Grants for Dublin mobile applications

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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.