Nokia N900, sports tracking and geotagging

This blog contains some tips how to use your Nokia N900 smart phone as a “augmented reality” sports device.

Sports tracking

Sport tracking is about collecting your sports activity data using GPS and other equipment. After running/cycling/skiing/whatever you see where you have been, how much time it took and how fast you are. In same cases you are able to calculate burnt calories and estimated heart rate.

N900 has at least one sports tracking application out there, eCoach.  eCoach is also suitable for professionals as it has heart rate monitor integration.

eCoach allows you record and  store sport activities. During the activity it uses Open Street Map based map viewer to show your current location. At least Helsinki area has very detailed maps available there, showing even the smallest trails, so you can safely venture to unknown neighbourhoods.

eCoach exports its tracks as GPX gps data file format. eCoach does not have any service integration yet, but you can upload this file to Nokia Sports Tracker and Map My Tracks. The recommend the latter as it has better social media integration and seems to be under active development. On the otherhand I have been using Nokia Sportstracker since 2007 and it has not really development during the whole this time and seems to lack will to go forward. Also Nokia has disabled track profile for imported GPX files which gives a message “we really don’t care about this service”.

There is also a service called mapmyrun.com with various domain names like “maymysomething.com”. Steer away from this service as I tested it and it didn’t live up to my expections (too much advertising, horrible user interface).

Some sport tracks I have made

• Run in Map My Tracks
• Another run in Map My Tracks
• The same run in Nokia Sportstracker
• All my runs in Nokia Sporstracker

Geotagging

Geotagging is about having GPS  coordinates on your photos. This way photos can be put on the map autotically in photo sharing services like Yahoo Flick or Google Picasa. When you known location, capture time and sharing license of the photo, all kind of fantastic services can be created, like Microsoft Photosynth.

Technically geotagging works by embedded GPS coordiates into the EXIF metadata of JPEG files.

N900 has geotagging as out of the box feature – no additional software needed. Just turn on it on in Camera application settings.

Also, you can retrofit your photos with geotagging information afterwards. You can do this by hand using labels and drag and drop in the most of photo sharing applications, like Google Picasa. Also there exist automated tools if you have relates GPS records available as GPX or KML file: checkout GPicSync. This is handy if you record your sports in eCoach and forgot to turn on geotagging in N900 camera. GPicSync also has a Google Maps export feature if you want to create custom maps for your friends or customers.

• An example map created with N900, eCoach,  GPicSync and Google Maps from one of the runs above

Sports tracking + geotagging = ?

I am still trying to figure out how to combine sports tracking and geotagging to something cool. Maybe something along the lines of urban exploration.

But in any case here are some of cities I have “collected” from my travels

• Budapest
• London
• Copenhagen
• New York (GPS was not exactly working well…)
• Oulu

PhoneGap ported on N900 (Maemo)

We have ported PhoneGap mobile application framework to the new Nokia N900 smartphone and its Maemo operating system. PhoneGap is a framework to build mobile applications easily with HTML and Javascript. With the new Maemo port PhoneGap platform support covers iPhone, Android, Nokia Series 60, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Maemo, making it one of the most portable mobile application development solution available.

The demo application currently supports only Device Info and Accelerometer APIs. The porting work is still in its early stages and we suggest novice developers steer away from it. We’ll develop and maintain the work as long as we have client cases for mobile applications. If you are looking forward to port your commercial PhoneGap application to N900, please contact us.

PhoneGap port was done using QT and QWebView controller. The native shell source code is in C++. Build and packaging scripts are standard Makefiles. More technical information on the release notes page.

Code is available on GitHub.

So what’s cool about Maemo (compared to other PhoneGap platforms)?

Shortly: The openess of Maemo platforms enables developer innovation never seen before. There are zero artificial limitations chaining your imagination.

• No code signing whatsoever required
• No approval process to get your application distributed
• Very robust development tools and development environment. Hey, it’s Linux! The phone ships with X terminal built in.
• You have root access to the device if needed
• QWebView WebKit control which itself is open source – you can recompile from scratch and stick in the needed features
• The phone itself is rock solid. It beats iPhone 100-0.
• Maemo has very active open source community. You actually might get help when stuck, unlike with NDAs and other madness from some other vendors.

So what’s cool about PhoneGap (compared to other mobile application technologies)?

