As promised I am starting the outfoscions series with Onze Technologies. With their first and primary product Latlong.in they are trying to decode the maps for the rest of us. Latlong tries to give you the information on the go, hence the best way is to deliver by SMS. But the biggest problem for delivering the route on the SMS is 160 character limit. Guys at Latlong came up with a plan of decoding the last ~5km route to destination. This is a brilliant idea considering most of the time users struggle in last five kilometers. Any detailed information from a known landmark in last five kilometers is the way we generally give directions to our friend. LatLong tries to do the same on sms.
You can start using by sending “help” to 90088 90088.
This Sunday I met them at their office. In fact I used their own service to reach their office. It was great fun talking to all the four (Sud, Rahul, Sairam and Pavaman) founders.
Here is an interview I did with them. I am not an interviewer as such. But I have tried to ask questions, which probably will help you know more about LatLong.in. Thank you Sud for taking time out.
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I have been using Nokia e61i (Symbian S60 3rd edition) for quite some time now. I am happy with it mostly because of the following applications. They are free and they enhance the functionality of my mobile.

1. Opera Mini is my browser on my mobile. Its open 24X7 on my mobile. It supports book marks (you can also sync the bookmarks if you have Opera Account), offline reading of the pages, supports https, supports uploading files and its fast.
2. GMail Mobile App is my email client on my mobile. Its faster than the default client. The newer version allows multiple accounts and also allows hosted accounts. It can open basic file formats like txt, doc and jpg. It lacks attachment feature. It also lacks Gchat functionality.This is my second application that will be open as long has my mobile has juice.
3. MobiGenie is my answering machine. It runs locally and hence I do not have to pay my service provider. You can set up many things like answer by voice and record, reply by sms, block the caller etc. You can record custom welcome message in your own voice. You can export the voice message as mp3 files. Thanks to Asgatech company behind MobiGenie.
4. Qik is my live video production house. It runs on my mobile and sends the live video to the world. You can either see my live on qik/thej or at my *live* site. I have used qik to live stream cycling even and a marathon. In future I might even have scheduled live program ( on the lines of schedule live video interviews/podcatst). You can watch the past videos, you can download them for offline viewing too.
5. MgMaps is my map on phone. It has Yahoo, Yahoo India, MS Live, Ask, Open Street and wikimapia on it. It can work with external/internal GPS. It can even pre download the map images and store it on your memory card for offline usage.   It also has subway maps for major cities and FON locations. Geek stuff: It can also display kml files. I usually use it while traveling.
6. Fring is my voip client. I use it log into my skype account. But you can use it log into any SIP account. It works on both edge and wifi. It also supports Yahoo IM , ICQ, MSN and Gtalk.
7. Putty – s2putty is my on the go command line. Its an open source project on sourceforge. It works all most like putty on your desktop. What more do you want as a developer on the go?
8. DEdit is the best text editor on the go. It is the best full screen editor available for s60 phones. It supports different character encoding like ASCII and Unicode.  It supports really big files (mega byte files). It has search/replace and book marking features. Its my IDE on the go.
9. Twitxme or Twitxr is my image/picture uploader. I use it to upload the picture on the go. I have also configured it to upload the same pics to flickr and facebook. It also tweets to my twitter/thej account. It works pretty well.
10. Autolock is also recent addition to my list of software. For some strange reason e61i does not have auto locking feature for keypad. So i had to install this program. It works pretty well but I want PIN support.

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Ask Thej is my new experiment where my blog readers can ask anything and I will try to answer their question (or will direct to somebody). You can ask any question from travel, technology, Java, GPS etc etc. I will try to answer them.I will pick up and answer them in a blog post tagged with Ask Thej. Of course your question and my answer are creative common licensed. Please leave your blog url so I can credit your question. Welcome to the new experiment. Happy asking :)

Go ahead be the first one to Ask Thej

Ask Thej is my new experiment where my blog readers can ask anything and I will try to answer their question. You can ask any question from travel, technology, Java to GPS. I will try to answer them. You can leave your questions in the below box. I will pick up and answer them in a blog post tagged with Ask Thej. Of course your question and my answer are creative common licensed. Please leave your blog url so I can credit your question. Welcome to the new experiment. Happy asking :)

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I am usually a backpacker hence i don’t carry many things while traveling. But there are few of those that I cant miss.

1. Digital Camera : is number one on my list. I don’t have to give reasons right?

2. Mobile with camera and browser: I usually carry my k750i which can act us my quick (or back up) camera. The camera of k750i is pretty decent. Won’t believe? check these pictures from streets Kolkatta. I also use my mobile to keep in touch with friends and family. You might think thats an obvious function of mobile. But when I am traveling I avoid making more than one call per day and usually keep in touch with friends using internet. Hence good browser/apps is necessary. I use opera mini and some Java applications. Read the rest of this entry »