Mobile Dublin

Grants for Dublin mobile applications

2010-11-05T11:08:00.002+00:00

From the list of 25 Cultural Tourism Technology projects to be funded :

iSpysculpture - development of iPhone App for 30-50 pieces of Dublin's public art – iPhone GPS will get the user's current location and then plot all artworks in the immediate area and give directions to create in effect a self guided walking tour

Develop a free of charge mobile application for both android and iPhone directly linking localities in Dublin city with the life and poetry of Patrick Kavanagh

National Botanic Gardens - Development of 3 x 40 minute colour coded self guided Tours / walks consisting of audio commentary, music and digital images which will be available to download at the visitor centre, online and also preloaded onto reusable media cards for insertion into mobile phones

via Damien Mulley who thinks it's a massive waste of money.

busTAXT

2005-04-14T13:22:00.000+01:00

Seen at Overheard in Dublin

On the 41a heading for town, two guys got on in their 'nice' shell tracksuits and caps at 45 degree angles.

One of the guys spies a poster on the bus for "bustext" to which he loudly proclaims...

"BUS-TAXT? look at that, the gov-dern-ment trying to rip us off again!"

Dublin traffic cams on your S60 phone

2005-04-11T19:23:00.000+01:00

TrafficCam is a Python app that lets you check traffic cams from your Series 60 phone. I've created a data file for the Dublin cams here. I've also created a version of the app with Dublin in the dropdown. Download it here (Note: I made a small change to the app that shows the name of the selected location instead of just "Traffic Image").

Free SMS alerts for N7 users

2005-04-08T19:11:00.000+01:00

According to this article at ENN:

The National Roads Authority (NRA) has initiated a pilot scheme to provide travel time estimates to motorists using the N7 in order to help them plan their journeys better... At present the NRA is covering the costs of the text messaging service...

You can subscribe to the service here.

According to the site:

Unusual travel time alerts will be sent when the current travel time in the user's region of interest has exceeded the historic travel time by more than 2 times (N7 Northbound only).

Severe event alerts will be sent when a major traffic incident has occurred within the user's region of interest (N7 and M50).

Taxman's confidential SMS service

2005-04-07T12:00:00.000+01:00

Reading ENN, I was reminded of the Taxman's service for requesting PAYE forms by SMS. In this article, Saadian's Peter Corkery says:

For tax affairs, texting a message is obviously more confidential than making a voice call. Very few people would call the Revenue on their mobiles while commuting, but many people will quite happily text in a request...

As I said yesterday, the discreet nature of SMS makes it well suited to this kind of application. I would certainly prefer to send an SMS than make a call in my open plan office.

Oh, and congratulations to Saadian on being shortlisted for one of the ICT Excellence awards for implementing the service.

ISPCC launches Childline Text 50101

2005-04-06T07:41:00.000+01:00

The ISPCC has launched a new text service called “Childline Text 50101” which:

aims to offer an additional support system for children and young people contacting Childline. The text service will be integrated within the existing Childline telephone service and will provide an automated, immediate response to a child who texts.

This seems like a good use of SMS technology, and it allows young people to communicate in a medium that they're comfortable with. I believe that one of the reasons for the phenomenal success of SMS is due to its discreet nature, which makes it ideally suited to this kind of application.

RSS as the mobile "killer app"

2005-03-31T23:58:00.000+01:00

I read Paul's NFC proximity sensing in shops post, in which he mentions the possibility of shops providing their latest offers via an RSS feed. This got me thinking about Lidl's weekly specials and how it would be cool to get them as an RSS feed in my new LiteFeeds mobile aggregator. A quick Google search yielded RSSxl - Convert an HTML Web Page to RSS which has a handy form for - you guessed it - generating RSS from HTML. In about 5 minutes I had a feed that lists each special (with a link to the product page) in the title and the price listed in the description of each item.

Now I'd like to be able to say that I added the feed to my LiteFeeds account and the rest was history - handy notifications of Lidl's weekly specials in my mobile aggregator. But that's not quite true. The generated feed doesn't actually work in LiteFeeds (I'm not sure why) and besides this is a rather brittle hack. (Although I prefer LiteFeeds, my generated feed worked fine with Bloglines mobile.)

I think the exercise illustrates an important point though. With fairly little effort, I was able to make use of readily available information and tools to get notifications of interest to me, on my mobile phone. No premium rate text messages and no need to browse the full HTML site with the limited resources of a phone. Now the question is: why aren't Lidl already providing their specials as an RSS feed (instead of an email newsletter)? And what about the recruitment sites and the property letting and sales sites and, and... Surely the obvious thing for them is to offer highly personalised feeds of jobs and properties and weather reports and DART times and ... the list is endless. Feeds that people could aggregate on their mobiles allowing them to get all their notifications in one convenient place.

BusSched as an alternative to busTXT

2005-03-27T23:53:00.000+01:00

I had seen BusSched before, but it seems to have been updated.

