Georeader, a free Android Smartphone app that allows written text to be placed at any GPS location, was the audience favorite of five USA Challenge GNSS application idea contest finalists profiled at the September ION GNSS 2011 conference in Portland, Oregon.
Georeader, a free Android Smartphone app that allows written text to be placed at any GPS location, was the audience favorite of five USA Challenge GNSS application idea contest finalists profiled at the September ION GNSS 2011 conference in Portland, Oregon.
The people’s choice is a downloadable mobile travel guide, connected to 120,000-item database of GPS locations of historical interest. GeoReader automatically uses a phone’s text to voice feature to read the text of a historical marker as the user drives past.
The app contains nearly all of the historical landmarks for Texas, Virginia, Georgia, Oregon and Michigan, Pennsylvania’s entire historical roadside marker collection and other points of interest in the USA and Canada.
Users are encouraged to add their own data, said Dave Moreau of Syracuse, New York, who developed the free Android smartphone app. " We call these Talking Points™. You can easily create GPS-specific entries. For example, speed traps, dangerous intersections, hiking trailheads, local history and legends . . . or UFO sighting locations."
Voting for the People’s Choice award took place with the help of eVOTZ, a way to authenticate and verify voting without paper, pencil, postage, or traveling by car to polling locations — using emerging mobile device internet and hybrid GNSS technologies. eVOTZ was developed by Eliot Klein of New York and won last year’s USA Challenge award.
The USA Challenge is a regional partnership of the annual European Satellite Navigation Competition (ESNC). In 2011, the North American contest was organized by Inside GNSS and sponsored by NovAtel, Inc., and the Institute of Navigation.
This year eVOTZ teamed with Inside GNSS to demonstrate the technology at ION GNSS 2011. Attendees cast secure and verifiable votes for a “People’s Choice” award from among the Final 5 best USA Challenge ideas, using location-enabled phones or pads. The technology created a virtual “geofence” surrounding the Oregon Convention Center to qualify voters who cast ballots using their mobile devices. Callers within the fence accessed an interactive voice option menu
that allowed them to receive hyperlinks and short message service (SMS) "ballots."
The demo showcased eVotz’s technology partners — TechnoCom Corporation, a leading provider of enterprise location solutions, and Intercept Networks, a joint venture between Primary Wave Media and TeleSmart Networks.
Each of the five USA Challenge 2011 finalists received a bronze sculpture, nicknamed "Arthur," after novelist Arthur C. Clarke, who in the 1950s suggested the idea of a satellite-based navigation system.
Yet to be announced is the winner of the USA Challenge 2011 and the overall ESNC 2011 Galileo Master, which will occur at an awards ceremony in Munich, Germany, on October 19.
