Traveler based GPS enabled rings

The BBC is running an interesting article on a British Royal College of Art student Gail Knight who has developed a GPS enabled traveling companion which vibrates a ring based device to notify the traveler of potential danger or points of interest. It is a great concept by which I draw great parallels with what we are doing at Indaran. Travel and the services which will evolve over the coming 18 to 24 months excites me greatly. Being able to harness technologies such as GPS to provide the user a richer experience be it travel or other is extremely interesting.

Similarly an old colleague of mine Alex Craxton who is now over at Ymogen have started working with the BBC on slightly different but still very interesting project linking BBC information with actual physical locations. They utilise GPS coordinates and BBC URL's to provide markup to physical world locations.

JSR 256 Motion Sensor API update

JSR 256 had a major maintenance update release in the last couple of days. JSR 256 is a API for controlling sensors in mobile devices. It is interesting to see how this development library is utilised in the coming years.

Technical folk can find the Java docs here

Nokia's pledge to GPS in all phones & future phone must have's

There was an interesting article over at ZDnet last week in which David Watkins, Multimedia Sales Director Nokia APAC was quoted as saying 'GPS will work its way from niche product to mainstream functionality and will one day be considered as ubiquitous as the cameraphone is today'.

This is great news for the location based content market and for anyone looking at harnessing the new age of integrated sensors.

So a quick question I would like to pose - what is the sucessor to GPS in the line of mobile device 'must haves'? Personally I think it will be a mix of varied user interfaces including ePaper, OLED wrappable screens and sensory devices.

On the sensor side I would have to suggest digital compases (we will talk about these soon) heart rate monitors, motion sensors (see Nokia's 5500 which came out last year - no it wasn't you Apple who were the first to integrate one even though you like to say so), temperature and light sensors (the later Apple does have in the IPhone) are close followers in my books.