The WhereAmI Project  (formely The "WhereIs" Project) is all about GPS Location of oneself. It is a mechanism for me to transmit my GPS location to a central server and for my family, friends and colleagues to figure out where in the world I'm at, - "Where Is <nagi>". The project is in BETA- and, currently just me in the dogfooding chain.

I must note to the reader, that there's a BIG DISABLE button in my transmission end point application where I can choose to NOT transmit my position.You know that whole "Privacy" :)

So, how does this work?
There are essentially THREE pieces of moving parts. ONE, an application that I will have running on my GPS ENABLED Mobile device (Windows Pocket PC Phone) or a similar equipped Laptop that has a pre-established Internet Connection. TWO, a Web Service that is hosted on my server at home that gets call by the #ONE with my GPS data.  And, THREE, an ASP.NET AJAX Enabled web page hosting Microsoft Virtual Earth Mapping Control that knows how to plot my position on the world map.

If you have a Laptop or a Pocket PC Phone that is internet connection aware and has GPS data stream, you're all set to go to leverage this project.

If you're interested in giving this a shot, you will need to ping me to get a PROFILE ID.  Once you have that, you can download either the Laptop rev or the Pocket PC Phone rev of the application and install it. Configure the application with the PROFILE ID I provide you with. And, as long as you have a GPS receiver connectivity to either of these (either via built-in or via Bluetooth, or direct cabled), you are set to go.

As indicated earlier, I am looking forward to adding more features to this. A couple of areas come to mind;  a) Adding a Windows-Vista Sidebar Gadget that allows one to keep track of where his/her buddies/family is at. b) Exposing #THREE (above) via Microsoft-SilverLight for enriched UI and c) Enhanced "InfoBox" UI for "as of date.time" weather, POI info, news info, etc; are among a few.

Click on the screen shot image here to jump to the web page that plots my location. 

ciao

Nagi