Geo tagging dongle

Posted on October 25, 2009

Saw a truly awesome piece of kit on the engadget website, the PhotoTrackr mini from GiSTEQ. It’s a little USB dongle that you carry around with you and it logs your route as you go. When you’re done you plug it in and use the software to add geo data about where you were when you took the picture.

It’s less than £50 and what’s best, it exports the logs as NEMA and GPX.

Javascript mapping abstraction

Posted on June 5, 2009

One thing that occurred to me while I’ve been writing Sproozi is how tied to a mapping implementation I am and it’s something I’ve been thinking of starting a project to abstract the details away so that I could swap implementations whenever I liked.

A couple of things I wanted out of the API, the most important was to be able to do were switch from one implementation to another without loosing my markers or having to reload them. I really like that foot paths show up on the OSM maps.

Then I came across mapstraction – which looks very good. I’m checking it out to see if it meets my needs. I’ll let you know.

Whoops, for some reason this didn’t get posted yesterday. Must try harder.

Local business advertising

Posted on January 15, 2009

A large part of the assumptions we’re making with goroam are based around the idea that local business wants to capitalise on the Internet to bring in business. But it’s not easy. How do promote a book store, toy shop, cafe or plumber in your local area online, now imagine you have a books and toys to sell, coffees and tea to make or houses without hot water to help – in short, a full time job that doesn’t leave much time for SEO, SEM, analytics and tweaking a website and search advertising strategy.   

We’re not just pulling the assumption out of thin air though- helping local business market online is big business, Yodle’s 700% growth last year and $10M C round is a great example of this trend and from the techcrunch article, they’re not the only ones in the game. 

Yodle competes against a number of similar, venture-backed companies such as ReachLocal(which raised a substantial $65 million in funding to date), MerchantCircle (which raised its $10 million in Series B funding round in November 2007), Ingenio (acquired by AT&T, also in November 2007), WebVisible (total funding: $17 million) and a plethora of smaller companies trying to get their piece of the pie.

So we’ve got the social proof, now we just have to capitalise on it and bring something to market that makes it easy for small businesses to target their services at the people in their area who are interested. 

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Location, location, location

Posted on November 4, 2008

Previously I made some vague statements about location based services being the future of mobile. I just want to go back and touch on the point I made at the end of that post and highlight it a bit.

when I’m out there the data I want most is about out there

When I’m sitting somewhere waiting for someone I use my phone to check on any any feeds I’m following or to read my email, but I want so much more than that. The fact of the matter is location does matter, because but more often than not I want to know more than just where my nearest coffee shop or bar is; and I want to know more than just how to get there. I want the depth of information I can find on the internet, but I want to see it on a map and I want to see it relative to where I am.

I want more than is on offer right now with location based services. I want to be able to pull a richer set of information off the Internet and overlay it on a map. I’m not entirely sure what that richer set of data is, or how to display it – I just know it’s not what is out there now. It’s not just a glorified business directory, it’s not just directions to somewhere and it’s not just a simple news mashup.

Watch this space.

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Location based is the future of mobile

Posted on October 14, 2008

First we started to explore, then quickly we needed to figure out where we were and we’ve been building increasing numbers ever more sophisticated maps, guide books and other sources of location based information ever since. The extension of this location based information to mobile Internet enabled devices is the obvious next step and potentially huge market. Just think of all the location based data people pay for:

• Mapping probably the biggest market segment, and the first which we’ll see device convergence. Look to see the traditional GPS hardware/software become applications for the current and next generation devices.
• Reviews A common feature of newspapers, local and region
• Business Directories again, think of the big yellow book of business for every area. It’s one of the most common things to look for in an area.
• Travel Guides More than just reviews, travel guides also provide us with areas of interest and all of that is very useful in an up to date online service

All of this is pretty obvious and most of it exists now. The problem up to now has been the walled garden approach taken by the mobile phone companies. They had the ability to determine position, but wanted to charge for it. Unfortunately for us consumers, charging for that data has meant that for the most part services would need to turn a profit for every single request, from the start or they’d be very expensive to develop and very quickly.

Mobile data has recently become very cheap and new devices with integrated ability to determine their location is having a profound impact on the mobile landscape. They’re allowing us to build services which instead of answering the question: where is my nearest X, will let us explore the area around us. Mapping the wealth of knowledge on the internet to physical locations and allowing us to actually input data when we’re most likely to want to – when we’re actually there.

From experience, when I’m out there the data I want most is about out there.

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Location services – must try harder

Posted on September 26, 2008

Location based services, another area where there is certainly a case to be made for someone to make it suck less and probably a number of successful application to build on it.

Why it sucks

Location services suck because it’s inherently hard to map the collection of information on the Internet to physical locations.

Most of it just wont map because it’s not about something physical.
It’s obvious, but true – most of the Internet isn’t about a place, or a thing that is likely to stay in one place. This post for example, or this blog’s homepage – neither are about anything specific. My house isn’t

It’s hard to map because language is imprecise, physical location isn’t.
When you’re looking for a nearby restaurant a blog post with a review of a restaurant in London probably won’t give you an address and probably won’t even link to a site that will. It’s become the job of search to try and link the post, a very difficult job – was the post about London, England; London in Ontario or one of the dozens of other Londons around the world. At best the search engine might be able to link the name with another URL that contains an address – but there are no guarantees the name is unique or the address is right.

Sending letters for physical addresses with an activation code is one approach Google has tried, I’m not sure how successful it’s been though – I haven’t noticed locations search has stopped sucking, so I assume it’s not the silver bullet.

Sucking less

How to go about fixing it? If I knew the answer I’d be coding the solution right now and wouldn’t be sitting her writing and thinking about it.

The rise of location aware internet devices
It’s inevitable, the rise of the iPhone, Andriod phones and other location away devices with Internet connections mean people are going to want to consume location based resources. Though they’re not the first phones on the market to do any of this, they’re game changing because they’re the first platforms that make it easy to consume and more importantly produce location based content.

The other key ingredient these platforms offer is a browser, not just a cut down browser – a real browser, with tabs and javascript and all the trimmings!

Like any good problem, this one can be solved with metadata!
We’ve got the consumers with their million plus iPhones, we’ve got the producers who all want to start geo tagging. The problem is how do we link the two and how do we make it easy? We’ve got a few standards for location tagging document, but no clear forerunner.

Suddenly it doesn’t suck anymore

Services for producers and users to announce and tie information to physical locations is going to be the catalyst that really makes local search and local information portals of all kinds take off. It won’t be long until someone comes along with a killer solution.