:A2B and More

Yesterday, Google officially released its Google Maps API - the details of how to put Google maps on a website using Javascript. This is quite an amazing development. No geocoding or routing, but I’m sure that’s due to licensing with Navteq and TeleAtlas.

Having signed up and received my key, I tried a few things out with the mapping service last night (and had to join their mailing-list to get a couple of things sorted out.

This is what I’ve come up with so far - putting markers on a map of my choosing.

The main disadvantage so far is that there’s no way to specify a map which specifies longitudes (West and East) for its left- and right-hand edges, and latitudes (North and South) for it’s top and bottom. Instead, you have to do this by centering the map on a latitude and longitude, then choose a zoom level appropriate for the number of markers you have on the map. Oh well, guess I can do something with it…

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Interesting to see whilst reading the RSS feed from Eurotelcoblog that there were a couple of adverts which had somehow slipped in there… one of which was for Pings.ws - apparently a new site which provides weblogger services. Must be that the adverts get put into the blogspot RSS feeds automatically - I’d never noticed it before. I’ll try and get A2B added to the list.

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A great report just out from a group of quangos (at least I think they’re quangos) promoting cooperation in biofuels in Europe. It also says that European production of biofuels is expected to quadruple by 2010. Amazing! Watch out for some major companies emerging in this area in the next year or two.

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Great to see that Johnson Press, owner of an extensive stable of UK local newspaper titles, has introduced an RSS feed for each of them.

This should be interesting for A2B as, knowing which town the news is relevant to, we can geocode the feed and return local news automatically using a location-enabled search.

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Great post to the BBC Backstage mailing-list earlier from Brit. He’s working on a new online version of the board game Monopoly, involving black London taxis driving round London from board location to board location. Here’s an overview of how it will work:

“Essentially, real places in London have been GPS tagged with hotspots (variable dimensions) in accordance with locations on the new Monopoly board. The playing pieces are GPS transmitter equipped cabs, and as they cross into hotspots (following a sequence of rules) player pieces move round their online board - rent is paid, money accured, etc etc.”

When I asked a couple of questions his colleague Chris Walker went on to say this:

“Players could hail the cabs if they wanted to (they are all liveried up etc. so easy to spot) but of course, you’d have to be very hardcore to want to spend real cash moving your piece round the board to win virtual cash The cab moves around of its own accord otherwise - all 18 of them in fact - and the player’s board piece (and the other 5) move around the virtual board appropriately, dependent on the hotspots crossed etc.”

It all sounds rather majestic - I love the idea! They’ll also be using the BBC’s real-time traffic feeds to add tension to the game. The website is here. Due to go live on 21st of June.

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Robert Lindsay seems to find A2B a bit mysterious (read down to the bottom). I left a comment explaining what our service does.

It’s great to see Nancy Redford mentioning us, but again, some slight confusion. Definitely our fault, and we need to update the documentation.

This kind of thing seems to be a problem in general for A2B. We’re constantly looking for ways to simplify what we offer and explain it clearly. Maybe we need an overall “what A2B can do” page as we’ve become quite feature-rich. There’s also still a lot posted in the A2B Forum which hasn’t made it into the main site documentation yet.

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Good to see on
O’Reilly Radar that the latitudes and longitudes are back online in the Yahoo! RSS feeds - we’re going to try and combine this with the feeds at BBC Backstage and come up with some kind of experimental feed for use on Placelab-capable Series 60 phones.

Thanks also to Greg and Jeffrey for pointing me in the right direction to actually pin down the latitudes and longitudes…

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I finally posted information on how to get the Placelab proxy running on Series 60 phones. WIth any luck people will download it, try it out, point it at the A2B mobile Placelab search and start stumbling GSM cells.

I’ve also posted a link to the source on the Placelab developer mailing-list - with any luck someone will help out given my minimal CVS experience.

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