july 2003 archives

Tuesday, July 29, 2003

Locate your nearest Hackney coach

Last year, Zingo introduced a service to be picked up by your nearest Hackney coach that's been located by its GPS unit. The network operator identifies the caller's location using the cell ID. However, in a highly dense urban environment such as central London, a single cell can cover many buildings and may not be accurate enough. To bypass this issue, a new service is being introduced by London Taxi Point. Customers walk up to one 5000 new Taxi Points. These are actual signs on the street that feature a unique four-digit location code to identify its exact location. People text the location code to the London Taxi Point service. Using GPS tracking, the service identifes and books the nearest black cab, delivers a confirmation SMS, and sends an alert when the taxi has arrived.

Since the service was only recently launched, I am sure you won't find a London Taxi Point outside central London yet. I really can't remember the last time I I had to wait for a black cab in central London, so why would I bother phoning the London Taxi Point while 10 black cabs drive past?

Friday, July 25, 2003

Of GPS and PDA

This week, the Garmin iQue3600 was introduced on the US consumer market. Instead of having a separate GPS unit, the iQue3600 is the first PDA to feature a built-in GPS antenna and integrated turn-by-turn navigation software, allowing users to look up an address or appointment and navigate to it using the maps and following turn-by-turn, voice-guided directions to their destination! Please, can I have it?

Thursday, July 24, 2003

Mind your language Google!

As the Dutch are generally known to have a decent command of foreign languages, I was involved in a few multi-lingual project in my previous job: e.g. store locators for Shell and IBM. The templating system developed in-house switched the interface language triggered by a URL parameter, or the language preference defined in the browser. However, users were able to change the interface language at any time. For example, English-speaking users of the Shell website in Germany can search for all petrol stations in Berlin in English.

This morning, upon the announcement that Weather.com has partnered with Google to deliver location-targeted ads, I had a look at Google Zeitgeist. Instead of the usual listings of international search results I was presented only the listings for the google.nl domain in Dutch (“routeplanner” was the most popular search term in April 2003) and no way I could get to the listings for other Google domains. It appears the Google headquarters in the Benelux are rather eager to draw attention to their presence! When I look at Zeitgeist from the Netherlands, I get a completely different page than when I access the same URL from the UK. So much for Uniform Resource Locators. Indeed, there is a lot to be said for location-specific content, but only if geography really matters!...

Monday, July 21, 2003

Creating web maps in SVG from GIS data

Recently, I copied and hacked a quick conversion programme in PERL to read Arc/Info ungenerate files and to write out SVG files. Thought more people would be interested to go down the same path. Hopefully, the article I wrote is helpful to some of you. Please let me know if you would like to see some more detail.

Monday, July 14, 2003

Do we really “Need to know”?

For some reason, the people at NTK always seem to spot work in progress that slipped through your version control software. Last friday, they caught out The Roof Box Company's store locator: This is just a map with some city names on it - these are not the places where you should expect to find us!. The map is a straight copy from the Mazda store locator, so expect to see some fine Multimap.com StoreFinder to appear soon: it'll certainly take away your disappointment!

Monday, July 07, 2003

Mapping footie

Looking for a pitch to play footie? The British Football Foundation recently launched a Pitch Finder: by entering a town name, postcode or known facility name, online Visitors can find the nearest football grounds in a specified area, and check other useful information on listed football grounds. Zooming and panning functions enable the visitor to view specific areas or to look at all football grounds within a specified area. The REFF website was developed to give local authorities and other interested bodies an accessible, visual guide to help plan the provision of sports facilities and see where extra funding is needed and where funds should be channelled.

The REFF website was developed at a cost of GBP 2 million. The Pitch Finder was implemented by Kingswood MapMechanics using the GeoConcept Internet Server, due to the ability of GCIS to handle complex geographic queries and searches. Furthermore, GCIS is particularly web-oriented, and delivers a compact package of information to the user. The digital mapping tool also means visitors can plan a journey to the football ground using the route information displayed for each pitch. Interestingly, the links for the route information direct the visitor off-site to the Multimap.com public website!

Another interesting feature is the competition banner at the top of the Pitch Finder. Although the majority of footballs on the Pitch Finder are black and white, there are some red ones, indicating these are not plotted in their correct location. If you can feedback the correct location of any of the red footballs, you could be entered into a draw to win a pair of Premier League match tickets!

Friday, July 04, 2003

Onboard or mobile navigation devices?

Last month, a survey revealed that both users and non-users of car navigation solutions prefer stationary, in-built devices over mobile phone and PDA-type applications. At present, navigation is typically used as a failsafe in unfamiliar areas, although ten percent use it on an “always-on” basis. Most people are more interested in the basics, such as route finding and orientation features than they are in location-based services: knowing their destination's best bars, clubs and restaurants.

Since stationary in-car navigation devices are typically offline systems and road network updates are published on CD-ROM, it's rather surpising to learn that users would like better quality of current traffic and roadwork related information, information that's best delivered real-time to online devices such as mobile phones and PDA-type applications. Another survey substantiates this view as it found that 52 percent of respondents cited their preferred method of road trip planning was to receive online driving directions. The emergence of GPS navigation through mobile phones allows people to receive up-to-date route information.

Earlier this week, Multimap.com launched its new travel directions service. The service seems to generate routes much quicker than before. Hopefully the new release of TeleAtlas data will improve the route quality and instructions. At the moment, the route from Cardiff to Oxford ignores the Severn Bridge and the number of steps can be easily reduced.