Emergency Beacon

So I was driving through Vermont this weekend and the wife and I were both playing with our iPhones, I've got a iPhone 3G and the wife has the original iPhone, and we were getting intermittent signal. I started to think of the poor CNet writer/editor and his family who got stuck in the middle of the wood out in north CA and died. Scarry thought to tell you the truth.

The wife and I started to talk about emergency supplies and creating some sort of emergency pack. We even talked about what we would put in such a pack and maybe we could sell it. The thing that then came to mind was some kind of emergency beacon. Thus the emergency beacon idea.

The basic concept would be small package, something you could easily store in the car, that when you activate would triangulate your location (GPS) and broadcast an SOS with your location. An after though was to throw in some sort of soalar panel. I think a basic model would just have lights indicating if the GPS locked in and then another light that indicates when the system is broadcasting the SOS. A higher end model would have a display with information like how many satelites the GPS can see, what your location is, and then that the system is broadcasting, and even battery charge/status.

I think this is an awsome idea, next stop is SparkFun to see if they have the parts. Of course the other search is to discover if someone else has done this. One of the keys would be "no subscription"

Mobile translator

So I was thinking the other day, while traveling, how useful it would be to be able to translate street signs, menus, and signs when traveling in a foreign country. So one way to deal with this problem is to crack open a translation dictionary and look up each word. Of course that means a lot of looking up stuff and that can be a real pain in the ass. Not to mention really time consuming. Next way to deal with this problem is to use an electronic translation dictionary. This seems like a faster solution but you still have to type each word. So less time consuming but still chews up time.

Something I started to carry around when I go traveling to other countries is a GSM cell phone. It's really simple to get a local GSM SIM and the cost is usually really cheap compared to roaming charges with a US cell phone. More recently the phones I've been carrying around have become more powerful. Most have reasonably high resolution camers. My mind then connected the two and the thought came to me that you could take a picture of the item and translate it some how.

The rub with image translation is that it's computing intensive, both image to text and language to language. Even the hot new iPhone 3G doesn't appear to have enough horse power to do the translation in a reasonable rate. Next thought, ship the image of to a massive server to take care of. So what I finally came up with is a mixed device solution, using a cell phone and back end serves. A user takes their cell phone, sees something they want translated, they take a picture with a special translation app. The translation app ships the image to a backend server which does the OCR work (web service?). Once the image is translated to text the text is shiped to a translation service (web service?). The result translation is returned to the cell phone/pda.

This seems highly doable to me but just needs to have the pieces to be brought together. Another feature that came to mind was to give the translation service a hand by using the GPS, found in most cell phones, to tell it where you are, ie what is the origin language or languages.