Notes from Carotonama

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I was at #cartonama conference in Bangalore on 23rd September, 2012. It was wonderful to be among geogeeks and see the energy and enthusiasm. Got to see some great demos and LBS apps from startups in India. Here’s a run down from my notes and bookmarks.

  • Traffic cams in Bangalore: This was probably the coolest demo for me. Love the simplicity and usefulness. Just open this URL in your smartphone browser and get real-time feed from the traffic-cam neareast to you from BTIS.http://hackday.freecrow.org/trafficam
  • Thru the Gall: A Layar-based android app to solve the last-mile direcction problem in India. Bubbles guide you through the narrow-lanes (galli). http://www.layar.com/layers/galli/
  • Padma: Search and Browse Indian documentaries through locations of the clips in the documentaries http://pad.ma/map
  • DelightCircle: LBS app to discover offers and discounts near you. Surprised at the coverage and partnerships they are able to genrate in the short time. Powered by MongoDB at the backend.http://delightcircle.com/
  • Commonfloor.com: Google Maps API app for property search. Nicely done and simple UI and fast lad times. The team talked about challenges and techniques they use to de-dup the listings and pin the individual listings to the apartment block. http://www.commonfloor.com/apartments-for-sale/maps/
  • Yahoo: I had forgotten about yahoo as a geo player. But from the talk the team seems pretty excited about their geo APIs. The Geo APIs are used by many yahoo properties internally and available to developers too. The API to extract locations from free-form-text was cool. YQL is a SQL-like query interface for their API. http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/, APIS at http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/
  • NextDrop: Very interesting idea. Most places in India do not have a regular water supply and people’s day revolves around when they are able to collecct water. They have built a system that alerts subscribers by sms when they can expect water based on the information from the utility company. Subscribers pay Rs.10/month to get this data. Their challenge revoled around locating their customers on a map – both for billing as well as determining which pipeline will supply them water. http://nextdrop.org
  • Lokasi: Simple android app that allows you to share your current location by sms. Reverse-geocoding + location identifier. http://www.onze.in/ . collected POIs + street geometry for entire bangalore is about 6 months with a 10-person team.
  • Brief history of map making: Fun talk with lot of pretty and interesting maps. No geo conference is complete without a passionate discussion on projections 🙂 http://www.slideshare.net/sumandro/sumandromapping-thecity27032012-12203410
  • Chalo BEST: Bus route planner for Mumbai using OpenTripPlanner and GTFS feed from BEST. http://trip.chalobest.in/. Challenges in converting messy spreadsheet data from the agengy in to GTFS feed.
  • Geohash: overview of the geohash system. Lots of discussion around what geohash is good for. http://geohash.org/

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