AfterTheDotNet

Using GPS Tracking to increase productivity?

GPS  is one of the great inventions of modern times. Wikipedia describes GPS (Global Positioning System) as “The Global Positioning System (GPS) is the only fully functional Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). Utilizing a constellation of at least 24 Medium Earth Orbit satellites that transmit precise microwave signals, the system enables a GPS receiver to determine its location, speed, direction, and time”

GPS technology has given the opportunity to businesses to be more productive and “in control". One of the industry that has benefited a lot with this technology is the transport industry. GPS has helped the transport industry become more efficient and has helped cut costs. For example a customer calling a taxi service is able to get the taxi faster and probably at a lower cost. This is made possible by GPS as the coordinator of the taxi service is able to contact the nearest vehicle to the customer which enables the taxi to reach the customer faster and a lesser cost as the distance traveled is less.

Some detractors argue that GPS infringes your right to privacy. I personally do not agree with that because I believe that when one is at work one is fully answerable for all the actions and if one is working diligently then there is nothing to fear. Tracking of employees was practiced earlier as well though it was done stealthily. Therefore to contend that because of GPS privacy of people is infringed is wrong for in this day and age there are other ways to find the location of person.

If you are based in United States and looking for the latest GPS systems then you should consider Brick House Security. Brick House are the leaders in providing the government and private users assistance in security, safety, protection, covert surveillance, and counter-surveillance. They have some amazing GPS Tracking devices which include

• Super PocketTrack Covert GPS Tracker
• T-Trac XS Internet GPS Car Tracking System
• P-Trac Micro - Tiny GPS Tracker which works indoors!
• GPS Fleet Management System FT6200

To check their whole range you can go to http://www.brickhousesecurity.com/gps-car-tracking-vehicle-logging.html. Brick House Security has more than 12000 security products!

Tags: IM, Internet, manage, style

Mobile Phone: Edit Google’s Mobile Page from iGoogle

With the use of mobile Internet gowning there are some interesting developments that have taken place on the Google’s mobile home page. Now Google’s mobile homepage lets you add some of the gadgets like feeds, weather, stocks, Gmail and few other gadgets from iGoogle: which is the personalized home or start page. The personalization can be done from the phone by accessing Google’s mobile home page at http://www.google.com/m/. This might be cumbersome.

The good news is that now you can customize your Mobile Home Page from IGoogle itself which makes life a lot easier. For Iphone users the home page for Google is at http://www.google.com/ig/i.

Tags: Google, Igoogle, Internet, mobile

Wridea - Basic Project Management tool

Capturing ideas is one of the difference between successful and not successful people. Everyone comes across various ideas during a day and to be successful one has to develop a system to capture ideas so that they can be referred to later.

Wridea is a service that helps yo capture ideas in a systematic manner. You can categorize, organize and share your ideas using Wridea. One can use Wridea as a basic project management tool where you can create pages for different projects and categorize the ideas in that project. Collaboration is a feature which allows you to use Wridea for a team.

Once you have an account you can upload ideas via email and different colors are used for distinction of different ideas.

Some of the key features of Wridea are

Create pages

Create categories

Get your ideas organized.

RSS Feeds

Collaborative brainstorm sessions.

For those who work in teams and on different projects it is worth a try specially if the team consists of people who are not technical.

Tags: brainstroming, collaborative tool, project management

Google/Yahoo Search Partnership Announcement At 1:30 This Afternoon

More on this tomorrow. Seems like a partnership is brewing between the two giants and it is in the search arena. This is a big surprise and techcrunch seems to have got it first. Read the story in the link below.

Google/Yahoo Search Partnership Announcement At 1:30 This Afternoon

A new Google logo has been sited. Read about it here

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/12/googleyahoo-announcement-at-130-this-afternoon/

Tags: Google, Yahoo

Mobile Web or Mobile Internet is the new trend

Increasingly it is becoming clear that Mobile Web or Mobile Internet the new medium that is going be used by the new generation. Google one of the leaders on the Internet has changed its logo the first time in eight and half years so that it is usable on Iphone and other mobile devices shows that they believe in the importance and the potential of the mobile web.

Opera browser is one of the most used browsers on the Mobile Internet and they have some interesting findings which they revealed in a study they released in May 2008. There were 11.9 million Opera Mini users in March 2008, almost 41% of mobile traffic now goes to social networking websites when people use Opera Mobile. The United States, South Africa and Indonesia have more than 60% of the mobile traffic going to the social networks on the mobile web. One would assume that there would not be a whole lot of web traffic on the mobile Internet but there was 33 million MB data traffic that was exchanged worldwide according to the study.

