Simon Zambrovski

The vacation time of most people is over, so it is time to meet and discuss a little. A good opportunity to do this will be given on September 1st in Roxie, Hamburg during the Eclipse Stammtisch. The event name translates into regular’s table and indicates a regularity of the happening. Even if the upcoming event is only the second in series I expect to meet many people after the great feedback after the last one.

Details:

• When: Monday, September 1st, 19:00 CET
• Where: Roxie, Hamburg, Germany
• Directions: http://www.roxie-hamburg.com/roxieway.htm 
• Who’s comming: Doodle Poll

See you next Monday.

The first “Eclipse Stammtisch Hamburg” took place in Bolero in Ottensen. It was a full success, about 50 people were there. Peter and Stefan seemed to like it too. I was glad to see people I met on Eclipse Democamp again. I liked the location, having a separated room, big enough for another 50 people. I spoke with Ralph on the intended frequency of the event - it could be good to have it once in a quater. Some pictures can be seen in my FlickR gallery.

According to Slontech a new GPS related technology breakthrough may become available. In contrast to GPS live mode, where the coordinates are required in time of receiving (e.G. for navigation scenario) geo-tagging does not require them. As described in Geotagging with GPS Whitepaper the new device could just store the raw GPS signal. Later this signal can be used to recompute the coordinates from the timestamp and the satellite positions and write them to EXIF. The general idea behind this approach is to minimize the the energy consumption. A standard GPS device needs about 30 seconds to calculate its position. The most time it uses to download the satellite position and only 200ms are needed for the position determination of the device itself. Other approaches exist to improve the precision of GPS and transmit the additional data using radio or the Internet.

In general, I think the approach could have some impact on GPS usage, because the device is cheap and the usage is easy. In the same time, it is not the first device that can be sensefull build in in any device. A bluetooth chip is also very cheap and could be used in any digital camera for photo synchronization, but it is mostly an exception…

Technorati tags: GPS, geotate, no fix, geotagging, geocoding