It's a new year and with it come announcements of new mashups hoping to grab more eyeballs. I ran into the press release from the cleverly named ZoomaRooma.com. It's a mashup of hotels. What's different?

The site focuses on the three things that consumers are typically most interested in: location, image of hotel, and price....ZoomaRooma.com is a more visual and less cumbersome way of searching than manually filling in fields and sorting through lists.[little keyboard use]... One very interesting feature of ZoomaRooma.com is the way it loads hotels dynamically as users drag the map to a new location.

So, what's new is not the data, but the slightly different process for searching. Is that enough to matter in these times? Doubtful. Do searches want to search by location before noting if rooms are available for the time of stay? I don't. Business model? Unknown.

New Scientist reports on a project in the UK where bike messengers carry sensors and GPS units and use cell phones to report air pollution.

[Eiman] Kanjo [the computer scientist at Cambridge University] and colleagues gave local cycle couriers air-pollution sensors and GPS units that connect to their cellphones via Bluetooth. Custom software lets the phone constantly report the current air quality and location to servers back in the lab.

...
The sensors are carried inside storage bins on the couriers' bikes and record levels of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, and nitrogen dioxide.
...
The Cambridge research is part of a UK project, called MESSAGE, developing new ways to collect air pollution data using sensors on vehicles and people.

Project details and maps are here. I first heard about this vision for data capture in one of the most memorable interviews I ever did, with David Rejeski from the Wilson Center in 2003 (pdf).

GPS devices were one of the big tech sellers this holiday season. More than likely you or a family member or friend gave or received one that's now settled into a single car, or caught in play between two or more vehicles. What might the large number of sales of these devices mean for the growth of location-based services in 2008? Editors Joe Francica and Adena Schutzberg look into the crystal ball.

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I used the holidays to catch up on some magazine reading. I found, in Geomatics World, an article titled "Measuring raod runnin courses - digital photogrammetry versus the calibrated bicycle method. (No, it's not online, but the research basis for the article is here on Stuart Gordon's old website at Curtain University in Australia. He's since left that institution.)

The bottom line is that photogrammetric measuring can be as effective as the "old" calibrated bicycle wheel method for measuring courses used for foot races. The article notes three drawbacks to the "bicycle method": (1) safety issue for the cyclist (2) the rider's ability to cycle (repeatedly) a "shortest path" and (3) there's no exact record of the measured route. Using imagery and photogrammetric tools, argue the authors, these can be overcome.

The suggestion is that these methods be used to augment (not necessarily replace) existing methods, especially for high profile events. While such a method can be done without a visit to the course, the authors make clear the value of such a visit both to get a feel for the course and to ascertain any changes that occurred since the images were taken.

With more and more marathons offering a virtual tour via 2D and sometimes 3D imagery for the runners, it seems like its time for national and international stakeholders to look carefully at this and other research and perhaps in time accept such measurements as "official."

I was pleased to find a link to the reserach from my regional USA Track and Field measurement page. I find all of this interesting in light of some issues related to a very long marathon in Milwaukee a few years back.

Two weeks ago we asked:

What's the hardest working hardware on your desk? Thirty-two readers responded.


CPU 66%
Other 10%
Monitor 10%
Cell phone 7%
Coffee maker 4%
iPod/MP3 player 4%
External harddrive 4%
Thumb/Flash drive 0%

Next up: How do you use Web video for geospatial?