EirePreneur

Horses for courses in podcast land

Dave Winer quotes Dutch Uncle -

"Daily Source Code gets less interesting the more it starts to resemble an IPO road show."

But for me the exact opposite is true. I'd be happy if Curry was to ditch the mash-ups, promos and showbiz gossip completely and just continue chronicling his start-up experiences. Of late he's been living life out of a suitcase, chartering planes to catch meetings and even getting face time with Steve Jobs. Its fascinating edutainment for any entrepreneur.

Too many rules for Irish businesses

From RTE: Too many rules, accountants told -

The president of the Institute of Certified Public Accountants has told its annual conference that the current level of regulation is strangling business.

Referring to what he called a current 'addiction' to increasing regulation, Michael Dolan said we were in danger of becoming an EU of administrators rather than entrepreneurs. He said recent surveys had estimated that the cost of regulation adds 4% to the cost of producing goods in Ireland.

Satellite navigtion looks to smart business ideas

The BBC carried a great article yesterday about the new European GPS system - Galileo and the 'glorious opportunities' it will open up for European businesses.

And for the companies with innovative ideas on how to use this improved data, there are expected to be some big new markets to exploit.

Analysts believe the value of the Galileo-enhanced business - equipment and services - could be worth well in excess of 10 billion euros a year by 2020, as sat-nav functionality wheedles its way into every corner of modern life.

Some applications are obvious... Other applications will stretch the imagination and ingenuity of Europe's smartest technologists.

And hopefully OpenEir - Ireland's open source GPS map will contribute in some way.

The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet - perfect for my location independent lifestyle

There has already been quite a varied response around the blogosphere to the announcement by Nokia of the 770 Internet Tablet. While much of the commentary is rather negative I have to say that I think I'll be amongst the first customers for the device when its launched towards the end of this year.

In fact I admire Nokia for taking an apparent risk by basing the 770 on the Linux the operating system and literally taking the phone out of the smartphone. This latter point is one which has some observers totally flummoxed but I think its the master stroke. Why? Because I need a more powerful browser than the Opera mobile one that fits on my Nokia 6630 but the idea of buying a PDA or Microsoft Smartphone with largely duplicate functionality is one that doesn't sit well. All I want is a way of browsing the full internet in a mobile setting and if I can do that with a pen input device then all the better.

You see I'm in a position where I can carry out practically all of my daily tasks through a browser window. Its true that I normally use Mozilla Thunderbird to manage my email and FeedDemon to download my Bloglines channelled RSS feeds for off-line reading, but the fact is all my email accounts have a web interface and of course Bloglines is a web app. And the bulk of my day is spent managing our community forums through InfoPop's Eve web console.

When I left a comfortable job to work for myself I swapped security for lifestyle flexibility. That means I want to work independent of time and place. No 9 to 5. No ball and chain. If I can get full web access from anywhere in Ireland then there's no reason why I shouldn't head of to the beach midweek. Or do the school run, or drive a relative to the train station, etc, and still continue to work during all those 'in-between' moments, in all the places where it would be unrealistic to carry a laptop PC. With the pocketable Nokia 770 I'll be able to process a membership subscription while sitting on a park bench and then carry on... enjoying the flexibility of self employment.

Photo tagged map of Ireland - please contribute!

I've suddenly remembered that Bernie Goldbach has previously setup an Irish blogs group in Flickr, so I've now copied all my geotagged photos in there and created a new Mapufacture map of Ireland centered on Athlone.

I'd invite all Irish Flickr users to geotag their photos and copy to the Irish Blogs group for a single unified photo tagged map of Ireland.

Mapufacture your Flickr photos

Mikel Maron, the genius behind WorldKit and MapProxy has come up with another brilliant web-based GPS tool called Mapufacture. This allows you to easily annotate satellite maps with geocoded RSS feeds or Flickr photos.

I just took some of my previously geotagged flickr photos from an OpenEir tour, fed them to Maron's new application after specifying the midwest of Ireland and boom..... out popped this Mapufacture map where the red dots represent waypoints where I took photos. Hover over the dot for a thumbnail or click on it to be taken to the full version on Flickr.

