About

Location Based Media, Locative Technologies and Geo Social Networks are rapidly developing and becoming main stream. The Sharing and Freedom of Geo Data, Location Based Media and Art, Geo Retail Bridge, Real World Gaming, Geo Political Landscape, Gorilla Marketing, Tracking, Tagging, Security, Anonymity and Managing Our Personal Identities. These are concepts which will soon become part of our everyday lives. In a gentle wave of Web 3.0 technologies, the internet as we know it is braking free from its constraints. Long range wireless networks and location aware devices are converging to give us new emergent applications in real world, location driven, information, data exchange and communication.

At its core stands Geo Data, developing application and infrastructure to support, manage and generate Geo Data offers huge potential. Maxamundo aims to be more then a curiosity or constrained cooperate add-on, rather an evolving tool-set which will allow us all to freely manage and develop our personal and commercial Geo Data. From the Teenage New Wave Media Hacker to the Academic Researcher Maxamundo aims to provide a usable stable platform on which to evolve quality data.

The current incarnation will allow a community of users to geo-tag locations with information and media. It allows for personal tag sets and group tag sets to be established and maintained. There is currently limited social networking, but this capability will develop rapidly across a multitude of social context over the coming months.

Maxamundo spun out of a research project at Salford University in the Northwest of England, it has been a labour of love to realise its current position. The project has been developed by two individuals on a shoe string budget, a designer of sorts and a talented programmer, this with a great deal of help from their friends. The project took inspiration from Ben Russell's fantastic and inspirational Headmap Manifesto, the work of Blast Theory and Urban Tapestries, also Futuresonic and old days back at BT Exact, not to mention all the amazing work done by Open Street Map and the community of Amateur Cartographers. We hope this is just the first step of many towards realising our vision of Nodism and a managed solution for Geo Data across a broad spectrum of social and commercial context.

It is the mission of Maxamundo to develop a locative media platform which allows for the emergence of a spectrum of locative applications and data libraries. These range from the cultural, heritage and arts through to the commercial. It is our belief that any such system should be map-centric and application driven. A solid application interface has been designed which can be quickly adopted across this range of social context to generate quality tangible locative data. The data although generated through a series of different projects will be centralised in one core data base, the majority of this collected data will be available through the top level web based and handheld application to anybody.

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Maxamundo 1.0 has only been possible due to the existence of open source mapping data produced by Open Street Map. Their community of digital cartographers have remapping the UK. Before OSM it was impossible to gain access to mapping data without the constraint of Crown Copy Right. Now with access to open source data, projects like Maxamundo can begin to explore the possibilities of Location Based Media. As you peruse the map you will see that it's not 100% complete, though more data is being added on a daily basis. If your interested in helping to develop the map data and want to get involved visit the OSM website for more details.

Further Developments

Developments are well underway on the Hand-held version of Maxamundo, we are currently working on Maxamundo Lite a version which will function on location aware Nokia, Samsung and the HTC Touch Diamond mobile devices. We are also developing a iPhone application. Our handheld version of the application will facilitate further the Geo-Retail-Bridge, Allow real-time Geo-Social-Networking and introduce a selection of new proximity node types. The first mobile version of Maxamundo is scheduled to be piloted at the end of June 10.

Maxamundo 1.0 has very limited Social Networking capabilities. We are in the process of developing the functionally further to encompass a whole selection of social networking tools. This will include real-time text and video messaging, the implementation of open and private groups and the capability to define custom node types and node characteristics. There will also be functionality with regard handheld devices and real world Location Based Media.

Maxamundo 2.0 will see the implementation of what we call the Geo Retail Bridge. We have functionality which we hope might begin to close the gap between the online and real world shopping experience. A tool set will be available for retailers to establish a presence in geo space, remote from their fixed location. We hope to explore the possibilities of Geo Retail Trade and Market Place and Personalised Targeted Marketing. Any retailers who would like to become involved in the research and develop of this area of our application please get in touch and help us move this concept forward.