I’ve been using the mobile version of Virtual Earth for a couple of weeks now and have found it to be very handy. This appears to Microsoft’s response to Google’s mobile mapping application. The main limitation that I’ve found with Google’s software is the fact that it cannot determine my current location. Virtual Earth Mobile tries to solve this problem in one of two ways. The first (less accurate) approach is to do an IP lookup when connected to a WiFi access point. Based on the IP of the access point, the location (generally the ISP location) can be looked up. This is somewhat accurate, but not all of the time. The other approach is using GPS, which can be accurate up to a few meters. The problem I’ve found with Virtual Earth Mobile is that it can’t find my Bluetooth GPS receiver. I’ve tried all sorts of configurations, but have fallen short.

I believe Virtual Earth Mobile is compatible with devices that have internal GPS units. At least that’s what I’m assuming. In the meantime I’m planning on experimenting with the Virtual Earth source code and hooking it up to some code I got working over the weekend.  This means I should be able to pass these location coordinates off to the Virtual Earth API and have some sort of real-time positioning and routing. It will be an interesting experiment and I’ll post what I find out. If anyone has successfully configured their Bluetooth GPS to work with Virtual Earth Mobile, then I would love to hear about it.

While driving around in Dallas I get to see a lot of interesting vehicles. A few weeks ago on the way home from work I saw a crazy hot pink Hummer H2. On the way to work this morning I finally got to see a Lotus Elise. I’ve seen a few in different magazines, but this is the first time I’ve actually seen one in person. It reminded me of the newer body style of the Toyota MR2, except the Elise (in my opinion) looks a lot better.

What’s most suprising is that the Elise costs just over $40,000 and can get from 0-60 in less than 5 seconds. Check out the specs section on the Lotus website. The Elise appears to be a little rocket. I thought I would share the photos I took from my V Dub. If you’d like to learn a lot more about the Elise then check out this great article from How Stuff Works.

Since I started working at SensorLogic I’ve been fascinated with the whole machine-to-machine space. I’ve been inspired to connect everything I possibly can to the Internet. A couple of years ago I decided to write a program for my P900 called BlueGPS, which runs on several Symbian devices. BlueGPS allowed my P900 to communicate with a Bluetooth GPS receiver and send location data over the air to the SensorLogic platform. If you look at the diagram below (which I grabbed shamelessly from SL) you’ll see that the GPS receiver is represented as a sensor and my P900 is the access point.

This is a fairly common network topology for M2M communications. I recently retired the Symbian BlueGPS project and am working to make the project open source. The main reason is that I’ve switched phones and haven’t released an update in over a year. I’m hoping developers from the community will pick it up and run with it.

I’m finally getting to the subject of this post. This past weekend I was digging around for some Bluetooth code that would run on my Windows Mobile device (Cingular’s 8125). I stumbled across this article that describes how to do serial communications using the .NET compact framework. The code in the article leverages the OpenNETCF Smart Device Framework, which basically handles most of the communication between my Windows Mobile device and Bluetooth GPS receiver.

So I was able to modify a fair amount of the code to work with my Bluetooth GPS receiver and I can successfully display location information on my phone. The main thing I had to modify was the way the program parsed NMEA sentences. It was parsing the GLL sentence while I wanted to use the GGA sentence, which includes altitude information. You can see an image of the app running on my phone below.

Yes it’s extremely ugly and I hope to design a nice user interface for it in the next week or two. I’m also working on getting the information sent wirelessly to SensorLogic’s platform where the data can be displayed and exported. I’m planning on releasing a version for Windows Mobile users to download once I get everything in order.

My dear friend Auburn sent my one of the funniest links I’ve received in a long time. CareerBuilder has implemented a personalized monkey email that allows you to type a message or even use your microphone to record one. Using text-to-speech technology the monkey can then dictate what you typed. The monkey’s lips move rather accurately to what you’ve typed, unlike the old kung-fu movies. You can check it out here.

Auburn was taunting me of our recent trip to Miami, but don’t always believe what a monkey tells you. You can check out an image of the monkey making fun of me below.

Stupid monkey. At any rate, I’d like to mention the technology used to implement this is Adobe’s Flash and Oddcast’s text to speech engine. I know Ajax has been receiving a ton of buzz lately, but this is one thing that Ajax will never be able to touch. Flash truly shines when it comes to highly interactive multimedia that attracts eyeballs. This is not an Flash vs. Ajax post since each technology serves a purpose for a given task. As a Flash advocate it’s always exciting to see these type of ad campaigns crop up.

Push technology has been around for what seems like a decade and in the late ’90s it was supposed to revolutionize the web. It has become extremely useful for instant messaging, but there seem to be very few applications that use push in a web browser. About 5 years ago Macromedia released Flash Communication Server (now Flash Media Server), which enabled developers to easily create persistent connections between a client and server. This was all capable using the ubiquitous Flash Player. Since version 5 of the Flash player developers have been able to create socket servers that push data to clients.

This evening I stumbled across Lightstreamer and decided to dig into their product a bit. It appears they’re doing an Ajax push that updates the page without having to manually refresh. You can view some of their demos by clicking here. This is accomplished by creating an HTTP stream to the client. With as much buzz Ajax has received over the past year I’m certain this will create even more hype. The term Comet has been coined for Ajax push applications and I’m interested in seeing what innovative applications will leverage the technology.

I know that we could potentially leverage push at SensorLogic where we build enterprise applications for remote asset management. All sorts of devices and machines can talk to our platform over many different wireless networks. Some of these devices report frequently where operators need to monitor their condition or location. This data is made accessible to the operator through a standard web browser. Now think about the operator having to refresh to look for new data every couple of minutes or so. It would be nice to have the interface automatically when new data is received. A lot of technology is involved to make this happen, but that’s the concept.

Back on track. I know of a few push initiatives that seem pretty interesting:

1. Pushlets
2. Realtime on Rails
3. Lightstreamer

I’m sure there are plenty of others, but these are the ones that stand out in my mind. Stay tuned into the World Wide Web of Push.