Mobiles phones and the Isle of Wight.

Posted on March 24, 2006 by Reverend Dan Catt

Here’s a quick throw-away post for the people who came to the “Technology 2.0″ talk last night.

Which, what, huh, phones have location based info we can hack around with and use? This is an extract from an IM with Mor Naaman from a couple of days ago.

[snip]
Mor: Here’s the list:
Mor: Any A-GPS phone;
Mor: Any Series 60 phone (cell tower)
Mor: Any provider-supported-location phone
Mor: Any other phone that exposes some location info (cell, gps) to the user
Mor: Any phone that runs software (e.g. CheckMates) that explicitly tells the phone where you are
Mor: So that’s WAY more than just the people who own a GPS device…
[snip]

Mor also pointed to this Research Paper thing, GPS IC Markets, which probably contains lots of really juice info if I bothered to pay for it, myself I was happy to just read the abstract.

“After years of discussion, Location Based Services (LBS) are finally being unrolled by cellular operators worldwide. The initial deployments in far-east locales such as Japan and South Korea have been successful, and now we are starting to see traction in Europe and in the United States.”

A-GPS = Assisted-GPS

Bonus Link (also supplied by Mor) : The mobile GPS semiconductor market is expected to exceed 180 million units in 2008

The Isle of Wight.

I also had a chance to talk with Tom Carden (Of OpenGeoData) last night about their plans to midnight parachute a crack team of Belgium GPS wielding teams onto the Isle of Wight on the first weekend of May to, drum roll…

…Map the whole of the Isle of Wight in 2 days!

Then release the data, of course. If you want to know more about this or help out in any way then go contact Tom!

[Update] More info on the Wiki

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Filed under: gps, talks

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2 Responses to “Mobiles phones and the Isle of Wight.”

  1. Tom Carden, on March 24th, 2006 at 3:02 pm Said:

    Yeah, so… Isle of Wight mapping. I’ll be there, for sure. I think the proverbial Belgians are actually more Norwegian, German and Swedish, but you’ve certainly got the right idea.

    The OpenStreetMap mailing lists and wiki are the best places to find out more about the project. If people can’t make the first weekend of May, I should point out that there’ll be a follow-up project, Mapchester, in Manchester two weeks later.

    Would be good to talk about fun things to do with Flickr/Geobloggers and OpenStreetMap… I had a bunch of ideas to do with auto geo-tagging camera phone pictures of street signs etc. and then use those to annotate the maps. Of course, if we go down this route then there’s also an opportunity there to simultaneously geotag and celltag most of the Isle of Wight, and lots of Manchester too, I think. If that floats your boat, please help!

  2. Tom Carden, on March 24th, 2006 at 3:04 pm Said:

    Of course, a link to the wiki might have helped:

    http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/OSM_Workshop

    For completeness, I’ll note here that there are also a good number of English folks helping too.

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