Cambridge Conference, an invite only conference aimed at senior people from the worlds National Mapping Organisations. (update – there are podcasts of many of the presentations here ) This evening the prestigious Hotline Lecture was given by Martin Sweeting, of SSTL the guys who are having amazing success building micro-satellites, built from commercial off the shelf components which are competing successfully with the traditional large and expensive satellite systems.I could not help but think of the obvious parallels now with mapping.Written and submitted from the Cambridge Conference, Cambridge, using the free CC2007 wifi network (Great Job Mr Bridges !!!).

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AGI GIS Technology Thoughts

GI Innovation in the UK – you just need to look in the right place..

Yesterday was a series of interesting contrasts for me, the state of the “traditional” Government dominated GI industry was pretty well summed up by the Chorley Day review event organised by the AGI, key impression – “why after 20 years of trying does nobody listen to us”, while the very same evening brought a larger audience to the mashup* location themed event, key impression – “Hello we would really like to build application “x” using your platform is that OK..”

I was really pleased to see the WIDR guys at the event last night, some bright guys who used to work for me while I was at Ordnance Survey, who have developed a location determination platform, with an open API, based on wifi hotspots. Not a new idea I know, but the API element is really interesting as it offers the potential for developers to easily add location awareness to their own web based applications.

Widr

What would begin to close the gap between the two diverging GI communities, would be if these guys could develop they ideas during the day rather than in their spare time, and bring the benefit directly back to their organisation. The 20% time that Google engineers can use to develop their own ideas is well known, and really is a powerful tool for developing new products and services – would we ever see anything like that in Government ?

No.. I guess not.. but then the next generation of customers of Government services, as David Rhind so brilliantly called them yesterday the “myTube” generation have vastly different expectations of dealing with organisations based on experiences with eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Google etc all of which recognise the importance of innovation in keeping their customers happy.

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

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Google Maps Technology Thoughts

Google Maps api and GeoRSS

Great news announced at the Google Maps api blog today, that GeoRSS is now fully supported in Google Maps. It is now possible just to pass the location of a GeoRSS feed as a parameter to the google maps url to see the feed rendered as an overlay. So http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://edparsons.floo-net.com/?feed=rss2 produces a map of this blog.

Google maps and GeoRSS

Of course the map is also embed-able using the api, as in this quick and dirty example of this blog, and my past travels.

Many have been waiting for this capability, and as the Google api seems to be the most popular mapping api this is a great opportunity, GeoRSS is a really robust lightweight encoding which should now be able to reach an even wider community of users

It you are publishing simple geographic information on a regular basis why are you not using GeoRSS ?

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

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Technology Thoughts

Why its hard to buy a train ticket…

My local station has got some new ticket machines which allow you to purchase tickets using credit cards – wow !!! When they work that is, and now we know why they often don’t.

Windows tickets

Surely a job for embedded Linux ?

Written and submitted from the BA lounge, Heathrow, using the BT Openzone 802.11 network.

Categories
Technology Thoughts

If YouTube needed the dragons ?

BBC Dragons Den

So Google pays nearly £900m for YouTube, well done Chad and Steve !!

But just imagine it they had attempted to get investment from the BBC’s Dragons Den programme instead of Sequoia Capital..

Chad and Steve – We have this great idea.. a site where people upload they home videos and then let everybody view them from free !!

Dragons – OK, so you charge people to upload the videos.. Internet bandwidth is expensive.. what is your margin ?

Chad and Steve – Actually, er.. you are right it is expensive and we expect to spend about a million dollars a month.. but um.. we don’t think we should charge users to upload either..

Dragons – So you have a business that costs a least a million dollars a month to run, and has no revenue stream – what were you looking for in terms of investment from us ?

Chad and Steve – Well dragons we would like £50,000 for a 0.005 % share of the company..

Evan – Today Chad and Steve left the den empty handed..

Seriously I understand the potential advertising angle here but even with a stock only transaction is this really worth the money?

To understand why YouTube has become such a success however just watch this – all power to the geeks !!
Written and submitted from Starbucks, The Strand , London, using the t-mobile wifi network.