Damn I wish I wasn’t so busy. I mean, I love what I am doing, but I am too busy to start another project. But…
If I was going to start a new project, I would enter an application in the Android Developer Challenge. What would my application be? Location tagging.
I have been hot on location based services for 2 years (still a vapor vertical market). Location tagging is a great way to get the ball rolling, and I think it would be really useful.
Basically, users would simply open the app and enter some tags. Using the GPS chip on the phone, those tags would be sent to a central server with the Lat/Long coords. Likewise, a user should be able to open the app on their phone and see a tag cloud based on popularity and distance. The third piece would be a web app that ties to Google Maps and overlays location tags on a map for an area.
I think this would be a really neat app and should be relatively simple to build. It is nothing more than a web service for collecting information, an Android client that talks to the web service, and a GMaps mashup for browsing. The most difficult part of the coding would be the Lat/Long distance calculations (which I don’t expect would be too hard to get close enough).
So there it is, a simple idea that could be a contender in the Android Developer Challenge with a solid implementation. I just wish I had the time to do it.
Note: iPhones need not apply since there is no internal GPS chip. I must admit, Android could make HTC hardware very appealing to me.
