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.

GoogleMapping Africa

Google Maps http://maps.google.com/ now has African towns and roads, though the towns of Ethiopia don't yet show at the resolutions I'd like for the Wepoco project www.wepoco.com
(but you can't have everything). Added to which those cunning Google programmers have added another feature I've been wanting in order to expand site specific weather forecasts to more countries - http://googlemapsapi.blogspot.com/2006/11/marker-manager.html
It seems I might have a busy weekend coming up if I'm going to make the most of all this.

On management

Here are some links to useful management resources for folks who manage technical suff. I've copied these (slightly edited) from the old website.

The Quality Gurus Information from the dti.

Communicating Sequential Processes Communicating Sequential Processes, or CSP, is a language for describing patterns of interaction...

Strategy Survival Guide A guide from the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit

A Futurist's Toolbox Methodologies in Futures Work

Analyzing resources and capabilities

Developing Organisation Culture for Strategic Advantage An organisation born of Hofstede's work on corporate culture

Practical UML Abstract: This tutorial provides a quick introduction to the Unified Modeling Language™

Agile Modeling Agile Modeling (AM) is a practice-based methodology for effective modeling and documentation of software-based systems.

The Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management Charles Handy's BBC World Service series.

my new blog

Welcome to Michael Saunby's blog. This blog probably won't say much about me, but will hopefully become a reasonably easy way to find stuff that I've done or am doing. So it's yet another project, and like most others will probably never be complete, it will evolve.

The latest project I've got involved with is Wepoco.

Other projects include writing software for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. See http://mike.saunby.googlepages.com for more details.