Mapping

In response to the Webware Challenge to make cell phones into better lifelines, many (hundreds) of people added comments and wrote to me personally to say the main solution to finding people who are lost or stranded should be better cellular phone coverage, cell phones with emergency satellite radios, or dedicated emergency locator beacons. I support all of these ideas, but as I said in a previous post, I still think we could use a "fail-safe" notification system that alerts friends, families, or authorities when a person goes missing. If a person is unable to make a call … Read more

The San Francisco New Tech Meetup met at our offices Wednesday. Presentations were given by four interesting companies:

Vizu's new Answers service lets anyone create a market research poll, which is distributed to various sites and blogs that have an audience of visitors the researcher wants to poll. It looks like a really fast way to get basic product research done. It's not free: You pay to distribute your poll to the sites in the network that have agreed to run polls; they, in turn, make money for running your research. In other words, it's much like … Read more

There have been a few dozen good responses to the post I wrote about new technologies or services that could help find people who get into trouble while traveling. See A Webware challenge: Make cell phones better lifelines.

It begins with notification. You don't send out rescue parties until you know someone is lost, and my initial proposal simply allows the alarm to be raised earlier. Several people rightly commented that it would be difficult to create a "flight plan" system that people would actually use. But I will not dismiss this idea just yet; some of … Read more

Shortly after we got the crushing news of James Kim's death, I received an e-mail from a human resources person here at CNET. She wrote, "I would love to see a Web site dedicated to the safety of employees. Employees should be able to submit their travel routes and whereabouts. Whether it's on a road trip or visiting an apartment listed on Craigslist, providing information on where employees are and the related circumstances may be extremely helpful in the event that an emergency or dangerous situation occurs."

I forwarded this idea to several people who run … Read more

Ask.com has released a new way to find all things local. While that may not sound exciting, once you try out AskCity, you will be hooked on this quick and easy super-directory that requires no prior knowledge of what you seek.

AskCity allows users to search for things like restaurants and services within a chosen area. An intuitive and simple interface integrates maps, address information, directions and sharing features, while eliminating many annoying steps. Unlike other directories, AskCity does not require that you even remember the name of that town with the Thai place near that movie theater that … Read more

I just got a new ThinkPad T60, and I've become a bit obsessive about it. I've been hanging out on the ThinkPad forums and reading the ThinkPad designers' blog. And I just found something for ThinkPads that's so cool it actually made me giggle: The Google Maps Thinkpad controller app, a.k.a. gmaps, by Tatsuhiko Miyagawa, an engineer at Six Apart. (The YouTube video below is his.) It uses the orientation and motion sensor of the ThinkPad hard disk's Active Protection System to enable you to navigate your Google map by tilting your laptop. Tilt … Read more

Jaguar is the first auto manufacturer to offer its customers internet tracking of their cars. Sourcing the technology from MicroTRAKgps (a company that may one day be known more for testing the envelope of English language capitalization than for GPS technology) Jaguar will offer "JaguarWatch" as a dealer-installed accessory. It uses a combination of GPS and GSM cellular technology.

Jag owners go to a personal portal to find their car, setup alerts for keyless movement, browse its speed and location history or set a "GeoFence" which will alert them when the car leaves or enters certain … Read more