Tom Printy’s Blog

With recent announced funding that both Choicestream and Aggregate Knowlege are getting there are still some money to be made in this space.  But with the valuation of these two companies I wonder what types of contracts they are going to have to put togther just to stay a float. These guys are also leaving a nice niche where smaller companies can move in and work out deals with some smaller web site/service.  It is interesting to see how much money these guys are going to burn through.

I signed up to be a beta tester of the Dash.net in car navigation system.  This looks to be the first full connected GPS navigation unit.  I have had my eye on a TomTom but might just wait till this thing comes out, even if I am not chosen as a beta tester.  They will also be at Where2.0 this year so maybe I will get to meet some of the guys there.

Today I install OpenGTS (Open GPS Tracking System). Eseentailly this is a jsp software app that collects tracking informatio from GPS enabled devices and displays reports and the current location of the device on a google map. The system can support multiple accounts with multiple users per account.  I haven’t actually entered any tracking information into the system but it seems that this part of the application is pretty complete. The part where this application is lacking is in the device and account management. As far as I know the only way to administer these are through shell scripts that interact with the database.

Overall the software was not terrible to install. The hardest part that I had was making sure I had all the various java packages that are required for the build of the war files.  Every time that you want to make a configuration change however you must rebuild the main .war file. Now that it is all installed It shouldn’t be too hard to maintain

There are some enhancements to the system that might make this better. I would like to see all the administration of accounts and devices to happen through the UI. I would also like to see some way to integrate a billing system into the system. This way one would be able to have people sign up themselves and add devices and for you the owner of the service to bill for the use of the system.

My next step to actually generate some track logs and actually see how the reports look and what the google maps looks like.

The google maps team release the MyMaps application today. There is a good writeup of how to use it on the Oogle Earth Blog. I went ahead and created my own map just to try it out. It seems that this is a good effort by google to get people to try and generate content for Google. Perhaps they are trying to build a POI (points of interest) database. I personally think that this is a direct attack on services like Platial where Google is trying to keep eyes on their site such that they can deliver without paying Adsense payments.

I think that this is a nice little solution for you to exchange maps with freinds but beyond that it doesn’t do much. There is a limit of 50 markers per map for example so if you have a lot of items to but on the map this solution is not for you. You cannot embed this map into another application. So right now this is a neat little trick that may help people share maps but I don’t think that it will go anywhere else. I think that most companies will want to control thier brand such that they will not want to link off onto another site that they do not control.