Leon Cych :: Blog :: Annotating the planet - localising data - GPS tracking/mapping in your mobile

This screencast was totally inspirational. It shows how Jon Udell used a GPS device to make a walking tour of his locality where he annotated his movements in Google Maps illustrating it with links to movies and pictures. OK this is old news but Jon now talks in a podcast with Cyril Houri of Mexens Technology about the system he has invented to make Wifi-aware devices that don't have the functionality use GPS to do this i.e mobile phones and wi-fi devices with virtual GPS - that's highly innovative !

This is one exemplar I will be showing every teacher to inspire them to extend these capabilities. I particularly liked the bit where he linked to a search function for the area and saw that a local birdwatcher had posted some info on birds at the time. Now imagine doing this with your phone and getting paid for it...

This is an incredibly revolutionary and powerful example of a mashup that will become trivial in education soon. Everything is joining up - location aware devices are coming online more and more being able to link this to wifi aware devices and cell masts is very interesting (especially the ability to do GPS inside because of mobile phone triangulation)- we need to annotate the planet - localising and humanising information in the process - Flickr and Zoomer have introduced geotagging since but it is still interesting to see the rise of GPS aware devices, especially mobile phones!, and how this technology can be extended.. It's all about people. This is an absolutely wonderful example. This is going to be the future and it is coming soon...

This is revolutionary because people will be constructing their own data - as in the Open Street Data project. This is going to become something that will grow with communities - these services won't own the data but sell the services around it and they may be a spur to make the service a success. As usual, people can't see it yet but this will be one of the biggest issues in the next few years. If you are a developer head over to the Navizon site to get the API next week...