On Day 1 the keynote speaker Vic Gundotra, the VP of Engineering at Google got things going with an excellent introduction into each of the session streams in a pretty seamless cohesive manner. A good launching point was the historical look at computing from mainframes to PCs to the internet, pointing to the cloud (grid) computing future of Google’s App engine and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. Over the next 90 minutes he touched on Gears, Android, Web Toolkit and Open social among dozens of other themes running through the conference.

An android demo given by Steve Horowitz, the Engineering Director for Android, was one of the morning’s highlights.  Showing an iPhone like application interface and nifty integration between google maps, mail and the killer demo of street view combined with the built in compass of the demo h/w (he rotated the handset showing the streetview which panned in synch with the compass) the demo put to rest our concerns about the platform’s maturity.

Touching on the session highlights for a minute: Android was pretty exciting with its fairly open architecture, multivendor support, Google Earth API, the ability to have an instance of Google Earth in your browser with a plugin was *amazing* and the MyMapsAPI was also really nice.  Open Social finally was a bit of an eye opener to us.  For various reasons we’ve been sitting on the fence with it and all it took was 2 days of sessions to convince us that it’s a good idea.  Watch this space.

I will be going into a bit more depth into the technology and application for rimrocked over the next few weeks, but we’re going to try to keep in touch a bit more often.

The organizers approached Rimrocked about using our GPS tracking technology to plot their progress as they journeyed across the country. A couple of breakfasts with the guys at Fathers and Sons near Ottawa University, and away we went (thanks for the food!). Given the cause, we were happy to help out.  You can see the application of Rimrocked by visiting www.rimrocked.com/tc

They’ve already racked up the miles and uploaded lots of pictures.
The Tour got underway in Port Renfrew, British Columbia will finish in St. John’s, Newfoundland some 85 days later. Best wishes to Kyle, Steve, Alex and Andrew.  Rimrocked will be with you every kilometer of the way!

According to rimrocked cxo, Andrew Draper, “Up until now we’ve been limited by pixels, with the addition of 255 characters this will really take the web surfing experience to the next level, it’s a quantum leap in computing .”, Andrew says

“Yes, we’re bringing it all together” responded Amit.

While mobile computing platforms have been rushing to bring 2D and 3D to handheld devices, they’ve missed the crucial 1D user experience.

“What do Apple’s iPod nano, Nintendo’s Wii and the next big thing all have in common? They’ve all mastered the dimension of dimensions” Amit Nandi from rimrocked says obtusely. “They are so far gone in their respective dimension categories, that they’re not even there.” Indeed. Citing ‘responsiveness’, ‘unparalleled rates of refresh’, and ‘class-leading memory consumption’ Andrew goes on to expound the advantages of this modern-day miracle.

When pressed for a working demo of rimAscii (pronounced Rim-raz-key), Andrew pointed to www.asciimaps.com. “Well, it’s true we didn’t develop this technology, but they’re the equivalent of google maps. We believe that we’re the first people even thinking of licensing this technology and have a killer application for their building block technology.”

Added Amit, “We think this will perfectly position us to be of great interest to potential investors.”

Time will only tell.

A record 28 Teams started the race this year and got off to a dramatic start. Team 21 fielded by the Boisverts, a father-son team, crashed into an errant villager who was unaware of the race start. A split helment, stiches and trashed snowmobile was the result. Fortunately the younger Boisvert wasn’t seriously hurt. A few hours later the snowmobile was rebuilt and the team was back in the race. We’re following the last 16 hours of the race to see how they do.

The race leaders have swapped spots repeatedly, ensuring a dramatic unpredictable race. It’s also been a race of attrition as in other years, engine breakdowns, busted tracks and general mechanical trouble have all conspired against the racers.

This is rimrocked’s first event, and Andrew and I have been working around to clock tweaking the experience, fielding feedback and for the first day fixing minor problems. The traffic experienced by this race have exceeded our expectations.  But coming to Labrador City and talking to people here involved in Cain’s Quest has really hit home how much being able to follow this event means to the snowmobiling community, not only here, but to fans of the race across the US and the world.

People from over 40 countries have connected to the Cain’s Quest Race at Rimrocked and we’ve gotten about a half a million page views in just under 4 days.
I’d encourage you to tune in to follow the exciting finish of the race.

