Ged Carroll

Search results for: “"where 2.0"”

  • Vindigo blue

    I noticed in news coverage this evening that Vindigo had closed up shop. I first ran into Vindigo when the agency that I worked for launched their London guide. The software ran on Palm PDAs in glorious monochrome. At the time we were Palm’s EMEA agency of record, so were speaking to all the right people and could preload Vindigo on to journalist review units.

    vindigo-5.jpg, originally uploaded by finitor.

    In terms of functionality the software provided recommendations on restaurants, clubs and bars (the play section in the picture),  shopping and the closest public toilet. It also had maps that provided point-to-point directions and was updated by syncing via serial port or USB connected cradle. Think of Vindigo as a chimera of a listings magazine like Time Out and the directions functionality of Google Maps.

    This was back in 2000, way before Google Mobile and GPS chips in everything. Palm was still a respectable technology company and the internet was going to change everyone’s lives but we just weren’t sure about the business model yet.

    Vindigo worked on dead reckoning for its turn-by-turn directions and it was considerably more helpful than its rival. A spiral bound atlas of London streets by publisher A to Z. It was some five years ahead of where 2.0 technologies that would revolutionise how we found our way around the world. Vindigo’s navigation function was a clever hack that made the most of the technology then available. This all required a large amount of information, which would have to be created manually. This is why the city directories took time to create. It used APIs to pull across information like restaurants and cinema listings. All of this was kept in a compressed database that the Palm device would decompress in real time to access the relevant information stored on it.

    Ignoring the personal information management software that comes as standard on a Palm for the moment, AvantGo (a kind of pre-RSS mobile newsreader) and Vindigo were the essential software that I carried on my PDA. More on Vindigo here.

  • London Bloggers event

    Hidden upstairs in West End pub (like an Victorian anarchist’s meeting in a Joseph Conrad story) is the monthly London Bloggers Meetup. The pub had an old world feel to it and still advertises Double Diamond beers (at least that’s what the in-pub signage said). Up the tight winding stairs and into a friendly room equipped with a plasma screen I felt like I had been transported back from the 1950s into the 21st century. I finally got to meet  organiser and marketing expert Andy Bargery in person, we had talked previously online.

    There was more familiar attendees including Annie Mole, Rob Hinchcliffe and Spinvox‘ James Whatley. All of us had managed to parley blog writing into some from of professional benefit. With Annie having managed to get a book publishing deal to channel her passion for the London Underground system.

    New people I met included Improbulus who shared her emperical experience in developing a search engine-friendly blog with the rest of the group:

    • Think about key words  and make sure that they are in the post title and first paragraph of the posting
    • Configure your domain so that your posting title is in the domain
    • Include similes of words thoughout the copy (include language variation spellings like US and European English variants)
    • Tags
    • Outbound links to high-authority sites

    Improbulus also is a die-hard Psion 5 user, but I may have tempted her to shop around for a Nokia E90. Other people included Pete and Julius who blogs about event management.

    There were presentations at the London Bloggers event from:

    • Commentag which provide a service that helps sort and browse comments on a blog.
    • Wordcamp UK a WordPress user and developer conference to be held in Birmingham this year.
    • M3: is a location aware social network for mobile devices. The focus on where 2.0 and mobile devices changes the context of the service rather like the Flickr ZoneTag mashup and Dodgeball that was a spinout from New York University. Both look to take advantage of the GPS modules appearing in modern smartphones

    London Bloggers are running these events on a regular basis, managed through Meetup.com.

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