quuxlabs at hack.lu 2007

quuxlabs (at least Michael and adulau) will be at hack.lu 2007 and mainly helping a bit during the hackcamp/unconference. So if you have idea(s) that you would like to share with us that's the perfect place. Hope to see you there.

Geopolis - Thanks for your feedback

We received various comments from the alpha version of geopolis, we were very impressed by the clear comments and question from Jean-Etienne Poirrier. We tried to summarize the questions and provide some answers.

• Accuracy is, at the current stage, as good as a standard people exchanging information about police control. We are developing a basic rating system in order to limit the abuse (e.g. feeding the information with wrong information) and more important to reward the good users. We have also a small advantage to prefer the SMS gateway interface. As the costs to send "fake" or incorrect information will not be null via such gateway. We are also planning to improve accuracy by leveraging the multiple submissions from the different users sent to GeoPolis.
  
  Subscription is also a planned feature to provide more functionalities to users. The privacy question is really a critical one. We provides to the user the ability to have a screen name that help him to hide his identity.



• Information processing & diversity We have already automated the task of recognizing the "correct" location based on user input such as "Rue Eglise" or "rue de l'église". In this respect, we're beyond alpha or beta stage even though we still have some things to improve here and there, of course. The last thing we wanted to do with GeoPolis is forcing users to enter exact geographic coordinates like longitude or latitude - in particular not via the small number pad of a mobile phone. On the other hand, only a small fraction of today's mobile phones has GPS functionality, and we want to provide GeoPolis to all mobile phone users.
  



• Safety and Security Of course it's in the responsibility of the users to make sure they don't put others in danger and comply with their local law. In addition, we see that a lot of people receive calls and emails at work (from colleagues or friends) with information about traffic controls in their proximity. This means there is a significant number of users who will use our SMS or email interfaces for sending notifications without driving a car.
  



• IndependenceWe really appreciated Google's efforts and their splendid Google Maps service. It's our first choice at the moment with regard to GeoPolis' map functionality.
  
  That being said, switching from one map service to a different one (say, Yahoo! Maps or OpenStreetMap) is easier for us than you might think. GeoPolis has been designed to be technically free of any bounds to a specific external service, including Google. And yes, this makes us sleep better, too ;-)
  

We are still working to improve the service but we welcome any feedback...

The quuxlabs team.

GeoPolis : tracking the traffic and police control

It's often quite frustrating to get caught by police when driving 5 kilometers/hour above the limit. There are so many social network out there but why not having a simple approach to inform the other driver of a traffic control. We (quuxlabs) started a small project to notify and be notified of ongoing traffic control. The idea is simple, you see a traffic control, just send an SMS (to the following number +32-499471966 for police control in Belgium) like this one :

quai d'arona huy belgium police

and automatically the information will be localized on a map and available to everyone. GeoPolis is still in alpha phase but we have some ideas to make it more useful (like instant SMS notification if you are interested in some specific area or building track where there are less frequent traffic control). If you have any idea or improvement that you would like to see, just send an email to info at geopolis dot be.