3dTracking.net turns the live tracking of somebody using Maps or Earth into the seamless web 2.0 mashup experience for the masses that it should be, rather than an exploit for geeks to boast about. You, the “trackee”, will need a GPS, PDA (running Java/Symbian or Windows Mobile 5) and a connection to the net, perhaps via your mobile phone, or a hybrid of all three. Palm OS support is coming. (It also helps if your “tracker” has a Mac or PC running Google Earth somewhere, or else there isn’t much point:-)
The site promises that this will stay a free service, comes nicely packaged, and doesn’t even bother asking for your email address when you register – how enlightened is that? Premium services are in the works, presumably to allow you to see more than just the last 20 tracking positions.
I’m still waiting for somebody to track their transatlantic flight live using, for example, SAS’s in-flight wifi. If nobody does this soon I might be forced to buy myself a GPS unit:-)
[Update 23.43 UTC: A positive review from somebody who’s actually used it.]
[Update 2006-01-19: Modded up from the comments, Sergio has an interesting niche blog dedicated to GPS devices. Here is his positive review of 3DTracking. I’ll be tracking his blog…]
My name is Roydon Michael and I am the Managing Director of 3dtracking Ltd.
We wanted to thank you for your positive write-up regarding our service and wanted to assure you of a few points.
Firstly, what you see when enter and use our site will always (and
unconditionally) be a free service. We’ll be upgrading our software over time, as well as trying to enhance the experience for our users, and all this too will be free of charge.
While the live tracking only offers your last 20 positions, you can track a historic path for up to 300 positions. The reasons for these limitations are almost entirely bandwidth and processing power. As we start introducing (as unobtrusively as possible) our premium services and products, we intend to utilise some of that income on improving the services that really defined us (as you can see, we’re very optimistic about our future. With over 1000 hits in our first
24 hours, we’re feeling very proud of ourselves).
We’ve successfully tracked a flight already (it was recorded, not live, but we have all the information in our server) and it worked perfectly. This, in fact, was one of the first things we thought of when designing our site. We’ve got some improvements in the pipeline that will make that tracking of flights (and other altitude-dependant
activities) far more interesting and interactive, but we’ll have to wait and see general reaction to our site before we give too much away.
Again, thanks for the support, and we hope that you and your readers enjoy what we have to offer.
Regards,
Roydon Michael
Managing Director – 3dtracking Ltd
Thanks for the link Stefan!
And a question for Roydon: are you planning to add a way to upload photos for a given waypoint? If so, would that be under the fee based services or offered as a free one?
Congrats!
A. Sergio Cardoso