PlanetEye

Archive for the ‘GPS/Geotagging’ Category

Monday, July 7th, 2008

A-GPS or Assisted GPS

Juan Gonzalez: Vice President, Technology

Travelling around northern Italy and Switzerland gave me a good opportunity to rely on my GPS-enabled BlackBerry as the only navigation device to get from one place to the next.

Our journey took us to Nice, Monaco, Milan, Lake Como and St. Moritz - a roadtrip that includes breathtaking landscapes of the Alps and innumerable opportunities for great photography.

While we never got lost thanks to the always useful Google Maps on the BlackBerry, many times we found ourselves stopping to let the device “catch-up” with us. The article “The disruptive potential of GPS on the iPhone 3G” in ars technica may provide some important clues about the tricky business of delivering reliable location information in these new generation of smartphones like the BlackBerry and the iPhone.

Perhaps a good introduction to the complexities of GPS technology is the article “Assisted GPS and the iPhone”, where the differences between traditional devices and those that use other mechanisms such as Wi-Fi networks and cell towers to accelerate parts of the process.

All this sounds great when you’re travelling around a city which is densely packed with cell towers and there are plenty of Wi-Fi networks available to download required information. Things start to get a bit more tricky when Wi-Fi networks disappear on the road and all the mapping information needs to be downloaded over EDGE networks (this was the case throughout most of our roadtrip).

All of the sudden the device “knows” where you are, but can’t really show the pictures to communicate that information on time. 3G promises to accelerate most downloads by a factor of 2 to 3 times, depending on the type of files.

Yet, there is one final element that remains a bit of a mystery for all these new devices: how can they provide a precise GPS reading much faster than other dedicated GPS navigators that typically need seconds to get a fix.

Being an “Assisted GPS” seems to be the key, but it also introduces imprecision to the process as we discovered a few times after taking the wrong turn. It would seem as if sometimes, even if our location appeared to be known on the map, it would be delayed by unknown factors.

Without knowing too much, I quickly concluded that not having enough cell-towers available to triangulate our position, the device would depend exclusively on an “old-school” GPS reading, leading to the usual delays associated with it.

This would explain why Apple states that in the iPhone “applications may not be designed or marketed for real time route guidance.”

Posted in GPS/Geotagging, Gadgets
No Comments »

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

The Nuances of Discovery

Mark Evans: Director, Community

This a guest post by Matt MacGillivray, our lead developer:

I attended the “Does Location Matter” panel, hosted by Nora Young with special guest Bill Buxton at mesh on Tuesday. It was a different discussion than I was expecting, but in a good way. While the conversation focused on the concept of ‘telepresence‘ , it was an interesting usability discussion.

At the heart of the conversation, Bill, a usability researcher, drove home the idea of building systems that adhere to existing social protocols. What does this mean? Let’s try to understand this by way of an example Bill used.

If I wanted to speak to someone who was already having a conversation, I would approach them in a way that they could see me in their periphery. I would generally wait for a visual cue that would indicate whether they wanted to engage in a conversation, wait or to come back later.

Within the online world, we have chatting and video conferencing. When a conversation is initiated, a high contrast window generally appears on your desktop immediately. Imagine someone putting their face 6″ from yours, while waiting to engage in a conversation. It’s very distracting, and doesn’t allow you to easily ignore, acknowledge or reschedule a conversation.

Does it make sense to ignore the social protocols that have already been established? Is it easier for users to understand, or interact with a particular application if it extends or builds on existing social nuances?

What nuances exist within the discovery, planning and taking of a trip? How can we leverage these nuances to make the experience more compelling?

Posted in GPS/Geotagging, Travel
No Comments »

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

Thank you, Where 2.0

Juan Gonzalez: Vice President, Technology

Thank you to the O’Reilly’s team for inviting me to speak at Where 2.0. The execution of the conference was superb and every single detail was planned in advance.

While the line-up of fellow speakers was great, I believe at these events, there is just as much value in the networking that takes place. During the conference, there were plenty of opportunities to meet new people.

At PlanetEye, there has been a long tradition of research backing up everything we do, and we wanted to share a little bit of what we’ve learned from our journey building the site.

“Crawling the web for GeoData” was a quick summary of the many techniques that we have adopted at PlanetEye to create a valuable online travel planning service. As many people commented after the talk, the core technologies that we have developed are applicable in other spaces, and we are glad to be able to contribute to the geospatial community.

As I sit down to write these lines, my voice has faded almost completely, a sign of the many valuable conversations that took place. I’m looking forward to keep them going online.

Posted in GPS/Geotagging, PlanetEye
1 Comment »

Monday, May 12th, 2008

Where 2.0

Juan Gonzalez: Vice President, Technology

For the next three days, companies working in the location industry are getting together in Burlingame, Ca. for the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference.

