Shortly after this new development, then apparently a little bit ahead of this tease about a pending QRCode reader, comes 2D Sense. I don’t think 2D Sense and QRCode Reader are the same thing, but I guess they could be. Either way — and I don’t mean to be foul — anyone interested in a beautiful confluence of location, 2d barcodes, and mobile computing must have a giant nerd boner right now.
On the eve of a potentially-interesting announcement at MacWorld, The Map Room is reminding everyone that Garmin’s POI Loader is out of beta and that MapInstall and MacManager are up and available.
Meetro was released for Mac today. I’m a little curious about it, but it appears that the ‘geo’ part of it being geo-enabled is limited to what the user reports as their location. A more revolutionary feature would be if it constantly updates the location of the person based on a wireless triangulation or a GPSr or…something. Mostly I don’t care now because my only friend is my wife and I know where she is most of the time. I can see how it might affect collaborating students across campus, of course, but let me think aloud about how this could be used in-library:
There’s chat in libraries already, usually centered around reference service. Proximity between the librarian and the patron probably doesn’t matter much. Possibly the reference librarian could use the location of the patron to direct them to the nearest resources, but if that was terribly necessary the location of the patron could just as easily be discerned by a question (I don’t know, maybe “where are you on campus?”). No? I suppose a patron — given the choice — could choose a reference librarian who happens to be closer, but…eh. There are certainly exciting things that can be done with location in a library (or throughout a library system), especially with RFID-tagged materials and live tracking, but my guess is Meetro ain’t one of them.
Popular Science writes about a GPS system that, if-it-could-possibly-work-but-I’m-not-that-smart-so-I-can’t-see-how, could go quite a long way toward leveraging the power of GPS mapping to applications that just couldn’t use it before. I’m thinking of analyses of patrons through a library space, primarily, but it could just as easily look at shoppers through retail space. But TV signals? I guess. It feels a little like the time I tried to make a hand-powered “tree-felling machine” with a spare chain and a dilapidated, upside-down Huffy. (Not really).
(more…)