Awhile ago, my wife gifted me with a Belkin TuneFM for my iPod nano. Pop the TuneFM into the iPod and optionally into your car’s power outlet and viola! You can use your car’s FM receiver to transmit music from your iPod over your car’s speaker system.
Belkin itself provides a service (based on frequency data from Radio-Locator) that will suggest an ideal FM frequency given a particular ZIP code–plus lesser alternatives.
The longer the drive the greater the benefit of not having to exchange CD’s. On the other hand, the longer the drive the greater chance that the ideal FM frequency you begin with won’t be ideal for the duration of the trip.
There are already numerous mashups that leverage Google Maps (e.g. open houses on the real estate market in a particular neighbor, etc.). So, it seems possible at least to take driving direction data from Google Maps (or MapQuest et al), combine it with FM frequency data from Radio-Locator (or Sirius et al) and produce a trip-long, location-aware FM frequency recommendation service. For extra credit, this mashup could produce a script that could be imported into your GPS device (e.g. an audio script: “change FM frequency to 92.9 in one mile”).
I wonder how easy or difficult it is to build such a mashup.
Update 9/2/2007: The approach taken by Mark Snesrud and Bob Mayo to decode the “San Jose Semaphore” is inspiring.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Loren Goodman // Aug 28, 2007 at 7:38 pm
Love the FM Transmitter Mashup Idea! And since it is playing through the stereo of the car already, would you mind adding the feature to give me a shout out any time I am within 5 miles of a Taco Bell? Or how about as another feature maybe having it start playing songs about the nearest landmark or city I am driving through?
Your post along with some of the other information-centric posts you have done got me thinking about visualization models and tools to find, discover, and build other ideas like the FM station finder that are out there. This might be old hat, but thought it was worth the time to send over anyway. It is like the chaining in a rule engine in some respects… So what if there were ways to easily get a complexity/difficulty score of automatically relating any two bodies of analog information–with the longer term goal being the ability to support perpetual hands-off automatic update (within the bounds of depending on others continuing to provide their part of the information trail)? This is the creation of real value: automatic transformation and assimilation from analog (i.e. creating the ability for users to teach their software how to unambiguously relate things based on ambiguous source materials). So it starts by assessing the transactional cost of relating that type of information in analog (i.e. searching for it by hand and interpreting text or images). The cost or distance of creating each relationship required could be automatically generated by aggregating interference patterns for combinatoric queries branching out from each end of the “information trail” using search engines–similar model to how directions between two street addresses are generated under the hood. So the user is left with a choice to get their answer, they could deal with each analog pivot on their own (assuming a way to store the analog pivot can be remember and re-applied). From the analog pivot, perhaps there is a computer-assisted road to automation through automatic transformation, depending on how digital the “information signal” is.
Rough example of what should exist:
Next step: create “knowledge service” that accepts lat/lon location and returns the biggest abscess of frequency interference based on geometry of signal patterns and previously generated matrix. The service execution should be automatable against the generated information in prior steps.
Next step: have an automated way to “outsource” required analog conversions going forward to lower cost resources (i.e. overseas) if you choose to keep the information alive. Perhaps the whole thing could be “watched” so that a pay per refresh model could also be supported.
So the tool would visually let people build structured information as they would like it to exist, and the system would figure out how ways to achieve it, even if human intervention and resolution is required along the way. The experience would be no different than getting directions on Google Maps, but instead of getting directions from city A to city B, it would be for getting to information X–and the underlying service figures all the pivots required.
These “information trails” double as “knowledge services” for others ex-post. Organically this could be a model for masses to digitize their knowledge in the process of achieving their own goals! Oh wait… I think they already call that the semantic web? Either way, at some point my computer will finally start asking questions instead of always giving answers.
Oh yeah, last and most important step: mandatory merging of all Taco Bell Locations on the planet at all times (wink)
Any thoughts you have or resources you can share on the topic would be greatly appreciated
-Loren
2 Craig Randall // Aug 30, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Heeeeere, lizard lizard lizard
On a more serious note, I’m now in the process of reading David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous. I brought this book to read on vacation, not knowing that it would be directly related to this particular line of thinking. It is and I will post my thoughts. Stay tuned…
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