Category: mobile

Trivia night destroyer – wikipedia on the go

In 1951, or so the story goes, the Guinness book of records was conceived when Sir Hugh Beaver realised that there was no reference book available to answer the question which is the fastest game bird in Europe, the golden plover or the grouse?

Nowadays the Guinness book of records has been superseded by wikipedia and the answer to all question current and arcane, “TO THE WIKIPEDIA!” is a cry heard all to often when a polite conversation degrades in to a slagging match. For the record glass is not a very slowly moving liquid and you can’t see the Coriolis effect in a toilet bowl flush (also dropping sugar into a draining sink does not help determine rotation).

However till now to answer a questions of this type required a computer and an internet link. Which meant that in the rarefied environment of Pub Trivia it has thus far been limited to what was been carried around solely in the competitors heads. This is slowly been eroded away, first mobile phones arrived, so you could ring a friend near a computer to get and answer. Then phones became GPRS enabled allowing internet access which will work, but is expensive. These are slowly been replaced by wifi enabled phones, but then this is currently limited as there may be no access point available (the rule rather than the exception in my experience). Thus far, even though the technology exists and has for a while it is patchy, cumbersome or expensive.

So the solution is simple, instead of trying to get to wikipedia over expensive or patchy infrastructure, why not just bring it with you? An enterprising gentlemen, ttsiod, has written a program that allows him to access a local copy of wikipedia on his laptop. No matter where he goes in the world he always has access, albeit to a static version of the people encyclopedia.

Not many people know that you can download the entire contents of wikipedia, it’s current compressed size is 2.9 GB. After hacking around with few open tools ttsiod is able to browse and keyword search his local wikipedia. Admittedly his current implementation isn’t for the faint hearted. However, how long will it take to port to an even more portable device, like the iPhone (with 8 GB of space) or other smart phone, the N95 for example has a microSD slot and disks sizes already up into the 4GB space.

It will only be a matter of time before all that knowledge can be bubbled down and people will be able to carry the font of human knowledge in their pocket. At that point in time any office argument will be solved in seconds and all trivia night questions are a predictive text search away. Can you smell the future? Are you excited? Are you scared?

Update : Imagine no longer, 2 weeks later, the future is here.

Picasa, map my photo, please!

Picasa web albums is a strange beast. Launched in beta over a year ago it seemed all geared up to take on Flickr. That didn’t happen and so far there has been no real move to wards making picasa the social web experience that is flickr’s power. Instead Google seem content to allow picasa web albums as a backup storage for photographs with the ability to share with other people(it is also used as a storage medium to power images hosted on blogs like this one.)

Today google announced that they have added geotag support in Picasa.

Map My Photos

For the uninitiated geotagging involves assigning a geographic co-ordinate to an image. It has been around for a long time, the military been a big user, but support has grown is recent years. The biggest impact was the release of Google maps/Earth which allowed a user to find the co-ordinates of the given location. This was then extended by the Google API plugin that allowed people to pull down the co-ordinates of that location and apply in in various ways to images, either adding the co-ordinates in the EXIF of the digital image or as tags on the flickr page hosting the image.

Last August Flickr added integrated support for image geolocation, using yahoo maps instead of google maps which has introduced geotagging to the masses. However the more discerning geotaggers are not too fond of yahoo maps and still geotag using google maps.

It is surprising that picasa web albums took so long to added geo location support. Especially since the picasa tools, picasa2 (very confusing) has had geotag support, using google earth for a while. However they might have been playing the long game on this one as in the same release they also announced mobile support for picasa web albums. With phones beginning to come with GPS as standard (now that cameras are de-facto and places like Europe are demanding that phones have GPS) all images will be geotagged in the future so the requirement to physically place a image in space will no longer fall to the user any more.

This means uploaded images to picasa web albums will be in the correct locations and the user will be able to see where the images were taken. This could be very helpful to travelers on exotic holidays. It’s easy to tag images where you are from as you more than likely know the locations intimately it is not easy if you were taken through the depths of asia.

Mobile Internet – The future


Nokia n95
Originally uploaded by KhE 龙.

Nokia recently released their new mobile, the N95 , which seems to me to be the first in a new wave of mobile devices that will change how we view and use internet. While the phone and the camera is old news (however at 5 megapixels thats not to be sniffed at) it was the addition of GPS and WiFi that got me really thinking, particularly what is going to happen once your computer is mobile, can always access the internet, it always know exactly where it is and is placed in the hands of the masses and no longer the domain of the geeks.

My personal feeling is that mobile internet is the next big thing. I recently traveled around Australia with a WiFi enable PDA and I was surprised by the amount of wireless nodes nearly every where I went. In some places I was able to get free internet access and access content from there.

However one of the biggest stumbling blocks that has yet to be wholly addressed is that screens on mobile devices are going to be small, even with new offerings like the iPhone due at the end of the month toting that the whole front of the phone is the screen. Personally I have found navigating the web as it currently stand clunky. However it internet won’t remain as it is currently, it will change to more effectively fit into this new format.

After I arrived back from my trip with new found wisdom on mobile internet I was surprised to find much blood in the water, both good and bad. First it turns out the the patent trolls are here already and there is a crowd called geomas that is suing verizon claiming to own location based search. They contend that the own the concept of returning search result based on the location of the search. Secondly yahoo have announced a location aware flickr app for mobile devices called Zurfer. It enables to to upload images to flickr taken with a internet enabled, GPS fitted phone and allows people to browse other images taken in the same area. I personally think that this will be huge.

People every now and again talk about a time before PC’s, before e-mail, before google, before youtube, well this is the beginning of mobile internet see you on the other side.