a personal website slash blog
Ever wanted to know what your local subway map would look like?
The designers at Transit Authority Figures might provide an answer. They did some great work in designing subway maps for small towns without public transportation. One interesting map detail is actually the wording: the station names are well chosen, with good local knowledge, not one of those “funny” naming schemas, and it almost makes you believe you’re viewing a real one.
Michael Moore suggested 9 action points to President Obama regarding the bankruptcy of GM. Bottom line of his article: convert GM’s car factories to mass transportation factories and promote energy efficient technology. Basically I would agree, though, I think it’s only one side of the medal and that there are a few more things one might consider:
Working on symptoms never cures the disease. Transportation needs are caused by urban planning. I’ve seen Jacksonville, Florida and I can’t possibly imagine how an urban structure like that one can be run by mass transportation. Providing public transportation services for such spread out areas – I’m talking about population densities as low as 970.9/sq mi in Jacksonville compared to 12,172.3/sq mi in Boston with decent public transportation for instance (source: Wikipedia, see map below) – is a tough task, and not very cost efficient or green. Urban sprawl at such dimensions leaves in most cases no other options than to rely on cars.
Other ways of individual transportation – bicycles, walking – require shorter distances to daily services (groceries, schools, doctors, etc.). Again, a large residential area and a huge mall somewhere along the highway make it impossible to introduce anything but car transportation.
Apart from being the most unpopular word in that country, increasing taxes on energy prices, like proposed in point 9, will hurt poor people first if the policy is not balanced out well. Wealthy people don’t care as much about gas prices, they can afford better cars and probably live somewhere close to city centers where they don’t even need them so much. Poor people on the other hand are the ones who have to take a 2 hour daily commute in an old inefficient car to get to work or bring kids to school. Taxes are an interesting lever in transportation and energy policy, but not the holy grail.
Rethinking urban structures, transportation and energy policies is a time consuming issue. It took almost a century to create the status quo, it’s not gonna change in a single presidential term of 4 years. I believe this country must be prepared for a long way ahead.
The keywords Facebook and Twitter in the short movie abstract caught my attention and made me pick “We Live In Public” as one film I wanted to see out of the great program at the IFF Boston last weekend.
The documentary is a portrait about Josh Harris, a visionary maniac so to say (cf. luvvy) and possibly
the greatest internet pioneer you’ve never heard of.
Having made millions of dollars in the dot.com bubble, he created and funded eccentric art projects like Quiet: We Live in Public, a colony with 100 people living under 24-hour surveillance in a bunker in New York City.
People want 15 min of fame, every day.
The master tapes filmed in the bunker must be a paradise for psychologists and sociologists and probably deserve a place in a university library. The bunker is a very brutal, exaggerated and compressed picture of the effects of sacrificing privacy and sharing your life with literally everybody. That part of the documentary raises the question for me why do we want to share our personal information on commercial platforms like Facebook or MySpace. What do we get in return? Targeted advertising and hundreds of connections to people you barely know, is that it?
I especially like the quote
Everything is free except the video we capture of you. That we own.
of Josh Harris. A principle of the bunker in 1999, but I guess it still can be easily applied to many Web 2.0 business models nowadays.
“We Live In Public” is a truly fascinating documentary and clearly one of my movie recommendations for 2009. Go watch it!
The tricky part of pedestrian navigation is, that it actually involves a lot of refinement work on current base maps in order to provide a good service. Using regular digital road maps, as we know them in Google Maps for instance, is just not possible. Pedestrians need different information. Most maps currently used in navigation devices are made by and for people in cars, moving at 35km/h and faster. As pedestrian you move slower, on other paths and parts of the street, your orientation senses work differently, you notice other landmarks, signs, use short-cuts, cross streets randomly and can make u-turns whenever you want to.
Nokia Maps 3.0 has some enhancements aimed to help pedestrians. I especially found the 3D-like landmark drawings on the map and the continuous reverse geocoding very helpful. I think I already mentioned in an earlier post the very well done cartography, optimized for smaller displays.
Walking directions work in most cases well. Nokia Maps knows the park next to the subway station I often use and shows me the shortest path to it.
Seems an easy task, but Google Maps, based on TeleAtlas’ road network in that area, shows some fantasy foot paths inside the park and suggests another route circling around.
OpenStreetMap shows the real layout of all foot paths in the park and provides good walking directions (by OpenRouteService) too.
The quality of the returned walking directions depend on the strength of the GPS signal in some cases. If it’s weak, Nokia Maps doesn’t dare to send you out to take a walk on a three lane street full with speeding cars.
Imagine you step out the subway station and ask Nokia Maps for the shortest way walking to your destination. If you’re lucky and the signal is good, Nokia Maps snaps you to the right street and returns good results.
Let’s assume it’s a bad GPS day and your signal is about 10m off, happens quite frequently in urban areas. Nokia snaps you on a 3 car-lane street and suggest you start walking there. Not good.
That’s what the situation looks like on the aerial. The subway station was under construction then, but there is an exit next to the containers. Anyways, a pedestrian navigation service should never propose walking on that road.
Other services I tried in that area had some problems too. Google Maps sent you on the same road. OpenRouteService basically returned a good walking route, but didn’t know that you had to jump off a 3m wall to reach the nice foot path along the canal.