My new 256mb MMC arrives.... already

It was only yesterday that I ordered a new 256mb MMC for my Nokia 6630 from Shop4memory.co.uk and I was surprised and delighted to receive it in the post this morning. Not only are their prices extremely good but their delivery is super fast.

I now have 5 new podcasts, several Spanish lessons and a number of music tracks on it - hours worth of listening - and there are still nearly 100mbs free. Chalk me down as a very happy Shop4memory customer.

The perfect GPS software solution..... for OpenEir?

Being a GPS newbie I've been putting off buying GPS software for as long as I can until I learned more about my specific needs. As a result I've been using a combination of trial software and freeware, such as OziExplorer, GPS Utility, EasyGPS, GPS Trackmaker and MyGPS. For the OpenEir project I've been using, exclusively, MyGPS because its freeware and I think its important to make the project as accessible as possible to all level of GPS users.

However, today I'm after coming across a GPS software product which has totally amazed me, not only in terms of its feature set but also for its very reasonable price of $40 in a category where most software is at least double that. Topofusion has a few really innovative features, four of which in particular deserve further explanation -

• Networks: This could be a killer feature for OpenEir. It allows you to create and manage networks of GPS data. You can combine multiple GPS tracklogs into a network, with duplicate portions of track logs averaged. That means that OpenEir contributors could easily combine several overlapping tracklogs to distill an increasingly accurate and more detailed map.
• PhotoFusion: This feature allows you to automatically geo-reference your tracklogged digital photos, as long as they have EXIF timestamps.  Luckily my Nokia 6630 does. I was able to watch Topofusion place my photos along the GPS tracks and see it produce HTML pages with clickable image maps. Fantastic!
• Auto Map Download: No calibration necessary! Topofusion downloads maps (Topo, Aerial Photo and Satellite) automatically from Microsoft's TerraServer and NASA's OnEarth server, storing them on the hard drive for offline use. This will save me a huge amount of time that I used to spend gathering satellite photos and coordinates from MapProxy and calibrating them in MyGPS. Not only that but the calibration is much more accurate with tracklogs now aligning almost perfectly with the visible roadway.
• 3D Modelling: TopoFusion includes the ability to visualize terrain and track data in 3d. Using NASA's JPL server, the 3D data is downloaded automatically, so there is no need to download, convert and store DEM files. The instructions for acquiring DEM data are included on their website if you want to store elevation data on your computer. I was able to do a beautiful 3D flyover of my journey around Limerick, Tipperary and Kerry. Amazing!

Here is a screenshot of some of the routes I had already compliled for OpenEir after being network rendered in TopoFusion. The extremeties are Limerick City (top right), Tarbert ferry port (top left), Listowel (bottom left) and Tipperary town (bottom right).

This is wonderful software and whether or not it is ideal for OpenEir I will be buying it for personal use.

Free development help for engineering ideas

QuickLink: BusinessPundit: Got An Idea? Here's How to Get Free Development Help.

Business ideas for the Geospatial Web

While OpenEir will always be an 'open source' project with the aim of mapping Ireland in extreme detail I don't see any reason why individuals and companies shouldn't develop innovative commercial products based around the dataset. Therefore I'll glady point to articles such as this one from O'Reilly Network about The Geospatial Web -

In this article, Mike Liebhold writes about what we need to do to tap the as yet unharvested business opportunities in a geospatial web. Join us to learn how vendors, application developers, and consumer web companies are using GPS, RFID, WLAN, cellular networks, and networked sensors in new ways to solve old business problems.

I bought my Geko 201 GPS unit from CharterNavGPS in Cork and I noticed yesterday that they have developed a very interesting (patent pending) vehicle maintenance information system. If there is a large uptake of this product they could easily provide trackpoint data for much of the country but of course Waypoints would still need to be profiled and managed manually.... I think. Hmmm,... I wonder......