Today's quote"Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clarke. GeoSmart Services • Web Mapping
• Car Navigation
• AA Traffic
• Cartography
• Fleet Management
• Route Optimisation Bizzone Business Expo 2009
Olesya Frolova & Luigi Cappel attend Bizzone Business Expo at Christchurch
Office MoveThis month GeoSmart has moved to a new office on the second floor of our existing building. All our contact details are the same. This move supports our continued growth in developing more services and products for our customers. For more information email info@geosmart.co.nz or phone Olesya Frolova 09 966 8765 or Luigi Cappel 09 966 8768 or visit www.geosmart.co.nz If you do not wish to continue receiving this newsletter please click the unsubscribe link below 
| Welcome to SmartNews Subscriber
Welcome to SmartNews powered by GeoSmart. This is the first edition of a new email Newsletter which you are receiving because you have been in contact with GeoSmart in the past and we would like to keep you informed of our new developments.
This newsletter will keep you informed about the exciting world of Location Based Services (LBS) and the way GeoSmart is harnessing this technology to add value to business and consumers in New Zealand and overseas. We will help you understand the opportunities that mapping and GPS can open up for you. This includes developments in websites, mobiles, car navigation, fleet management and personal tracking, business visualisation and planning, spatial data analysis, consumer marketing and much more, because location is everywhere.
If you do not wish to continue receiving this newsletter please click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the page. In which case you won't receive any more newsletters from us. I would also like to take the opportunity to introduce myself. My name is Olesya and I'm the new Sales & Marketing Assistant at GeoSmart. My job combines participation in a range of sales and marketing activities, liaising with marketing partners, creating newsletters, etc.
If you have any questions about topics covered in this newsletter or to do with sales and marketing please feel free to email me: olesya.frolova@geosmart.co.nz
We look forward to sharing our latest developments with you. Happy reading!
AA Traffic  Over the last year, GeoSmart has been very busy developing and planning for the launch of AA Traffic. The concept around AA Traffic is to provide motorists with information about incidents, accidents, road works and other conditions that could interfere with their journey. Whilst we are not solving the problems, informed motorists can decide to delay their journey or change their route in order to avoid the problem. Traffic congestion in Auckland alone was said to impact on the time-cost to business of over $1 Billion annually in 1999 and we all know this hasn't improved any since then.
This has been a huge undertaking and many people have been involved in developing and fine tuning our systems to ensure we deliver a quality product. This includes the many sources that we will collect information from including NZ Police, New Zealand Transport Agency, Local Government, and Fleet Management users. We have built an infrastructure capable of receiving many incidents concurrently, validating them, eliminating duplicates that might sound like different incidents and then being able to feed the information out to a wide range of services. We now have people managing this system 24/7 so that we can stay on top of everything and we cover all of New Zealand.
AA Traffic is available in many different outputs. First of all, you can find AA Traffic on the AA Maps website by selecting the features you would like to see on the ‘Legend', which are Major Incidents, Minor Incidents and the NZTA Webcams. For additional detail, click on the ‘Traffic' button on top of the AA Maps page and you will have more options including the popular AA Roadwatch, which adds access to future events as well as current and even flight arrivals and departures for Auckland and Christchurch airports. Shortly that will include more information including Cook Straight Ferry information.
AA Traffic is now available for car navigation devices, with Navman being the first brand in NZ to offer real time alerts and the option of an alternate route. Other services about to be launched include SMS and Email alert services. We also have the ability to send information out in XML format so that we can deliver information right into 3rd party applications such as call centres and despatch offices. Whether it is for business or your next long weekend, AA Traffic is a solution that can help you. If you would like to know more, please ask us.  What is LBS and what does it have to do with me?
LBS, or Location Based Services are applications or services that tell you about what is immediately around you spatially at a specific point in time. LBS equates to Location + Relevance + Currency. A good example of this is an LBS application for a user to find specials on a particular product or service such as "tell me about fast-food specials but only on Thursday nights between 5pm and 8pm within 1km of me". Therefore LBS is about the user setting the rules to allow push content only when and where they want it which opens up huge opportunities in the marketing of online services. GeoSmart's web mapping tools and online map content are designed to support the development of these types of applications with rich spatial content and spatial query features available through our web mapping API's.
Developers are racing ahead in coming up with applications that will run on these devices and in New Zealand, GeoSmart has the best quality of data, but just as importantly the API's and web services that enable them to create, test and launch the applications. These tools and services are available to developers free of charge, whether they are commercial developers, telcos, agencies, education or simply people with cool ideas wanting to invent something new, which has always been a Kiwi passion.
Applications come under a number of themes including Proximity Based Marketing, Location Based Social Networking (including Buddy Finders), Location Based Games, Web Mashups and much more. GeoSmart works hard to stay at the forefront of this technology in research, participating in industry conferences around the world, collecting the data these applications need; and writing the API's and web services that developers need to build their applications. We also offer consultancy to organisations wanting to evaluate opportunities, which can sometimes save a lot of anguish in not repeating the mistakes that companies have made in exploring this technology.
A key component of our support for developers is the Location Innovation Awards, which launched in 2009, in order to support developers and people with great ideas. This year the top prize was won by Matt Weston, a University of Auckland student, who we sent to the USA to the Where 2.0 conference. We are currently working with potential sponsors for the next competition, which will launch in the coming months. We are also delighted to be working with Massey University, Raffles University and AIS ST Helens, supporting students in developing LBS mobile applications.
In today's society, people are highly mobile, whether for business or pleasure. The mobile is the one ubiquitous device which is with us all the time. If your mobile knows where you are, what wonderful things would you like to be able to do? LBS opens those doors and GeoSmart is waiting to help you make those things happen. GeoSmart's RAPIDcV vehicle sets mapping in motion
The RAPIDcV (Road Attributes, Points of Interest, Imagery Data Capture Vehicle) vehicle is part of a driving plan which GeoSmart has formulated to re-drive all of New Zealand in order to provide the best possible data for Location Based Services (LBS) including car navigation, fleet management and all other product that requires an accurate turn restriction data set. Using leading edge technology we are now able to re-map NZ roads to around 15 cm accuracy. Our vehicle collects around eight terabytes of data every two weeks.
The RAPIDcV has a series of cameras monitoring all aspects of the road and its surroundings, including capturing road furniture, such as street signs and intersection controls, as well as Points of Interest (POI). The data collected by the RAPIDcV also measures the camber of corners which may be used for truck safety to alert drivers to take extra caution on road corners where the camber angle is not optimal. The vehicle also measures the inclination of roads which may be used in the future for services such as Eco-Routing.
RAPIDcV (Road Attributes, Points of Interest, Imagery Data Capture Vehicle)
I hope you find this newsletter informative and would like to continue to receive it from us. If you know of anyone else who might be interested in this newsletter please feel free to forward it to them.
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