Hasta La Gadget!

Interactive Map of Afghanistan for iPad. Image By/Used Courtesy Of Development Seed

GPS maps for smartphones generally require a fairly high-speed wireless internet connection, consume significant processor resources, and are optimized for driving. But what if your 3G connection is unreliable or unavailable, and you still need to get from point A to point B — perhaps on foot?

Last week, I spoke with Eric Gunderson and Ian Cairns at Development Seed, one of the companies developing tools to create custom maps that work in a wider variety of situations, like this one. It’s not that farfetched: In a natural disaster and in the developing world, mobile phones may be useful navigational aids, but only if they can work without a reliable data connection and are optimized for different kinds of transportation than just zooming down the highway to the nearest Starbucks.

Development Seed caught our attention with a post that Cairns wrote for PBS’s MediaShift Idea Lab on custom maps for cyclists and drunken, late-night pedestrians. For StumbleSafely, DC Bikes, and DC Nightvision, a typical street map was overlaid with crime data, bike lanes, bar and bike shop locations, and municipal infrastructure: “Not just buildings and roads, but even crosswalks, medians, and topography lines.” In short, all of the data that actually helps you get where you’re going when you’re not in a car.

These maps were built with TileMill, an open-source program the company created to help governments, NGOs, news organizations, and others easily create custom maps. The idea is to make map image tiles and Geographic Information System (GIS) data as easy to work with as RSS feeds or CSV databases are today.

“We want to put these tools in the hands of the subject-matter experts and see what they can do,” Gunderson told Wired.com. Development Seed won a Knight News Challenge award for the project.

Knight News Challenge: Tilemapping from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

One of the most-needed and currently most-poorly-served markets for mapping and data visualization support is in international development. As Gadget Lab reported this week, mobile devices are thriving in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the developing world, but data bandwidth and easy-to-find electricity aren’t.

“You can’t get an application like Google Earth working in Afghanistan,” Gunderson said. Maps On A Stick offers full-fledged, data-and-image-rich maps on a USB drive for no-bandwidth or poor-bandwidth use. The company and clients have plenty of experience with those scenarios, mapping uncharted road data in Africa, or helping relief workers provide housing assistance after Hurricane Katrina.

I think about those disaster scenarios often, just as I think about the people I love walking home alone in the city late at night.

When Apple launched the iPhone, it made a big deal about how its software team had written its own Maps client, using Google’s data only for the backend. It had to work for the touch interface, but it also had to make sense for how people would be likely to use Maps on a mobile device.

Now that easy mobile maps have become a natural part of our smartphone-carrying, 3G-surfing lives, it may be time for us to broaden our assumptions about the kinds of maps we’ll need and the conditions we’ll have when we need them.

See Also:

• Google Maps Finally Adds Bike Routes
• Microsoft Adds OpenStreetMap Layer to Bing Maps
• Help Us Review Google Maps for Bikes
• Preparing for the Next Haiti, with Maps, Texts and Tweets
• Google Maps Adds Bike Directions
• Satellite Net Service Sued for Caps, Paltry Bandwidth
• Using Google Earth and GPS to Track Afghanistan Cash

Today we point and laugh at yet another ill-conceived bike design, only this one will actually make it into stores and is the spawn of big-name Brit designer Ross Lovegrove, not just some dude with a CAD app.

The first thing I though when I saw the LDN (for “London”) was “How the hell do I lock it?” You could run your D-Lock through that hole in the frame (there to lighten the bike and let you hang it on the wall) but then you’re left with two unsecured wheels. And because the carbon-fiber frame lacks a down-tube, the front-wheel can’t be locked to it. The only answer is three D-Locks, inferior cables or heavy chains, hardly practical on a “London” bike. And that’s before we even get to securing the saddle.

Lovegrove designed the LDN for Biomega, and it is clearly billed for city use. It has a couple of saving features: hub-gears and a shaft-drive keep things clean (both in looks and non-dirtiness) and, well, that’s it. The Lady thinks that it would be hard to ride in a skirt, and I wonder why the rear-wheel mounts on track-ends, especially as the shaft-drive means no chain pulling on the wheel, and no real need to move the wheel back and forth for perfect tension.

