Last night I got to attend a talk given by Robin Chase, Founder and Former CEO of Zipcar. Her talk was titled “Sustainable Transportation and Accessibility Research & Transformation”, where she discussed how to decrease the impact of transportation on the environment and also using new transportation paradigms (such as shared car ownership) as a vehicle for bringing out mesh networks.

Mesh networks are simple: everything is a sensor and can connect to other sensors. She referred to it as “Ad Hoc Wireless networking”, but I think that confuses the issue, because then people start thinking it just means WiFi everywhere.

What it really means is that all of these sensors and network devices can talk to one another, gather, share, and use information. For example, if every car was a member of the mesh network, they would all share traffic information, road conditions, and driver destination, perhaps. Then your in-dash display would update real-time traffic ahead of you as each of these cars shared their data. Also, you may be able to get internet down the line as you all shared a common network system.

Other examples that have popped up in the past include finding potential mates/friends around you by a profile you broadcast, or tracking birds with RFID.

Of course, now that you have all this data, how do you share it? Robin says she envisions all of this being built on open-source technologies, to allow for “innovation” (aka ‘good hacking’). Open standards like GeoRSS could also be used to begin disseminating all of this data as it streams in and share it between devices. See the notes on Mikel’s XTech talk for more inspiration along those lines.

If the devices are cheap (< $100), open-design, and run on open-software, this is a great future. If, however, it is run by proprietary, expensive technology, and closed standards, then you’ll have a future where you get fast connections in your Ford car from other Ford cars, but no connection to all those BMW’s or Toyotas on the road.

A couple of days ago I mentioned some Greasemonkey scripts I wrote. One of them, which I didn’t discuss, is particularly devious.

What happens when users have the ability to hijack sites and how they expect to be used? For example, there are scripts to provide mapping functionality within Flickr!, or to compare book prices on Amazon.com with other vendors.

MapThis! overrides the “Map This!” link that shows up in GMail when an address is detected. Instead of linking to just a plain-ol’ googlemap, the link is “hijacked” to provide routing directions from the user’s geolocated position (using HostIP) to the address in the email.

This is useful, for example, if a friend sends you the address of their house, or that cool roller-rink with disco ball that you’re meeting up at and you want to quickly get directions.

It also demonstrates how a user isn’t limited by the interface a site-designer supplied, allowing them to customize and use the site as they wan.

Mashable has some thoughts on micropayments, in this case via indieKarma. indieKarma pays you a penny for every hour a visitor spends on your site. Implementation seems weak, as it requires both the viewer and site to have accounts setup and logged in to indieKarma (e.g. won’t work from public workstations)

Mashable states:

Does anyone really think that micropayments are a good idea? Paying one cent for every site I visit feels like a reading tax

I think micropayments are actually a great idea. Except for the web, we already pay a “reading tax” on everything: newspapers, magazines, books. We also pay a watching tax (except for network tv), a listening tax (either via ads, or buy your cd) and so on.

And micropayments shouldn’t apply to just websites. Open-source software is used by individuals and companies who find value in the tool and in some cases make money. Yet in most cases the original developer(s) never see a single $0.01. I can speak for this myself. There have been over 7000 downloads (that I know of via the tracking stats I have) of one of my programs DashSaver. This includes being included in MacWorld UK, and a Japanese Mac magazine, and being very favorably reviewed several times on sites and podcasts. Guess how much money it’s made me? (if you guessed anything other than $0.00, you were wrong - though if you guessed that it did win me a broken Newton Message Pad you’d be correct).

This doesn’t really bother me. I like making software and tools that people find useful. However, I’m a little less inclined, and able, to make great tools/sites/stuff when it comes out of my free-time and I don’t even have the option of making it my ‘day job’.

The only ways someone can monetize, and therefore begin to properly support themselves and produce great content and software is via advertising. Advertising drives up the cost of goods, makes a site fugly, and also can have a driving impact on the content itself (see also Lobbying of governments by corporations).

Anyways, Micropayments seem like a pretty decent idea - just have yet to be implemented well. The only current means of doing payments easily and universally is via PayPal, which takes a good chunk of the change for itself. And indieKarma requires 1 hour of viewing for 1 cent? Personally, I rarely spend more than 10 minutes on a site, and that’s for a good site.