A week ago Helge and I were invited to host a Digitalks session about GeoServices. Digitalks is an interesting event series in Vienna, aimed to explain recent media and technology developments to a “normal”, not so tech-savvy audience. Meral, the woman behind Digitalks, usually tries to invite early adopters or enthusiasts who are passionate about media and technology to host a session. There’s no PowerPoint in Digitalks, only live demos and hands-on are allowed, which is good and makes the presentations very lively, although it doesn’t always work as expected.
Anyways, I felt honored to be invited and talk a little about GeoServices. Helge did a brilliant job in presenting OpenStreetMap and explaining the revolutionary aspects of the project. I tried to give an overview of the grown variety of geographic applications in the internet since the first appearance of map mashups in 2005 and showing some recent location based services on a mobile device. If I’d have had a closer look at the attendees list first, I probably would’ve had chosen a few other things to demo. The ratio expert/novice of the audience was actually more leaning towards expert, so I hope it wasn’t too obvious for most people.
Thanks again to Meral for inviting us and many thanks to Luca for taping the session on video!
PS: the next Digitalks is about Microblogging, hosted by Twitter, should be interesting!
IMHO Nokia Maps 3.0 has basically two outstanding features:
While trying Nokia Maps I usually kept thinking why I would buy Nokia Maps and not use Google Maps mobile, which is a free application. If it’s only for looking up addresses and directions, and I don’t care about the mobile data connection, I’d go for Google. Google does the same or even a better job here.
When it comes to looking up POI nearby, Nokia Maps is way ahead of Google.
The other day I was looking for a post office, because the one I knew was under construction and closed (and the staff there couldn’t tell me where the nearest post office is btw). The official Austrian mail site totally failed on a mobile browser, no chance to get a list of their offices. Google returned a couple of search results considering my location, but would have sent me way far away to a post office in another district, giving nice directions with public transport though. Nokia Maps showed me two post offices in the neighborhood and provided walking directions of course.
Post offices is of course only one category in the catalogue. The POI catalogue seems very well organized and can be explored quickly, even tough it’s pretty comprehensive. I found the catalogue better usable and more efficient on mobile devices than a Google Maps mobile search for POI.
Better usable because a search for POI in Google Maps mobile requires you to stop, type and check results. A catalogue you can explore easily while walking, by using only one thumb, just like an iPod. It requires less attention than a text search.
More efficient because a Google Maps mobile search basically returns lots of locally irrelevant results. Google is probably working on that, but in the meantime Nokia delivers better, clearer and more useful local POIs.
Additionally there is an entire guide-section in the catalogue, providing mobile tourist guides I guess. Unfortunately I didn’t try this feature.
Bottom line: people who want more out of mobile maps than just address search and directions should give Nokia Maps 3.0 a shot.
Friday evening on my way home from work, after a pretty intense week, I started feeling the first symptoms of an upcoming flu – cold, probably little fever already, body aches and generally feeling very exhausted. Great, I thought, right on time for the weekend.
Vienna seems to be the center of flu-word these days btw, every other person I know is or has been sick lately.
Not really in the mood of becoming sick and actually, looking at my agenda, not the best timing for a week out of order either, I tried with the help of some good old home remedies to conquer the beast. With great success as it turned out today, 48 hours later all symptoms are gone.
The following combination worked for me so far:
Vitamin C and resting makes sense to me, but the thing with chicken soup is still surprising. I just can’t see the connection between chicken and fever, maybe it’s only the hot liquid and it can basically be any soup. Don’t know…
WOM World approached me and asked if I would be interested to test Nokia Maps 3.0 on a Nokia 6210 Navigator. I agreed and they sent me a test device last week. This is the first post out of a short series, I hope.
Unlike others, I received a two-pin plug in a two-pin plug country and am actually able to recharge the device. All manuals are written in some nordic language, Swedish I guess, but since I own a Nokia E71 myself with basically identical menus, I didn’t really need manuals. The other problem was that all Nokia Maps licenses were limited to Scandinavian countries too, which doesn’t help a lot when you want to test the application in Central Europe. A quick email fixed the problem. Good.
The device itself has a Navigator button which loads the map application immediately. Positioning works very fast, it instantly had me located on the map and the cartography looks very good at a first glance.
One annoying thing is that the back cover, where battery and SIM are hiding, opens really hard. “Aufquan” would be the best Austrian term to describe the process of simultaneously pushing and pulling the button with a pen or knife, which supposedly should release the back cover. I’m using my own SIM from my cell phone and need to change it frequently in order to try the 6210 Navigator. So that’s a small problem I have with the device.
Full disclosure:
Why I’m doing it?
Because I like maps, gadgets and was curious about Nokia Maps 3.0. I guess I’m not hard to convince when asked to play around with some tech toy for two weeks.
What does WOM World / Nokia get out of this?
Some backlinks, little buzz and maybe some useful feedback.
Norc, a Romanian company, is providing “street-level imaging” a.k.a. Street View for selected Central and Eastern European countries:
According to their website, the current coverage includes:
The interface is compared to Google’s Street View still a little rough around the edges, but otherwise, Norc did a fantastic job!
However, it would be interesting to know if Norc has developed its own business model based on their Street View services, and how it would work, or if they are just preparing to become the next Google snack.
[via Helge.at]