2007 in links

A quick summary of my 2007 as the web sees it -

January.
Carlo and I visit Addis Ababa and Nekemte in Ethiopia - Exeter Ethiopia Link newsletter (pdf)
BCS HQ London. Fifty Years of Fortran.

March.
Leeds. High Performance Computing.

May.
Google Developer Day, London. (Impossible)

September.
Web2ForDev, Rome. A climate mashup. (Français)

Ethiopia trip

The first Wepoco field trip was a great success. Carlo and I travelled to Nekempte in Oromia, Ethiopia to investigate the possibility of a pilot project to establish the benefits of advanced climate and weather information to subsistence farming. I'll post a link to the trip report on my blog soon, but for now here are some of the photographs.

Ethiopia January 2007

Wepoco mobile

Although plans are still evolving the Wepoco project aims to get essential weather and climate information to even the most remote farmers. These days the Internet reaches some pretty remote places, but the coverage is nothing like that for mobile telephone networks. So a mobile strategy is an important part of the project.



A while back the BBC had this report on WAP (mobile phone Internet use) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4795255.stm and just this week Google's Deep Nishar indicated that more mobile products are on the way from Google - see http://news.com.com/Googles+ambitions+going+mobile/2008-1039_3-6138755.html



So what might mobile Wepoco look like? Well at present the web pages use the Google Maps API so it could look something like this http://www.techweb.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=160700001



As mobile phone displays improve then something like the view I get with my Nokia 770 would be possible. At first though I think something more modest is in order, SMS perhaps.