The location industry includes everyone creating, aggregating, analyzing, mapping and searching geographic data. While maps are perhaps the ultimate graphic interface for the Web, most users will only get to know a handful of them. But the ecosystem of companies required to make them happen is vast.

To create a valuable online travel planning service, PlanetEye has contributed to the field by advancing geocoding techniques, aggregating unstructured geodata, fast retrieval and analysis and a superb set of tools for visualizing the data.

In the process, we have discovered that this space has learned important lessons about openness, creating platforms instead of products, services instead of Web sites and, ultimately, fostering a new generation of tools that will propel location-aware services to the forefront of consumers’ minds.

While the full conference schedule is available online, here are some of the talks I’ll be attending:

Of course, you can expect many of these to influence how PlanetEye evolves to integrate the latest technologies in the field.

Posted in GPS/Geotagging, Uncategorized
No Comments »

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

Local blogs

Juan Gonzalez: Vice President, Technology

A couple of months ago I introduced our Local Expert Guides. So far there have been over 600 articles posted for cities like Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, San Diego, Sydney and many more. All these blogs have in common the fact that are written by passionate locals who do their best to share valuable information about their city. But perhaps one of the key features that they all share is the fact that they are geotagged. While the local blog or place blog format has been popular for quite some time, we are using a very unique approach allowing the bloggers to embed maps within the posts.

According to Placeblogger:

A placeblog is an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time. It can be done by one person, a defined group of people, or in a way that’s open to community contribution. It’s not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism. It’s about the lived experience of a place

In its original format local blogging demonstrated its effectiveness as a medium to cover remote regions not reachable by traditional media. Such has been the legacy of projects like Placeblogger and Global Voices Online. Now the format is growing in popularity as demonstrated by mainstream blogs such as Gothamist and LAist, but there is a definite need to improve the tools that allow bloggers to truly bind their stories to the place and we think PlanetEye offers a great feature set that not only attaches the blog to a city but allows every post to be geotagged and linked to an interactive map. The next step is to offer the discovery tools so the articles can be browsed and discovered like any other data point on the map.

Posted in GPS/Geotagging
No Comments »

Monday, March 31st, 2008

Wikipedia GeoHack

Juan Gonzalez: Vice President, Technology

If you’re an avid Wikipedia user, you may have noticed that many pages now include geographic coordinates when appropriate. This information is conveniently identified in a standard way across Wikipedia: Wikipedia geo icon 43° 38′ 53″ N, 79° 23′ 35″ W.

If you click on the link a page with a list of various mapping tools will be displayed, and each one of their links will be tuned to the coordinate originally clicked. This resource is known as the GeoHack. PlanetEye is now listed as one of the map engines available in this page.

Considering that there are more than 200,000 pages currently with geographic coordinates, the volume of visitors coming from Wikipedia is very important. For this reason, we started analyzing our logs to figure out what Wikipedia visitors were mostly interested in.

What we discovered revealed something completely unexpected: Other than the usual large U.S. cities such as New York and Los Angeles and a smaller proportion of international destinations such as Milan and Mexico City, we discovered that among the top five most-visited map regions was a remote area in Alaska. At first, it made little sense that so many people would be interested in such a remote region of the world until we learned that the events narrated by the book/film Into the Wild took place along the Stampede Trail, which is located in this region of Alaska, more specifically near the Denali National Park and Preserve.

If we were able to cross-reference the most visited regions on the PlanetEye map with a feed of the most relevant events shaping public opinion, I’m sure a few more coincidences would appear. At the core it seems that more data is always a good strategy.

In his post More data usually beats better algorithms, Anand Rajaraman provides an account of the results obtained by his students of Data Mining at Stanford:

Netflix has provided a large data set that tells you how nearly half a million people have rated about 18,000 movies. Based on these ratings, you are asked to predict the ratings of these users for movies in the set that they have not rated. The first team to beat the accuracy of Netflix’s proprietary algorithm by a certain margin wins a prize of $1 million!

Different student teams in my class adopted different approaches to the problem, using both published algorithms and novel ideas. Of these, the results from two of the teams illustrate a broader point. Team A came up with a very sophisticated algorithm using the Netflix data. Team B used a very simple algorithm, but they added in additional data beyond the Netflix set: information about movie genres from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). Guess which team did better?

Team B got much better results, close to the best results on the Netflix leaderboard!! I’m really happy for them, and they’re going to tune their algorithm and take a crack at the grand prize. But the bigger point is, adding more, independent data usually beats out designing ever-better algorithms to analyze an existing data set. I’m often suprised that many people in the business, and even in academia, don’t realize this.