BusSched is a utility for Palm OS and Pocket PC based PDAs. It is designed to display Dublin Bus bus schedules.

This application has an interesting list of features, including the ability to enter how many minutes your stop is from the terminus, and have the timetable altered accordingly. The thing I like best about the site though, is the ability to create your own timetable. You can select the routes you use from a dropdown list and download only the databases for those routes.

With virtually every new mobile phone now supporting Java, I think this app is just crying out to be converted to j2me. Throw in the ability to download only data for routes you use (saving space on low-end handsets) and I think you've got some serious competition for busTXT.

Luas Smart Card top-up idea

2005-03-22T18:01:00.000+00:00

I just applied for a Luas Smart Card, which is billed as “the easy pay-as-you-go way to travel on Luas”. Strange – I thought pay-as-you-go was what I was doing when I put my money in the ticket machine and paid for a single trip. I would have thought the smart card more of a “prepaid” way to travel. Semantics aside though, this seems like a good idea and it would have saved me 45 minutes of queueing on Paddy’s Day.

Now if only there were a handy way to top it up from my mobile phone. The thing is, I’m most likely to “remember” that it needs topping up when I “tag-on” and I’m informed that my balance is low. If I could send off a top-up text message while I’m waiting for the next Luas or completing my journey, then I save myself from having to queue the next time – which is surely the point of the whole system.

MobileIrish

2005-03-20T12:11:00.000+00:00

So I was watching Million Dollar Baby this morning when I suddenly needed to know what "Mo cuishle" means in English. I have the number for MobileIrish (sms Irish dictionary) on my phone, so I sent off a quick text. Unfortunately, the service seems to be down though. This isn't a service I'd use every day, but it's perfect for this type of situation and it provided some entertainment on a pub crawl that included Anseo and Solas, when it WAS working.

A Google search for irish sms displays an AdWords link for MobileIrish, which is how I found the site originally. This despite the fact that the service isn't (wasn't) a premium rate one, and would have COST the provider to translate words. I'm not sure whether the service is just down temporarily or if it has been discontinued, but I for one would like to see it back - even at a premium rate.

Anyway, it's probably a good thing I got no reply - it would have ruined the end of the movie for me.

PodGuides

2005-03-18T22:42:00.000+00:00

As a recent convert to PodCasting, I believe that James at EirePreneur has had another good idea : PodGuides for the Irish tourism market. He links to PodGuides.net, which explains that a PodGuide is

the combination of a map (PDF) of a certain place and a series of audio tracks (mp3) which you can download for your iPod. Think of an audio tour in a museum, but not limited to just that. You could have a PodGuide about the 10 coolest pubs in London...or Dublin.

The site goes on to explain

On the pdf-map all the stopovers are marked with a numbered dot. Each number corresponds with a track number. So if, for example, you are on dot '3' you choose track 3 of the PodGuide, and the appropriate info will be played back to you.

My suggestion would be to offer either mini WAP sites or java midlets for displaying the maps, as an alternative to the pdf.

m-Paddy's Day

2005-03-16T22:13:00.000+00:00

A friend suggested that I post something about Paddy's Day. A quick Google search yielded the following:

Get in the spirit of things by downloading some free St. Patricks Day Themed Ringtones
FoneBlog.ie has a page from last year that says Join in on our Paddy's Day Blog! Send us pics and text to paddysday@foneblog.ie while you are out and about celebrating!!www.foneblog.ie/paddysday. I checked out www.foneblog.ie/paddysday and found no pictures, but maybe someone will post something this year.
VisitDublin.com's wireless site has a schedule of the various events.

DartMobile

2005-03-15T22:53:00.000+00:00

DartMobile allows access to live DART times available at www.dart.ie from any mobile phone that supports Java. If you do have a Java enabled phone and GPRS then this might be a cheaper alternative than DARTXT, and a list of stations in the application saves you from typing in the station name. My only suggestion would be that since people are likely to be using this while walking (or running) to the DART station, a larger/bolder font (at least on the Nokia 6600) might work better.

BusTxt ideas

2005-03-14T21:45:00.000+00:00

I found the excellent Wireless Wonders blog recently and read Paul's Follow-up text protocol post. His basic idea is that user's would opt-in to allowing merchants to send one follow-up text message per transaction conducted with them.

This reminded me of an idea I had when Dublin Bus had their annual fare increase earlier this year. Since I’ve used BusTxt a couple of times, they KNOW I take the bus (at least sometimes) and they KNOW my mobile number. It would be a no-brainer for them to send me a single text message with the details of any fare changes. Saves Dublin Bus 10 cents (since the driver lets you on at the old fare anyway) and saves me from looking like an idiot, giving me a warm fuzzy feeling about them (if that’s possible). Come to think of, I wouldn’t mind them sending me route or timetable changes for routes that I’d enquired about either.

The important point Paul makes in his post is that the number of follow-up texts be limited, so that people don't get spammed. I think in the case of BusTxt follow-ups, most people wouldn't mind getting the odd fare or timetable change text.