Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Just tried viNes on the E71 (check out my my Y! Purple Bike 1st ride route). The mobile app part of viNes is much nicer than Nokia Sports Tracker (this could be a "honeymoon effect" due to the E71's expanded RAM and fast processor but viNes on an E71 is much better than Sports Tracker on an N95-1! Sadly viNes doesn't work on an N95-1). In a bit of an oddity, the maps show on both the Nokia Sports Tracker site as well as the viNes site. The website (like far too many Nokia websites, what is the problem Nokia? Adopt Joomla, WordPress, Drupal or Rails, stop using proprietary web systems with ridiculous amount of flash please!) is still very bad: not enough social media features (that you get for free on the aforementioned platforms), too much gratuitous flash and bad URLs (check out my past whingeing :-) about the Sports Tracker site!). Someday when the iPhone has background processing, an app like this will come to that mobile too! Until then, viNes is much better than any of the iPhone GPS tracker apps I have tried.

QUOTE [From Nokia viNe Has Been Released - Black Phoebe :: Ms. Jen]

It is official, Nokia viNe has been released into the wild and is now available for download. This version of Nokia viNe is a mobile geo-path-tracking / photo / video location based mobile app that allows one to create "vines" or "journeys" on one's phone and then upload it to the nokia server to be displayed on the web or via a widget.

END QUOTE

Seeing Ms Jen's and Glenn's posts about the Nokia Sports Tracker Widget a few weeks back made me create my own Sports Tracker N Series Widget page. Unfortunately Sports Tracker is maddeningly infuriating in that annoying kind of "Nokia can almost make software way" because:

1. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it would freeze or stop tracking my movements in the middle of a bicycle ride when I first tried it (using the built in GPS on the N95-1 and the built-in GPS on the N82 (North American version). And I tried to make it work about 70 times (yes I have 70 routes on Sports Tracker and far too many are incomplete because the GPS froze) which I think constitutes a fair trial!
2. So I bought an LD-4W GPS when I was in Finland for Nokia Open Lab 2008, thinking that would improve the reliability. Well it did for ShoZu but for Sports Tracker it was no more or less reliable
3. I want to believe :-) ! Maybe it's the fact that I have an N95-1 so maybe I run out of memory? Maybe the N82 NAM doesn't work because it doesn't have the latest normal N82 firmware updates. Maybe it's because I don't use 3G (I'd love to use 3G but none of the devices Nokia has sent me to date has North American 3G)
4. And yes I know it's beta, I hope the next version called Nokia viNe is less flakey. Maybe both Sports Tracker and viNe are more reliable on newer phones like the N95 8GB NAM, N96, N85 etc! ShoZu has dramatically improved in reliability in recent versions for fanatical 30 pictures or more per day users like myself (pretty reliable for normal folks all along methinks)! Fingers crossed that the same thing will happen for Sports Tracker and viNe.
5. Postscript: just tried logging into my sports tracker account with my Nokia Account and it failed, in fact I can't login into my Nokia account at all. Here's the error message: "Servlet error: An exception occurred. The current application deployment descriptors do not allow for including it in this response. Please consult the application log for details." - Weekend maintainence? Regardless, a very unfriendly error message.

Unfortunately most Windows machines don't have the software to play MP4 format files so here are the Navteq Videos on YouTube re-posted (what a waste of time, somebody please solve the 8 million video format problem quickly please!) in Flash format:

1. Val Brown
2. Kevin and James Drive and Ride
3. Robert Gourdine Part 1
4. Robert Gourdine Part 2

Ever wonder what how the data for Google Maps, Yahoo maps, etc. is gathered? Well wonder no more. Navteq, "supplier of world wide map data to the universe" :-), were in town visiting WinBC today and I had the opportunity to do a "Drive and Ride" with them in their specially equipped Pontiac and also to speak with their Vancouver based field personnel as well as their marketing team from headquarters in Chicago:

1. PODCAST of our DRIVE AND RIDE in the Navteq car (9.1 MB MP3 file, 19:45) gathering some digital map data including where restaurants are, one way streets and medians (my apologies for the poor sound quality; something was amiss with my microphone).
   
2. Navteq visits WinBC flickr pictures March 16, 2006
3. VIDEO - Robert Gourdine Part 1 - Navteq has 1800 NOT 1600 people in 55 countries. Mapping the world! Providing data to enable "location aware" services. Recorded at Win BC on March 16, 2006
4. VIDEO - Robert Gourdine Part 2 - How to get access to the data? Navteq is interested in growing the community of people using their data which I came up with the phrase "enabler for providing smart, dynamic, location based information". Recorded at Win BC on March 16, 2006
5. VIDEO - James and Kevin - Vancouver based Navteq employees - James and Kevin are based at the Navteq office in Richmond, BC, Canada and are responsible for ensuring their mapping data is up to date from Manitoba west. Recorded March 16, 2006 at the Win BC office on my Nokia N70 cameraphone.
6. VIDEO - Val Brown - Val Brown, Navteq marketing manager, explains how Navteq's dynamic location data puts them at the foreground of location aware social networking, as well as their traditional market like mapping and car navigation systems. Recorded March 16, 2006 at the offices of WinBC.