Recently the coffee maker that my wife and I have had for the last 5 or so years decided to kick the bucket. We should have guessed a few weeks ago when it started leaking out the side it was on it’s last legs, but simply turning the carafe to catch the leak solved that problem.

It’s important to me to have a well-thought out coffee maker. I’m at my most vulnerable (and grumpy) first thing in the morning and don’t want to risk making it worse by having the first thing i do after i get up go wrong. So with our coffee maker broken my wife and i set out to find a replacement - this ended up being a 2 day project.

The last machine that we had was not an expensive one, but it was simple and well thought out. For instance the water reservoir pulled out and could be filled and put back in which meant no spilt water on the counter as you tried to fill the back of the machine. Also, the basket that the filter sat in was removable so you just grabbed it, dumped it into the garbage can and the filter (with used coffee grinds) slid in to the garbage never having had to touch the wet filter or risk spilling/breaking it on the way to the garbage can. It also made a good cup of coffee. I think it cost us a total of $40 but sadly, Hamilton Beach no longer makes this model (to be fair it was 5-6 years ago that we got it).

So the search began…between the 2 of us we were a little picky (e.g. knew it was 5-6 year thing we had to live with so it had to fill some pre-determined criteria so that it would not be a point of contention to complain about for that amount of time). I wanted it to be easy to fill and maintain and my wife didn’t want a stainless steel carafe (I don’t really know why that was an issue but any one who’s married knows to choose their battles wisely and this wasn’t one that was gonna do any good to argue…so no stainless steel).

We tried a number of stores over the course of 2 evenings to no avail, there was one or two that were potential candidates but nothing that really stood out. We finally ended up choosing the KitchenAid* JavaStudio Coffeemaker, it filled most of our needs - the water can be poured in from the front ensuring less of a hassle while on the counter top, it has a glass carafe, and it has a removable basket to dispose of the grounds. However, there was one major sticking point - it was white. They had 3 colours to choose from white, red and black. My wife was dead set on black (can’t blame i preferred it to) however the red and white models were marked down to $89.99 whereas the black model was still priced at $179.99. It may have done what we were looking for but i’m not about to part with $180 if it doesn’t clean itself or have a pot of coffee ready for me as soon as i think about wanting a cup of coffee. So after a brief discussion we ended up with the white model - saving ourselves $90 in the process. We brought home and it looks find on the counter AND most importantly it fulfills our requirements and (so far) makes a good pot of coffee.

This morning while setting up the machine i noticed a really great detail on the carafe, on the side where it has the number of cups of coffee there’s 2 part to it, one for the number of cups of coffee, the other for the amount of water required to get that many cups of coffee. I often noticed with our old machine that i’d put in 12 cups of water and only get 10-11 cups of coffee - a normal thing when you heat water up is that evaporates so not a big deal, but this small detail actually worked - this morning i got the exact amount of coffee i thought i was making.

* I generally dislike KitchenAid products so this was a hard choice - they seem to be the fine choice of Yuppies everywhere these days which immediately causes me to hate anything but i also find their products are designed to look cool but are usually not great in the usability end of things and they’re generally way over-priced for what they are - now, i’m more than willing to pay for good design (and have on many occasions) but not when most of the design has gone in to the way it looks and not the way it works. Just because it looks good doesn’t mean it’s well-designed, generally looking good certainly helps something work better, but looking good doesn’t in itself provide good design.

Manual input was almost an after-thought when we were first developing rimrocked as we believed that using a real-time GPS device or uploading GPX/KML from an existing file (e.g. from a GPS data logger) would be so much easier nobody would want to use a manual input feature. Boy were we wrong. It’s just so convenient to add your trip details, click the points where you were and then click “Add Trip” - I did it at the end of each day I was away. You can see them at my wife and I’s group for our trip: Cheryl and Andrew’s California Adventures.

Of course, using a real-time GPS device remains the fastest/easiest way to add map points to rimrocked as they just automagically are there when you log in after a trip (or if you set up the trip before you go others can see where you are in real-time) but given the cost versus ease of use the manual editor comes in a very close second.

So, don’t let not having a GPS device stop you from using Rimrocked - you’ll get all the functionality and ease of use by placing your points on the map manually. One feature to look forward to in regards to the manual tripinputinator (which will be forthcoming shortly) is to be able to add more points to an existing trip - look for it soon!