One more thing: The press release somewhat naively states that “LDN [is] a true urban tool.” Indeed.

Cüratorial Biomega: LDN & NYC (Press release) [Cyclelicious via Bicycle Design]

See Also:

• Peugeot Concept Bike Channels Tron
• City Concept Commuter Bike for Non-Cyclists
• Cannondale Concept Cross-Breeds Bike and Shopping-Cart
• Taurus Concept Is Like Hot Segway Bike From the Future
• Bendy Bike Wraps Around Poles
• Scary-Looking Concept Bike is All Corners
• Cannondale Concept Updates The Dutch Bike

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

This trike would fit right into a remake of The Shining, only instead of being ridden by the bowl-haired Danny Torrance, it would be piloted by a stretched, nightmarish cross between a creepy child and a psychedelic, broken-backed dachshund. The movie would, of course, be directed by Terry Gilliam.

The tricycle is in fact a sculpture by Dallas, Texas-based artist Sergio Garcia, and would likely be no less useful than a normal bike in that big, car-friendly state. The 50-inch-high piece is titled “Its not always easy to tell whats real and whats fabricated” and could probably be ridden if you sat backwards and didn’t mind people staring, pointing and murmuring “Red rum, red rum” over and over.

I wonder if Garcia would be interested in a commission. I snapped the frame of my bike at last weekend’s Bike Bolo World Championship in Berlin. I imagine fixing it up with a vertical version of Garcia’s looping tube, arranged around me like a big, skinny steel forcefield stopping any other player for getting near the ball.

Trike Sculpture [Sergio Garcia via the Giz]

Social Bicycles is a bike sharing system with a twist. Using an iPhone app, the system allows users to drop off, locate, and borrow a bike nearly anywhere. The bikes are equipped with a GPS device which is locked to one of the wheels, and when the bike is locked, it’s locatable using the app, so that someone can borrow it; when it’s in use and unlocked, it doesn’t appear in the app. The real upside to Social Bicycles is that the regular infrastructure required for bike lending systems — such as docking stations in a lot of convenient locations — are unnecessary with this system, which can get by with regular old bike racks, making it a much cheaper, fly-by-night option. It’s coming to New York City in very limited beta this fall, and we expect it to outperform Segs in the City in no time. Video is below.

Continue reading Social Bicycles bike sharing system powered by iPhone app to hit NYC this fall

Social Bicycles bike sharing system powered by iPhone app to hit NYC this fall originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Aug 2010 21:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink CrunchGear  |  Social Bicylcles  | Email this | Comments

This bad-ass, nut-busting ride comes from the fevered imaginations of the designers at Trek bikes. Called The Broadsider, the bike was made to a fictional brief featuring a post-apocalyptic story “of the legendary cliff racer Max Malco who lost his life saving a young boy from his racing rivals.”

Sound familiar? That’s because it rips-off the story of Mad Max, right down to the first name of its main character. And if you’re going to steal ideas from a movie to make a bike, it probably should be the still-awesome Mad Max.

The Broadsider is a concept project, but a look at the pictures gives an idea of the specs. The first “spec” on the list should be weight. This thing surely comes in at well over 60-pounds. Next are disk-brakes, likely needed to stop something this big if you ever manage to pedal it to the top of a hill and haul it over the crest.

Low gears are assumedly a given, but its the styling that is the point here, from the bar-grips that look like (and might just be) old inner-tubes, through the saddle which could have been stitched together by Frankenstein, to that top-tube, which I pessimistically described as nut-busting up there in the first paragraph.

This bike will probably never make it out of the near-future back to the boring present day, but if you are visiting the Trek World show this week, you may be lucky enough to see it.

UPDATE: Trek’s Senior Industrial Designer, Michael Hammond, mailed to say that the Broadside actually weighs “around 45lbs…nonetheless it’s still a bugger to pedal up hill.” He also points out, in case anyone actually needed convincing, that “Max is just a bad-ass post-apocalyptic name!” We totally agree.

Trek’s New Broadsider, What Mad Max Will Ride When he Runs Outta Gas [Bike Rumor]

See Also:

• People Ignore Critics: Trek Lime Wins Design Award
• Wired 12.07: Tour de Lance

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.