A quick note, we’ve got a great solution for urban GPS tracking with the Sanav CT-58 among other devices. If you’re interested in GSM based tracking and rimrocked mapping, this is the place to be.
Andrew and I just spent the last couple of days at Google I/O 2008. It’s been a fantastic 2 days, energizing us both. Here are my quick reflective impressions.
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.
Recently, we’ve helped out a group of four Ottawa area university students in their efforts to raise money for the Canadian Cancer Society. The basis of their fund raising effort is a cross Canada bicycle ride. They’re calling it the Typical Canadians Tour in recognition of the thousands of typical Canadians who are fighting cancer every day.
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!