So do what I do, if you like a site/resource, then make sure and give their advertisements a couple of clicks. Leave the windows open for awhile, and even click around and see what the advertiser has to offer. It’s no money out of your pocket, takes a short amount of time, and you’ll pay the site more than programs like indieKarma are offering.

Nokia has released their open-source mobile phone server. It’s running Apache, which seems kind of heavy-handed for an embedded web-server, but definitely full-featured.

Combine a local mobile webserver with the Opera Mini or Full Opera web browser makes for rapid development of nice phone applications.

They even offer some nice suggestions:

Interactive, Context and Location Dependent Content

These demonstrate that a website on a mobile phone is not just like any other website that simply happens to be on a mobile phone, but that it enables functionality that in the context of regular stationary websites is largely meaningless.

* Remote interactive picture taking.
* Use the phone as a webcam.
* Find other mobile web sites in the proximity.
* Find out the location of a mobile website (cellid).

For the past several months I’ve been playing with the Delorme Bluelogger GPS. It’s a very nice GPS receiver in its own right, but has the unique feature (for BT receivers) of including onboard logging. This is an great feature as it allows me to turn on the unit, toss it in my bag (somewhere on top, so it can still get a view of the sky) and forget about it. I don’t need to grab multiple devices, such as the receiver and a PDA or computer in order to receive and store my GPS waypoints.

This article will give a short overview of how to use the BlueLogger for a variety of applications. I use it primarily for geolocating photographs, but it’s also nice for any location-based activity.

The Bluelogger comes with the following:

• Bluelogger device
• Carrying case (with belt loop)
• Car charger
• Wall charger
• Charging stand (can work with either car or wall charger)
• Bluelogger Windows software

Connecting to GPS

To connect to the Bluelogger, you will need a bluetooth adapter. Many computers now come with bluetooth built-in or as an add-on option. If this isn’t the case, I would recommend the D-Link DBT-120. It’s probably the only D-Link product I can recommend, but I’ve had great luck with them, and never run into any device that it hasn’t worked with (and I have had problems with other BT adapters, especially on my Mac).

Once you have a bluetooth adapter, you will need to setup a connection to the device by pairing them. See your devices’/operating systems’ manuals on how to do this.

A very slick option is to run gpsd, which is a service-daemon running in the background that allows multiple connections to the single GPS device. Normally, only 1 software instance can connect at a time. With GPSd, you can “serve” your location. What would be really cool is to have GPSd be able to connect in with Geolocation by IP or Wifi as well as an actual GPS device to seamlessly switch between location technique.

GPSUtility is a nice, compact, graphical GPS application for Mac OS X. It can connect either directly to the GPS bluetooth port, or via gpsd. You can view location, satellite strengths, verbose NMEA output, and speed.

KisMac, while not a GPS-specific applicaiton, has excellent GPS support. KisMac is actually a wireless stumbler, which can also mark the latitude, longitude, and strength of detected networks and plot these on a map.

Storing & Viewing tracks

The Bluelogger software (currently Windows only) can export the tracks as GPL files. GPSBabel can convert these to a more useful format, such as GPX, which an XML format for GPS data.

Since using the bluelogger usually entails turning it on and off often, the entire track log will contain many separate trips. GPSBabel supports splitting up tracks based on a time separation. Each segment will be a self-contained track.

The following example will convert a GPL file to a GPX file, and make a individual track for any separation of 4 hours between points.

$ gpsbabel
  -i gpl -f Track_2005_11_23.gpl
  -x track,pack,split=4h,title="LOG # %c"
  -o gpx -F Track_2005_11_23.gpx

Displaying tracks

There are several options for displaying your tracks:

GPX Tracks

GPXLoader

• GPX Tracks HTML file

GPS and Nokia 770

ThoughtFix has a fairly comprehensive tutorial on setting up GPSDrive with a Bluetooth GPS receiver. They went with the i-Blue High Sensitivity Bluetooth GPS, which looks like a nice unit, but lacks logging.

Resources

• NMEA Protocol fields
• GPS Running Log -> GoogleMap on website
• Geocode Photos
• RoboGeo Windows photo-geocoding
• OziPhotoTool