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A Layar to show leisure/sports activities and an interview with GPSies.com owner
Posted in: Android, Augmented Reality, Blog, iPhone by openhanced on April 7, 2010
Besides building a freemium version of a Layar backend (to host your datapoints) we also joint forces with GPSies.com to bring you 300000 leisure/sports tracks from most countries in the world.
With the Layar you can find the start points of the tracks and advanced track, elevation and weather data.
Right now the database contains around 300000 + points and it is growing on a weekly basis. We will update our clone of the GPSies.com database once a week to bring you all the new tracks.
Interview with Klaus Bechtold of GPSies.com
What is your name and origin?
My name is Klaus Bechtold and I’m living in Berlin, Germany. I’m married and I do have two children. GPSies.com is just a hobby besides my job as a software developer at an internet agency in Berlin.
What is the goal of your company GPSies.com?
The goal of GPSies .com is to help everyone to plan and document their tracks. The focus is on the GPS technology and I tried to implement a simple user interface. So users without a GPS background can e.g. easy use the converter (automatically file detection) or the track creator.
Do you have a long history in sports activities and what is your favorite sport?
My first marathon was in 1998 – so I’m an enthusiastic runner. And I’m a cyclist in summer, when I’m riding from home to work. Sometimes I’m on trekking tour with my family – never without GPS 
How did you come up with the idea of GPSies.com?
I bought my first running GPS device in 2006. The device was very expensive and my wife did not allow me to buy additional maps to document my running tracks. Exactly at this time Google launched the version 2 of Google Maps – so I started some experiments to plot a GPS track on the map. Because I made it public, I received many positive feedback from the community – so, here we are!
How much visitors does your site attract on a monthly base?
GPSies.com has about 300.000 visitors with about 1.4 million page impressions. In summer 2010 I’m expecting about 2 million PIs. The community has now more than 50.000 registered users and it is growing very fast. All statistics (tracks, users, countries and so on) are public and are accessible by the footer navigation.
How much tracks are there in your database worldwide?
GPSies.com has about 340.000 tracks worldwide (March 2010, public and private tracks). Most of them are in Europe and especially Germany (170.000 tracks).
But GPSies.com has also tracks in USA (8.000), Russia (7.000) – see the statistics to get it all.
How do you see the future for the site?
My plans are to force the mobile accessabilities of GPSies.com. GPSies.com has already a mobile site (m.gpsies.com) and many devices (Andoid, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and so on) are using the API to get tracks in an area or upload tracks to GPSies.com. I’ll open GPSies.com as a plattform for any mobile devices to let them store thier tracks.
GPSies.com is growing very fast. As you know, it is just my hobby site and I don’t earn my money by GPSies.com. My wife and my children are fighting for more time to spend with me. Ok, I’m getting a small income by the advertisement, but this is totally used to pay for the infrastructure (server, administrator, …). I don’t know what happens next – I try to carry on
Do you foresee a great future for Augmented Reality?
Yes indeed! This is a great opportunity to get much information within an intuitive and easy to use interface. Smartphone software like Layar is just the beginning. Later we’ll have e.g. glasses with GPS, compass and internet access like in some SF movies.
Is there anything else you want to add to this short interview?
Yes, I’d like to mention, that GPSies.com has also an Android version that let you view tracks by your search parameters. The app is free and available at the Google Market.
Last but not least, don’t forget to go outside and have fun with your outdoor exercises!
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