The realization that travel planning decisions are made by more than just a good booking engine is a powerful one. Being able to analyze browsing trends as external events shape the curiosity of the community, and use this information to enhance the availability of travel information is something that very few can do and we hope it becomes an important reason for people to favor PlanetEye when thinking about finding inspiration for their next journey.

Posted in GPS/Geotagging, PlanetEye, Travel
2 Comments »

Monday, February 11th, 2008

Stalled Romance? Try GPS!

karen: Marketing Coordinator

It’s that time of year again when everyone’s minds turn to thoughts of love… or, at the last minute, their thoughts turn to the nearest available flower shop for something no doubt dripping in baby’s breath.

If you’re thinking big this year, and eloping, you might want to consider using GPS to make your wedding and honeymoon even more memorable.
My best friend was married last year and her initial idea was to elope. What stopped here were thoughts of her family: not being able to “share the day” with them.Geotagged photos may have changed that for good.

Using the power of Geotagging, you could have your photos taken using a GPS dongle, and then when you upload them to PlanetEye, you could get an overview of your trip that you could share with your family and friends, so they can gain the feeling of being there. (Okay it might not be a 1:1 Substitute for your dad giving you away, but you get the point.)

This is just one of the ways Geotagging can improve your life by bringing captured experiences into a shared environment. Get an account today, and give it a try, because on the web, as in love, you never know unless you try.

Posted in GPS/Geotagging, Photography, PlanetEye
No Comments »

Monday, February 11th, 2008

Cameras with GPS: When, How?

Mark Evans: Director, Community

By Mark Evans

While geotagging and GPS are gaining more momentum among photographers, a key piece missing from the equation is cameras that come equipped with GPS functionality. There’s a little bit of activity but it still seems like onboard GPS is not going to happen as a standard feature soon.

Underexposed’s Stephen Shankland recently interview Canon’s Chuck Westfall at the Photo Marketing Association Trade Show. Among the topics they touched upon were GPS. Here’s an excerpt from the interview.

Q: Geotagging is a hot subject, and much of the discussion at the PMA show seems to have moved from when it will arrive in cameras rather than whether it will. When do you think it will?

Westfall: The desirability of that feature is quite clear. You can see reasons why–classifying, sorting, and searching photos–especially with the advances in technology starting to appear that is taking advantage of the (location) information. That’s why we started putting in the optional capability with the wireless transmitters (accessories available for higher-end Canon SLRs).

Q: How far away is the geotagging era?
Westfall: There’s no doubt we’ll see cameras with built-in GPS within the next two years, possibly sooner. I’m not able to give guidance regarding Canon specifically.

Q: Are you getting pressure to add geotagging support from Web sites such as Google and Yahoo that enable users to make use of geotagged photos?
Westfall: Mostly we’re hearing from the vertical markets–professional, commercial, and industrial applications. And the military.

Q: Some envision geotagging as an aspect of “autotagging,” in which a rich set of metadata is recorded when the photograph is taken. It might be possible to combine face recognition with autotagging to label photos automatically.

Westfall: With our PowerShot line, we started autotagging a year ago. We call it “My Category.” It has a total of five or six presets and three customizable tags. When you choose a scene mode, it associates for example a “landscape” tag. It can be done in review, too–you can apply it after the fact. For a camera with face recognition, we know when people are present. This will become much more valuable in the future. Facial recognition is a very powerful feature.

Technorati Tags: Geotagging, GPS, Photography

Posted in GPS/Geotagging
No Comments »

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

Time to Start Geocoding Content?

Mark Evans: Director, Community

By Mark Evans

Are you a local news junkie? Do you still read a newspaper because it’s the best way find out what’s happening where you live? If so, Google has a new service with Google News that lets you receive headlines for your city, town, etc.

Not surprisingly, there’s lots of reaction from the Google-obsessed blogosphere but one post that caught my eye was Journalistopia, which proclaimed:

“WE MUST START GEOCODING STORIES.”

Well, that’s an interesting idea given geotagging is becoming all the rage within the photography world.

The question is how would content be geotagged? Would it simply be a matter of including the address/latitude and longitude of where a news event happened within an article? Or would the address/latitude and longitude coordinates be embedded within the article’s HTML structure?

For more, check out TechCrunch and Larry Dignan.

Technorati Tags: GPS, Geotagging, Google

Posted in GPS/Geotagging
No Comments »

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

The Future of Google Maps?

Mark Evans: Director, Community

Google Maps’ street view service has been controversial since its launch, raising a myriad of issues such as privacy and to what extent Google can give people a snapshot of the entire world.

This spoof video is funny until you start to think about easy it would be for it to become reality…if it already isn’t a reality but we don’t know it yet.