The Spatial Miscellany

It was whilst researching HTML5 mobile phone development that I stumbled on ‘App Inventor’. App Inventor can be found in Google Labs. It’s a web based application that allows you to develop applications visually with ‘lego blocks’.

With the aim of helping children learn maths and computing, a few years back some very bright people at MIT set about building a visual programming language called Scratch. Instead of writing lines of code, you arrange lego blocks that represent events, actions and logic. For those working in the GIS space think FME or Model Builder. Google have now taken this work, and built upon it, with ‘App Inventor’. Drag and drop building blocks, from within your web browser, to build an application for your Android mobile phone – the web development environment even includes an emulator. Sounds good, but does it really work?

In short – Yes. It’s a beta service and you can only deploy to phones connected to your PC (no Android market place distribution yet). It’s a Google beta, which means comprehensive, robust, and well supported. Everything I need for my mobile apps, is already there, location awareness, read-write-web, rich user forms, local storage and graphics.

It’s remarkable that mobile phone applications can now be developed within hours. I hope Google continue to grow this initiative, and can only recommend you try it.

Brady Forest has posted an analysis of some data released by Skyhook wireless, the company that provides the location for the Apple iPhone. Skyhook has shared some details of how iPhone application developers are making use of the device location in their applications.

It’s a small dataset, so we mustn’t place too much significance on the conclusions of any analysis, but it makes for an interesting read.

I often work on the assumption that location adds value to an application, so it was intriguing to discover that a greater percentage of location aware applications are given away for free (40%), in comparison to the larger pool of iPhone applications, of which only a quarter are given away, and the remainder are sold.

Another rainy weekend proved a good excuse to sit down and put some theory into practice…

The theory goes…take a GPS enabled mobile phone; some beta software from Nokia; a handful of HTML, Javascript and PHP goodness; and you have all the components for a dynamic tracking web service and mapping website?

Well, the theory works! I’ve put a demonstration together at the following link:

Mobile Phone Tracking with a Nokia N95 Demonstration

Given all the current hype regarding some telecomunications technology; I’m puzzled by the apparent lack of interest in the mobile web server. Sure, there are a few pieces to still fall into place, but if the mobile web server’s graduation from Nokia research labs, results in widespread deployment, it must have a profound impact on the web?

A couple of weeks back I surfed over to the Nokia website to check out the latest developments for their Series60 device platform (S60); unsuspecting I stumbled upon some software that really got me thinking.

It turns out, a couple of years back Nokia embarked on a project to port the Apache web server to the symbian operating system that underpins their Series60 device platform. The project was subsequently handed over to the open source community and you can get involved here, project raccoon. Interestingly, Nokia have recently wrapped the web server as user friendly software with a supporting website: www.mymobilesite.net.

I installed the application on my N95 and as you might expect it provides complete access to the contents of my mobile phone via the web. I can fire up the web browser on my desktop PC and browse to a web page, and then click a button on the web page to take a photo with the camera on my phone, wherever my phone might be. I can then use my desktop web browser to browse the photos I have taken, or any other information I have on my phone e.g. contact details or calendar events.

This struck me as a unique piece of software, I tried to think of other software that functioned in a similar manner. After roaming the web for some ideas I found an article from Tim O’Reilly that suggested similar behaviour could be observed with Apple iTunes, he’s coined a term to describe such software as…‘software above the level of a single device’.

Installing the mobile web server software on your phone, allows you to use the software on any number of devices…your phone; a desktop client with web browser; a games console; or any other internet enabled device, even someone else’s mobile phone? Software above the level of a single device – just as Tim O’Reilly describes when he observers that you can control your iPod from an iMac.

From a geospatial perspective, couple the GPS enabled N95 mobile phone, with the mobile web server, and we have a tracking service that can be consumed by any internet enabled device, powerful stuff. Perhaps worthy of more consideration, I look across the GI industry, GIS software vendors, the open source community, and other corners, but I don’t see ‘GIS software above the level of a single device’ as an overriding design architecture?

There is a bigger question here…what happens when 3 billion mobile phones run as personal web servers?

This time last year I stumbled across a report from Deloitte, a consulting firm, with telecommunication predictions for 2007, they painted a big roll for location based services (LBS) in driving the mobile industry forward – they were right.

March 2007 saw the release on the GPS enabled Nokia N95, assisted GPS followed shortly after. August saw a national campaign from Vodafone advertising location based services from UK property website Rightmove, and traffic updates from the AA. If in any doubt of the impact LBS would have on the mobile industry in 2007, October saw Nokia stump up $8 billion for mapping data provider Navteq; and only last week, news broke of a location enabled Apple iPhone.

The 2008 report strikes a more bearish note for LBS, at least with regards to GPS enabled mobile phones. Deloitte acknowledge that the convergence of successful technologies in their own right, doesn’t always add value to the converged device…just because we can GPS enable mobile phones, does it add value?

I have sympathy with this view point, and recall with anxiety, last weeks news from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) of the MP3 enabled Stun Gun:

Yep, you can sing along to your favourite tracks while shooting anyone who causes you distress with a 50,000 volt electric charge. What would your song be?

The 2008 Deloitte report can be found here: Deloitte Telecommunications Predictions 2008.