imran*

Chris 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 🙂