GeoSmart Maps updates AA Roadwatch Site

GeoSmart Maps updates AA Roadwatch Site

GeoSmart Maps has rebuilt the NZ Automobile Association’s Roadwatch web site and re-launched it to inform motorists about events taking place on New Zealand roads; this includes road works, accidents, road closures, delays and incidents such as slips and washouts, which are very topical given current weather conditions.

The original web site had generic maps which showed the general area where incidents had occurred, whereas the new site has dynamic maps allowing people to view the incident location on a map at region, suburb or zoom right down to street level.

A pop up window on the map provides in depth information about the incident including its anticipated resolution date and time. The site dynamically updates information every 5 minutes and indicates whether the incident has been verified. The service also includes Future Notifications such as events and other known issues.

“The service will be fully managed by the AA and a call centre which is operational 24/7 will feed public information into the system. The system will also soon have the ability for local authorities to enter information about planned road works,” says GeoSmart’s General Manager Phil Allen.

“AA Roadwatch is about informing motorists so they can make better decisions on the roads, whether it’s’ taking an alternate route or leaving half an hour later.” 

AA Roadwatch may be found at http://www.aaroadwatch.co.nz

Background

GeoSmart Maps is the leading provider of mapping data in New Zealand and has been in the business for 30 years. It is the leader in the provision of Car Navigation data as well as Fleet Management with a client list including Navman, TomTom, Siemens VDO, Honda, Ford, BMW and more.

It is also the leader in cartographic and web mapping with clients including Wises, the New Zealand Automobile Association Inc, Bayleys Real Estate, St Johns Ambulance, Ministry of Education, Heart of the City, and many more. Over 300 web sites in New Zealand use GeoSmart’s SmartFIND web mapping API’s and data. GeoSmart also supports solutions in many overseas countries including the Middle East and Asia.

In 2007, GeoSmart was purchased by the New Zealand Automobile Association Inc. The AA brings many additional resources to GeoSmart as well as being a major user of geospatial data, giving away more than a million maps a year to its members.

For more information, please contact Business Development Manager, Luigi Cappel email luigi.cappel@geosmart.co.nz or phone 09 966 8768

The Role of the Business Analyst within Technology

I currently work as a business analyst for the technology division of a New Zealand financial organisation which employs ~11000 staff (~450 in IT).  We’ve recently created a business analyst community within IT to help with collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and the breaking down of barriers between process and organisational silos.  As a part of this, we’re attempting to understand exactly what the role of a business analyst is within technology and what their interaction is (or should be) with our business customers.

Our model is for the business analyst seems to be mostly one where business requirements are supplied by subject matter experts or project teams from the business, and we take it forward through the rest of the software development lifecycle.  The issue we’re encountering with this model is that we either get very sketchy business requirements provided where we end up doing extra work to fix up what has been provided, or the business has leapt into “solution mode” and attempted to design their end-solution.  In the end, we basically have a disconnect between the project management methodology used by the business, and the SDLCs used by IT.

Those of us who have had more formal training (e.g. tertiary study, etc.) feel that the business analyst is meant to be engaged early in the project and conducts the full analysis work from elicitation of the business requirements onwards until implementation.  This is reinforced by the IIBA’s Business Analysis Body of Knowledge.

What I’m after is an idea of how other organisations use their business analysts and how they interact with their business customers.  We can then use this knowledge to help drive our community forward to a place where we can optimise the technology experience for our business customers.  To this end, could you please let me know how it works for your current organisation or whichever places you’ve previously worked?

Vodem stick is here!

[click to enlarge]

$199 on a 24 month term on Broadband Everyday (1GB) - seems slightly more expensive than what the Aussies need to pay for it (they pay AU$5 per month over the contract on a 1GB plan = around NZD$160)

(obtained from the August Vodafone catalogue)

Now you can get 3G broadband from Vodafone under the new 900MHz spectrum, which is still being installed throughout New Zealand, which brings more people under a 3G connection. It also supports 7.2mbps HSDPA off the bat.

This is going to go up on Vodafone's site soon - I hope.

Telecom... 850MHz WCDMA/HSDPA announcement coming?
Rumours are going around that Telecom New Zealand will announce tomorrow nationwide deployment of 850 MHz UMTS (WCDMA/HSDPA).

Telecom's original plans were for 850MHz GSM/EDGE in rural areas and 2100MHz WCDMA in the cities.

Let's see what is happening, tomorrow...

The current setup - Mediaportal
I think I have gone on about MythTV enough, what about the other major open source media center application, which has many of the features of myth and the added bonus of being Windows-based and hence a lot more familiar territory for most people?

I have run Mediaportal 1.0 for a couple of months now, it's currently at RC2 and has been pretty good. You may have noticed my HTPC system isn't exactly top of the line, a single core and 1GB of RAM means Vista doesn't run very smoothly. MP can be sluggish, I think the remote lag has been fixed, but often loading a channel and setting up a recording can be slow. The worst problems come when recording 2+ shows, especially if some are HD, and watching another at the same time. The show I'm watching will skip or pause, I don't think the hard drive is fully up to the task.

Now plenty of people of these forums already run Mediaportal but there also seem to be plenty running GB-PVR and MCE and to be honest I'm often not sure why. One obvious point is the use of Popcorn hours as a frontend for a GB-PVR server; they look like a sweet quiet, reliable client, but what you are missing out on is full support for all of Freeview HD's audio formats (and hence can watch all the channels), and support for recording multiple channels of a single digital frequency. This is something I do all the time, and to test out my system I once got it recording 5 shows at once, including the HD channels, and it worked fine. I'm sure it could do more, even an HD stream is only around 1.2MB/s, but I got bored. On top of that of course you have support for multiple sources (digital and analogue) and can hence have Prime and FreeviewHD on one system. Again, can't see why you would want to go for Vista MCE instead. Yes it is more stable but I fail to see why so many people have posted at The Green Button complaining about the delays, and possible cancellation, of H.264 support when there is a viable alternative avaliable right now.

This brings me to my point about Mediaportal, its flexibility and feature support, which come from its ability to lean on other software for support. MP doesn't have built-in H.264 decoding, it uses an external codec such as PowerCinema. MP doesn't need drivers for all the TV cards it supports, it uses the provided Windows drivers. And I don't know the technical details but MP also leans on various other parts of the operating system, such as Aero for video performance. This of course gives it a huge advantage over MythTV, which requires all these critical supporting components to be written by volunteers and included in the operating system. Hence, I use it :)

Finally I thought I might add to this blog with what I have been watching. I recently managed to add to my standard fare of The Daily Show and CSI/SVU etc with Friday Night Lights, 8.30pm Friday C4. Set in the heart of Texas; it is about football, God, cheerleaders and football. Very interesting insight into what these small towns revolve around, namely Friday night college football. You thought we take rugby seriously here, we have nothing on the Americans!    

No Critical Security Bulletins for July
For July, Microsoft released only 4 new Security Bulletins and none of them were Critical. Actually, all 4 were rated as Important, which typically means they are serious, but that...