Also, as part of opening up sign-ups we’ve made a slight change to our commenting system, you used to have to be a friend before commenting on a trip or journal entry of another person, however, comments are now open to anyone who has a rimrocked account, which means you should sign-up, sign-in and start socializing with everyone at rimrocked!

If you have any questions, comments or bugs to report please email us as we’d really like to hear anything you have to say - good, bad or otherwise. Not because we’re starved for social interaction (although this might be partly the case) but because we value your insight into what we’ve created and would like to make it even better.

We have lots of announcements to make over the coming months, so stay tuned to this blog, we’ll be announcing them here first.

Update: A slight adjustment to the above, although the invites are gone, sign-ups will now require a ‘webcode’ for your new account to be activated. Of course this puts the onus on us to provide webcodes, so without further adu, if you’re reading this and would like to sign-up, simply go to the Rimrocked home page, click “Sign-up” and use the webcode “blog”.

Recently Garmin and GE announced 2 very interesting GPS enabled devices, one is a phone, the other a digital camera.

Garmin Nuviphone

Although not expected to be released until the summer, this Garmin Nuviphone looks a lot like the Apple iPhone from the provided photos and has the potential to alter the GPS market landscape as well as the cellphone marketplace - competition in both markets is welcome in both in my opinion as good competition pushes companies to innovate and focus on the user experience - both things that benefit the consumer greatly (and in turn the companies that understand and implement these kinds of strategies).

The Nuviphone appears to be very well thought out design wise and executed well - It’s impossible to know what the real experience will be like as size/weight/battery life/price have not yet been disclosed, but for now I’m quite interested and would consider one instead of the iPhone (if either are ever released in Canada and the data rates in Canada fall inline with the rest of the developed world - I’m looking at you Rogers).

Garmin already has a very good understading of user experience on small devices and with GPS making it’s way (slowly) into digital cameras and cell phones it seems like a natural decision on Garmin’s part to me.

GE E1050

This might not be news to most as it was announced a week or so ago (I’m a little behind since my vacation) but it’s worth saying nonetheless…

With 10 megapixels, high-def movie recording, a touchscreen, GPS receiver with a MSRP of $249.99 this is a camera worth keeping an eye on! The E1050 is the first affordable camera I’ve seen with a GPS receiver on board - there’s a couple of others but the price vs. features keeps them off my list.

I don’t have any experience with GE cameras as I’m quite fond of my Canon Powershot and Rebel but at $250 I might be willing to try this out as it should be a fairly inexpensive way to have your photos automagically geocoded - and you can bet that we’ll be working on adding the ability to rimrocked to interpret the location data on the photos from this camera!

I couldn’t find any information on availability but it’s marked as 2008 camera, so keep an eye out for this digital camera - it might be the first affordable gps-enabled camera but it certainly won’t be the last, I’d expect increased competition in this market over the next year or so, which can only mean better options/experiences available to consumers - always a welcome thing!

Check out these links to learn more:
› Nuviphone
› GE E1050

After losing my Trackstick somewhere in the bush and just before embarking on a trip to California I decided I’d like another data logger as they’re quite small and make adding trip points on Rimrocked quite easy. So I started searching online to see what else out there as I wasn’t completely satisfied with the Trackstick. After reading a number of reviews online I decided on the GlobalSat DG-100 and went to canadagps.com and purchased one. At $120 it was about $30 cheaper than the Trackstick (I’ve since seen the DG-100 for as low as $80, so shop around if you’re thinking of buying one).

I’m quite fond of this little GPS logger as it’s quite easy to use - it has a single on/off button, 3 lights (one to show that a satellite signal has been acquired, one to say it’s on, and one that lets you know when the onboard memory is getting full) and a switch on the side that allows you to switch, on the fly, from one of 3. There’s also a place for an external antenna if you so desire.

The provided software, in my experience, worked fairly well, the user interface was a little clunky and not terribly intuitive (GlobalSat let me know if you’d like some help, I’d love to work on a new GUI for stuff like this!) however it did as it should. From the software you can set exactly what you want the settings of the 3 position switch to do, using a combination of time intervals and distance travelled.

After taking the DG-100 with me to California and using it while driving from San Francisco up to the coast to Bodega Bay and throughout Sonoma/Napa for a week I’m quite impressed with it and highly recommend it if you’re looking for a GPS data logger device to track your movements, record where you’ve been on a trip.