ProjectX Technology

We’re working with Zawadzki Limited to bring a high level seminar on “Using Google Maps”. The seminar is in Wellington on Friday 26th September 8:30am to 10:30am. The event is free, but you will need to register for the event.

Here is the overview for the seminar:

Using Google Maps

Google Maps is a great tool for making the data you already hold more accessible to your staff, your customers, or the public. Using Google Maps as your platform, you can:

	make it easy for all your staff to benefit from the geospatial information you already maintain
	link information stores to Maps and help users find and interpret information faster
	engage your public with interactive Maps-based applications

In this two hour session we will cover:

• What types of information can be presented using Google Maps

• How to use Google Maps to visualise your existing information sets

• How to augment your systems with Google Maps as a front-end

• Examples of effective use of Google Maps
  

• What is involved in piloting your first Google Maps application and common pitfalls
  

• Licensing for Google Maps and differences between the Free, Premiere and Enterprise versions

At ProjectX, we’ve been wanting to show-case our abilities in building cool map applications. Here’s a little R&D project that was kicked off as potential contender of Mash-up challenge. We’ve built Wellington Trains as a flash based “Train Simulation” showing the estimated location of a train in real time. The position of the train is estimated based on the train time-table from the Metlink site. The project was inspired by Swiss Trains. We’ve taken it to the next level by having proper animated trains and it runs against the current time. We’re thinking of adding buses to the app in due time. We’ve used Google and Virutal Earth maps in the demo.

Its fun to watch around 8:30am and 5pm as the number of trains on the network increase.

A big thanks to Metlink for giving us permission to build the demo.

Here’s some pictures:

Johnsonville, Hutt and Melling trains on a Google Map.

A couple of trains stopping at the station in Red on a Virtual Earth Aerial map.





A couple of trains stopping at the station in Red on a Virtual Earth Hybridmap.





Here’s a train coming into Ava Station

I was just testing the new add place functionality on ZoomIn and I added the Hippopotamus Restaurant in Wellington to the site. Google crawled the page and put it in the Google index in only 12 minutes and it became the top match! A new record for ZoomIn ! (Previously down from just over 30 minutes)

The net is ablaze with all the iPhone pricing rip off.(Although that haven’t stopped some from queuing up already)

My 2c on the whole pricing thing is Vodafone have set the prices so that they don’t marginalise the rest of their smart phone line up.

If you sell a iPhone 3Gfor $500 or $199, then why would you buy a Nokia N95 at $1399 ?

Steve Jobs set the pricing in US so that iPhone would blow away the competition. The pricing here doesn’t reflect that

Unfortunately, NZ’s probably not big enough to invoke Apple pulling the iPhone from the Canadian marketplace.

We’ve just completed an update to the underlying data on ZoomIn. We’ve just switched to a new suburb set on ZoomIn base onto the “New Zealand Fire Service” (NZFS) suburb set.

Why?

Its about accuracy, we want to provide the most up to date map service around. The NZFS suburb set is being used by all of New Zealand emergency services ie. Police, Ambulance and Fire Service. This update will better represent the way that you think and use addresses in your neighbourhood. The update adds another 1500 suburbs to ZoomIn. We’ve now got a total of 2986 suburbs in our address database.

We’ve completely rebuilt our address system from scratch, which gives us a chance to get all of the address cobwebs out of the system.

Changes to ZoomIn urls

The new address data means changes to the ZoomIn URL’s. Don’t worry, all of the old URL’s will still work, they’ll automatically redirect to the new address url.

Here are some examples:

OLD: http://www.zoomin.co.nz/map/nz/wellington/wellington+wharf/waterloo+quay/28/
NEW: http://www.zoomin.co.nz/map/nz/wellington/pipitea/waterloo+quay/28/

OLD: http://www.zoomin.co.nz/map/nz/auckland/auckland/queen+street/
NEW: http://www.zoomin.co.nz/map/nz/auckland/auckland+central/queen+street/