Brian Zhang Larsen’s Blog

Finally I finished processing our track logs, and pictures. I used JetPhoto studio to EXIF stamp the pictures, and upload them to flickr. From the tracklogs and the newly generated picture metadata, I have made some .kml files for google earth. You can see the result below.

Beijing, day 1. (.kml)
Beijing day 2 (.kml)
Beijing, summer palace (.kml)
Shanghai, day 1 (.kml)
Shanghai, day 2 (.kml)
Hangzhou (.kml)
Shanghai, day 4 (.kml)
Zhouzhuang (.kml)
Guiling, day 1 (.kml)
Guilin, river cruise (.kml)
Guilin, 26th (.kml)
Guilin, 27th (.kml)
Longsheng, dragon back terraces (.kml)

Geotagging, geocaching, plot your runs, trips and so forth. There are many new coming hobbies and tendencies provided by new technologies such as GPS devices, interactive online maps and various web apps. What about just plotting your entire life?

I wanted a more efficient way to geotag photos, and a lot of people are doing it by comparing a GPS log with the photos EXIF timestamp, and adding the GPS data as EXIF data to the photos. Often by interpolating between the GPS points, to get a closer match.

But the log itself could become a little amusing, especially on vacations, to see where you actually have been. Not to mention those Sundays, where you wake up and think “hmm… what exactly happened yesterday”. Upload the log to your nifty little web app, and there you go. In 15 years, it could be possible to look back and see where you were on the19th of April 2008, or any date and time for that matter. You can then calculate stuff like how many meters you moved overall for 2008, or what was your average velocity in 2011, compared with the year before. If I ever become so manically obsessed with tracking my own whereabouts at any time (quite likely), I would prefer to keep all this data somewhat private though. That being said, I am really not too concerned about privacy in general.

Anyway, for my new toy, I just ordered this:

I wanted a small lightweight logger at first, to see if this would catch my attention. So by studying the flickr group “GeoTagging Flickr”, to look for advice i found the DG-100 GPS Data Logger to be an interesting choice. This gps receiver should be more precise than the Sony GPS-CS1, and have a newer chip set :O! I am a little nervous about the battery time though, but for a first device whatever must be adequate.

Logging and uploading daily whereabouts will only be step one. When GPS phone prices drops, it could be tempting to write a little java or whatever app, that sends the GPS data directly to a server. In that way, it would be possible to obtain real time life logging, which obviously has tons of opportunities (?!).

In a few years, I image myself with a large hat, which transmits my location and my viewpoint video/audio feed to my server, so I always have an exact multi media log of my life… Well, maybe not.

Other than private amusement, there must be great marketing potentials if GPS logs where publicly obtainable. Even for semi or fully anonymous data. It would be possible to use the data to define marketing segments, and target ads about local shopping or dining specifically to people who is likely to get near these areas. By generating heat maps, it could be possible to forecast trends to where the new hip spots are occurring. It could also be used to optimize transportation, city planning, real estate location relevance and much more.

More on this topic when I actually make an implementation and try it out.

Yesterday Lei and I went to Lejre Experimental Center, Near Roskilde. It is an open air museum, with reconstructions of ancient living, stretching from the early stone age to the early 19th century, mainly with focus on the Iron Age. I really like these open air museums, because they tend to have very authentic nature, and combined with good weather and beef sandwiches with garlic butter, it is a winning combination.

I been there once, 20 year ago, and I have wanted to go back for a long time. There is something really fascinating about the Iron and Viking age history, especially for a kid like me, who grew up in the Roskilde area where the local history from this era is rich.

Anyway, we took a bunch of pictures, and geotagged most of them. I still use the “old” style Google map geotagging with visible geotags, partly because otherwise I had to rewrite my own Image fetching script, and partly because Google maps still tends to be much more detailed. You can see the geotagged pictures in the map section, or all of them on flickr.

Yesterday I went to the tiny danish equivalent of E3 and TGS, the D3 Expo here in Copenhagen to get a first impression of the new wonderful consoles that may await my consumption. The Wii was all I had expected. Fun and revolutionizing, and I am sure that there is potential in that little wonder for all ages. Nintendo had put around 22 of their Wii up for people to play, and that turned to be a quite satisfying number, hence the relative short lines, and the ability to show a broad aspect of their new games. Maybe they had overspend on this display, but what they spend they certainly saved on their lousy quality polo shirts, and cheap sneakers which their personnel were wearing. But hell.., the last thing I am is a fashion critic, and I think Nintendo did a marvelous job on promoting their upcoming console. Same could not be said about Sony and their Playstation 3. They had some top secret, closed doors promotion tactics that in my opinion was totally out of place. People had to stand in line for around 50 minutes, to get into some closed cubicle where they could see and play the PS3. It was not possible to view anything without standing in that line, and I think many including myself, where not up for that at all. I was very disappointed in Sony for their strange way of introducing their new product. I really looked forward to see it, but I became a bit stubborn, and decided not to when I experienced that the only possible way, where to wait and wait… In the end it is the little things that make the consumer settle on one product, over the other. In this situation I would say that Wii was the clear winner.

The D3 Expo where not really big, but still they managed to present the most interesting things in the main stream gaming world. But you could argue that it is quite easy to catch people’s interest at the moment, when the release of two new consoles is awaiting in the near future. A big disappointment though, where the lack of booth babes… Next year, you have to do better on this!

On the side note Yahoo just provided me some pleasant surprises. When I was geotagging my pictures for the expo, I discovered that yahoo maps now has much better support for Europe. They now include street maps to even small cities in Denmark and much better satelite detail than before. Now they really provide serious competition to Google in the world of geotagging and other geocoded applications.

Another funny discovery is that the Chinese yahoo offers free download of music. Besides the newest popular chinese music, you can find a lot of foreign music. It was quite a surprise, both because this most likely is illegal, and because I haven’t yet heard about any controversy concerning this. Even if it is not directly illegal, it must be against some kind of mission or value statements, and it could harm the image of the corporation. But I guess nobody in the headquarters can read Chinese, or nobody just cares about how they run the foreign platforms. And after all the Chinese interpret the phrase “copyright” to “the right to copy”.