Before I left Malaysia I said I wanted to try out route-mapping in the Gold Coast with the help of the beta Sportstracker application. What I wanted to do was walk around the city, take some pictures, and have it recorded on a map so I could easily share some of that experience with you.
Click on the below picture to see the results:
Couple of notes I'd like to make here:
1. I turned on the GPS to get the initial lock and then for the most part of the rest of the trip, my N95 sat in my pocket. The magic is that with the initial lock, the application then uses the accelerometer to determine the direction and number of steps you took to 'map' the route. I did take it out two or three times again to get a re-lock, but as you can see from the route, the accelerometer was quite accurate.
2. I snapped pictures along the way and I think it's quite descriptive of what we did. Basically, this route was mapped when we to take a walk around to do some grocery shopping. Along the way, we passed some awesome sites and snapped a few pictures. There's another route that we took that I mapped with some pretty good pics as well. All the pictures snapped are compiled as media and geo-tagged to location by the Sportstracker application.
Overall, I had some fun doing this and it worked beautifully even without a Wi-Fi connection. Of course, the GPS took a little while to get the initial lock (about 4 minutes for me) without the help of A-GPS, but after that, the re-locks happened real quick. CNet's already predicted earlier this year that GPS-enabled cameras will be the next big thing and from my personal experience, they can't be far from wrong. What will rule, at the end of the day, is ease-of-use and the simplicity in getting the mass consumer to understand this new experience.
Okay, that's it for this update, I'm thinking of budget-travellers guide to Gold Coast as a future post but we'll see how that goes.
*For the sake of disclosure: I do work for Nokia as a consultant. However, the above opinions are purely my own, coming from the corner of my geek personality but probably influenced by my deep(er) knowledge of the technologies Nokia works on. Which often make me exclaim (cool!) anyway.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Geo-tagging and route-mapping in the Gold Coast
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Back from Gold Coast
Just got back from the Gold Coast and am mucho sleepy, but I just wanted to let everyone know I'm back!
Yeah, the plane touched down at 3:10 p.m. on time, but a culmination of a very long queue at the immigration counters, slow transferring of baggage off the aeroplane and a long, long queue at the too-small duty free shop meant we only got back to KL about 6:30 p.m. (a whopping 3 and a half hours since we stepped off the plane!)
I read in today's Star about a story where AirAsia complained about them needing to move out of LCCT (at least partially) and I have to say I agree. With low airfares getting really popular, and an increase in volume of passengers, we need better facilities to cope.
Anyway, let's not sound to sour about the whole terminal issue, rather, here's a nice pic I snapped in Australia. And it's geo-tagged too:
More pictures to come later.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Maps [check], GPS [check], Internet [check] this is what I'm gonna do in Brisbane.
This is awesome. I'm inspired. When I go to Gold Coast and Brisbane next month, this is what I'm going to do.
Okay, first off, Stavros is a fictional character Nokia created for this pretty (clever) online advertising campaign. But the technology is real. Yeap, you can download Nokia Sports Tracker, use the built in GPS on your N95 or N82, and send the routes you've walked and photos you've taken online. Perfect for chronicling your adventures. You can even create the map and embed it on your blog; check here.
So what I'm gonna do is try doing this whilst I'm in Aussie-land with the wife and see if it's really as simple as its made out to be. Hopefully, I'll come back with lots of pictures and interesting routes to try.
Jason, Robin, Ernest, interested in seeing if we can map a couple of mountain bike trails and post them online?
Of course, in case you didn't already know, in the interest of full disclosure, Nokia is one of my clients but I am not writing this post for anything remotely job-related.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Tech Everywhere!
It's Labour Day today here in Malaysia and a good mate's wedding to boot. So, for a little cheer, here's a fun post with some pictures we took at Vincent's wedding (the rest were too embarassing to put up).
I call it: Tech Everywhere. And yes, that's me in an Afro.
In case you missed the point, see what comes out of the Afro.
