imran*

Category: Locative

  • Way-Dar

    WaydarChris Masters, one of our senior designers at Orange is currently travelling from London to Ulaanbaatar. Chris is travelling with a satellite phone from which he’s periodically texting a particular email address; the mail server parses the email for GPS coordinates and plots them onto a Google map (I think it’s generating KMZs too). His last reported location was central Uzbekistan, at N40° 24.72′ E63° 04.39′, at around 9:46AM today.

    You can follow his progress at his site; unfortunately there’s no RSS feed, geoblogging fans…

    Chris’ project reminds me of Jon‘s Personal Radar, developed at FTRD Boston back in 2003. Jon was using GSM cell data to plot movements of FTRD staff onto Keyhole maps. In fact, he geotagged the first couple years of his daughter’s movements after she was born!

    Coincidentally, a few days ago, Sony announced a GPS companion device, the GPS-CS1, for its digital camera range. Elegantly simple, the GPS-CS1 simply records a stream of GPS coordinates and respective data+time data to its internal memory. Later, this location stream can be used to geotag photos by matching date+time of photos to those of the location stream. Of course, as a Sony product, you can be assured the accompanying software will suck.

    The GPS-CS1 could be employed to generate location streams for any collection of bits or atoms – a consumer homing device? The Waydar 🙂

  • “I Had a Really Weird Dream Last Night”

    Signs_3 Echoing the Onion’s I Had a Really Weird Dream Last Night parody of Martin Luther King, I actually did have a very weird dream last night – I dreamt of a locative media application that would plot Yeti/Bigfoot/Nessie sightings onto maps, utilising the wisdom of crowds and predictive markets to anticipate the location of future sightings…I could probably have VC funding by tommorow morning in the current climate…

    MonsterMash(up).com? I’m either entering the first stages of insanity or need to sleep less 🙂

  • The Urban Long Tail

    An interesting idea: the urban long tail. Steven Johnson suggests that "the long tail premise has a tacit anti-urban bias to it, since it used to require big city scale to find obscure long tail books or albums that are now readily available to anyone with an Internet connection." But he goes on to argue that "some long tail services can’t be Fedexed or downloaded — people, for instance", and describes how you’d have more luck meeting other fans of Scandinavian doo-wap if you’re in Manhattan rather than the middle of nowhere. Elsewhere, he goes on to describe how Dodgeball addresses this urban longtail of people.
    I would also suggest that urban environments supply experiential longtail services. Cities can provide direct access to a plethora of niche experiences, buildings, places, views, things – as well as people. I look forward to the day when locative services are capable of mining the richness and diversity embedded within cities, according to the specific needs of the user.