Further it is predicted that by 2012 there would be as many connected mobile phones as the population of the world. This has been predicted by a website called phonecount.com which predicts the number of phones in the coming years based on present sales around the world.

The good news is that advertising is growing in the mobile Internet market and there other markets apart from UK and US are jumping onto the bandwagon. BuzzCity has revealed the statistics for its myGamma Global Mobile Advertising Index. myGamma is an ad-supported mobile social network service that is very popular in many of the markets outside of N. America and Europe (from MobiAD). The results are

1. Indonesia: 654 million (up 13328% on Q1 2007)
2. India: 577 million (up 1522%)
3. South Africa: 426 million (up 418%)
4. USA: 132 million (up 917%)
5. Kenya: 79 million (up 424%)
6. Romania: 57 million (up 446%)
7. Bangladesh: 53 million (up 305%)
8. China: 37 million (up 6053%)
9. Brunei: 35 million (up 221%)
10. Pakistan: 35 million (up 814%)

Even though mobile advertising is still in an experimental phase at this point, the revenues generated in 2008 are predicated to be over $1.5 billion

M:Metrics which is an agency in UK and it found in February 2008 that mobile users were more likely to respond to advertising than regular Internet users, and 27% more likely to say they are tempted to buy an advertised product then the average person.

There is a video (though old) which gives you an idea of where in the world the Mobile Internet is growing.

Detractors would say that there are a lot of hurdles in the growth of Mobile Internet some of them being availability of handsets and data charges but with new technologies being released like the Iphone with 3G and the handset is cheaper things are definitely becoming interesting and no one can deny the tremendous pull and popularity of the Mobile Internet. Therefore in the future if anyone wants to have a presence on the Internet getting themselves ready for the Mobile Internet is a must otherwise soon they would be left behind.

Tags: Internet, mobile, web

InSuggest: Make use of your Del.icio.us bookmarks

Del.icio.us the bookmarking service which was acquired by Yahoo has some loyal followers. Personally I find it handy and interesting. It is a great way to find new services and follow trends.

One of the feature that has not been developed is recommendations by del.icio.us which are based on your bookmarks. Though the system is there I never found it useful.

Now a new service has been launched called Insuggest for bookmarks which gives suggestions based on your archive on Del.icio.us. It is very simple to use. On the home page of Insuggest Bookmarks you are required to give your username of Del.icio.us and based on your archive the system recommends other pages that you might like to bookmark.

You can also filter the recommendations by using 20 tags that you have used in your Del.icio.us archive. The interface is interesting and smart usage of Ajax makes it quite appealing. Given the fact that the system works very fast it is a sure winner.

You also have the ability to use ‘image suggestions’ and the ‘website suggestions’ based on your archive on Del.icio.us. What is satisfying for users like me is that all that labor of tagging and bookmarking in Del.icio.us is paying off. Another smart suggestion that can be used to discover more bookmarks, websites and images on the Internet is to use someone else’s account on Del.icio.us to run a query since the account password is not required.

I’m sure that other features would be added in the future to Insuggest but at the moment it seems a winner and I would suggest it to anyone who is interested in discovering new websites and services on the Internet.

InSuggest: Del.icio.us Recommendations Reborn - ReadWriteWeb

Tags: bookmark, delicious, social

Design and help Google with their new favicon

Google has changed its favicon after 8.5 years. Why? The Google blog states that the Google team wanted to change the favicon so that it would scale better to the new mediums like the I-phone and other mobile devices.

What this does mean is that Google amongst others, believes that using of the phone to browse the Internet is one of the areas where the Internet is set to grow.

The selection process was not easy as there were 300 permutations to choose from. From their post it is interesting to observe what are the things to keep in mind when designing a favicon or logo. Some of the logos which had a transparent or a semi transparent look were one of the hot runners. So was the case with some of the colorful favicons but they were not chosen because color trends do change and therefore a colored favicon might not have suited in the times to come.

The Google blog states that “By no means is the one you’re seeing our favicon final; it was a first step to a more unified set of icons.” If you are a designer and have a great idea for Google’s favicon then you can submit your designs at the submission page. Rules to the contest are posted on the page and entries close on June 20th 2008.

Tags: favicon, Google, web design

Twitter down? - Use Twiddict

Those who use twitter have been finding the service down more often than up and it is frustrating.

Twiddict is a service which allows you to tweet even when Twitter is down. Twiddict constantly pings the Twitter service (adding to Twitters woes of too much traffic) to see when it comes up and then posts the Tweets you had sent when it was down as soon as the Twitter service is up.

As rightly observed on mashable, if services are started which hope to be successful if your service is down then it is not a good sign for the service provider who in this case is Twitter.

I’m both happy and sad that this service is available like most people.

Tags: Twitter, web 2.0