Orient Expression

I now have my Snapper Card and eagerly waiting to use it on the bus for the first time. I still believe that Micropayments are due some further disruption where time and convenience would benefit from a payment card. My take on three candidates: 1. Taxi payment - not really a micropayment as typically fares will exceed $10 but this is included due to convenience. In a society where cash is no longer king you still need some to pay for your taxi home. You have the option of a credit card but you can't use EFTPOS. An ideal payment method would be the Snapper Card if the technology could be successfully integrated with the taxi itself. An extension of this would be a general rollout of GPS into cabs to help the drivers navigate around Wellington. If you combine GPS and Snapper properly you have a predictive cost tool based on point A to point B by road. 2. The cable car - in many ways integrated into the Wellington transport sphere enabling payment by Snapper must be a log...

A couple of weeks I took myself along to a seminar hosted by Google "Google in the Public Sector". They gave a run down of how government bodies across Asia Pacific are starting to use Google products. Of particular interest to me was the use of Google Maps integration. I have drawn on the idea before in some of my discussions for the Techdirt Insight Community but the seminar got me thinking about specific application to New Zealand. 1. Snapper Mapper: Snapper is the new RFID stored valued card that can be used on Wellington's Buses and Trains. The system uses GPS to keep track of the charging zone for the payment. An outward facing use for this would be to show which routes are now Snapper'd and of those where the bus currently is. Overlay this on Google Maps and you've given your customers a real time view of which bus they can use Snapper on and where the bus is. Good news for commuters looking to plan their journey. Here is an example of what is achieva...

This year's Olympics should be the best ever for coverage. Fring are looking for onsite commentators and as a means to encourage people are offering a 3.5G phone as your reporters tool. I hope that this will be the games of the micro blog. The potential for services like Twitter or Jaiku to open up access to the games in a way never seen before is encouraging. Essentially there are three dimensions to the games: Nation Event Athlete Typically broadcast of the games ha content defined by the nation. The USA channels closely follow the USA squad, the same for UK, NZ Australia etc. This is targeted at the national pride. For those people who are actively engaged in an event themselves, marathon, it's the event that is king. There will still be an element of "my country" but this is equally balanced by "my sport". The final element is the followers of a specific athlete. Friends, family and fans may elect to follow all of the events surrounding a person. ...