• Use low entry level HTML, CSS and Javascript technologies – even PHp coder can build his/her own mobile application! This is the most cost effective way to develop non-CPU-intensive applications.
• PhoneGap has the widest mobile platform support – the best medicine against fragmented mobile application markets
• You can always break out from the sandbox and use the native capabilities of the phone. This is something you cannot do with Flash Lite or Java ME.
• Very active community
• WebKit rendering engine enables CSS3 goodies and much more
• Easily convert your existing mobile site to an application

Do you really think 160 chars tells the story?

Still receiving from time to time some marketing SMS messages from different “clubs” I have opted in. Been too lazy to opt-out but those messages also works as kind of reminder about the status and state of mobile marketing. Just few weeks ago got a marketing message from one of those clubs (just rough translation and all identifying info removed/changed):

Now all Red Ball Products are on sale! 20% off on all normal priced items, only this Saturday!

Eh, I have no clue what those Red Ball Products are… nor willing to visit the store just to see if those happens to be something interesting stuff I want to buy. So, how about if the message would been something like this:

Now all Red Ball Products are on sale! 20% off on all normal priced items, only this Saturday! More info about Red Ball Product’s: http://domain/rbpad

And just by clicking the link in received SMS message I could have easily learned about what the heck are Red Ball Products and other info, perhaps other offers too.

In November 17 Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) released a research results done in UK amongst the senior (ad, digital marketing etc.) agency representatives. Whoa, 95% of digital (marketing) budgets include mobile, too!!! Gee, that’s great number… do we see even more great text messages?

Same research revealed that most of the mobile (marketing) campaigns have not been planned by mobile specialists (in 2008 only 32% of agencies had mobile specialists, in 2009 52%). So, no wonder that plain text message is still the thing, media and channel when agencies plan their mobile marketing activities…

But things are moving to right direction, even slowly. Even here in Finland we have seen with some companies and agencies that they do want to do more, use that personal channel of mobile phones much more effective ways. And those agencies will be front runners when mobile internet will became more mainstream media, also for marketing and interaction, not just for consuming content, like reading the news.

Installing Python Imaging Library (PIL) under virtualenv or buildout

I have greatly struggled to have PIL library support in isolated Python environments like virtualenv –no-site-packages.

For example, when installing Satchmo shop under virtualenv:

../bin/clonesatchmo.pyhe Python Imaging Library is not installed. Install from your distribution binaries.

../bin/clonesatchmo.py
The Python Imaging Library is not installed. Install from your distribution binaries.

Though it clearly is there, installed by easy_install PIL command:

ls ../lib/python2.5/site-packages/PIL-1.1.7-py2.5-linux-x86_64.egg
ArgImagePlugin.py	 ExifTags.py		  GimpGradientFile.pyc...

Does anyone know if this problem is with PIL itself, eggified PIL or something else?

In any case, there is an easy workaround: use system-wide PIL (sudo apt-get install python-imaging) and symlink PIL from your site-wide installation under the isolated Python environment:

(satchmo-py25)mulli% pwd
/srv/plone/mmaspecial/satchmo-py25/lib/python2.5/site-packages
(satchmo-py25)mulli% ln -s /usr/lib/python2.4/PIL .

You just think you don’t have mobile users on your site

Been a while when last time posting anything but you know how it goes… well, at least I do promise (again..) to try to be here more often.

There has been recently several reports, surveys and other information how mobile internet and mobile browsing will increase alot in coming years, or how it is “here” already. But what you think? Or know? I guess that you do not. Know, I mean.

Let me tell one real life example:

One of customers (in UK, if that matters) have had mobile site for some time now implemented and managed by us. Visitor numbers on that site have been fairly good, especially as no real marketing about that site has never done. Just a sentence or two about the site here and there.

Not long time ago that customer implemented visitor checking on their main web site and all visitors using mobile phones were automatically redirected to their mobile site. Whadam! Number of visitors on their mobile site immediately increased sixfold (6x)!!!!

So, answer and conclusion are quite simple: they have had already lots of mobile phone users visiting and using their web site. And with this simple action this customer is able to serve they own customers much more better, via mobile phone optimized mobile site.

How about you? Do you even know how many visitors are using mobile phone for accessing your web site? Just dig a logs a bit and when you see what’s the status, come back to us: we will gladly help you to get your mobile site up and running in no time. And it wont cost strawberries (or, as you say outside Finland, it wont cost a fortune)!