Andrei's Blog

With at least 212,506 acres burning nationwide and new fires popping up each hour, it is safe to say that Russia is on fire. You know it is bad when the wall of fire is clearly visible on a satellite image. To make sense of the disaster, GeoMixer released a nifty app that tracks fires in real time. GeoMixer injects data from various sources and displays hot-bed locations over the latest satellite imagery mixed with current temperatures and wind directions.

Check it out.

p.s. The application is beautifully implemented but there is one huge downside – you can’t embed a map without a valid API key for which you have to sign up for an account…

About a month ago I sent three packages to a friend in Russia, two of which have not yet showed up. As it turns out, I can’t to track packages once they cross into the motherland (unless you use courier service) and can only hope they arrive at some point in the future. Not only does the Russian Post not know the location of my packages, but they can’t locate their delivery trucks either. As a piece of good news, the latter is about to change.

Back in May 2007, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a decree officially providing open access to the civilian navigation signals of the GLONASS GPS. Last week, almost exactly three years later, Navigation Information Systems (NIS) won the contract to outfit Russian Post vehicle fleet with GLONASS GPS navigation terminals. This marks an important milestone for the industry as it is the first Federal contract of its kind.

Photo: diecast43

The contract amount hasn’t been officially confirmed, but it is believed to be around $17M (530M Rubles). Over the next two years, NIS will install GPS terminals on 10,000 trucks and deploy 300 control stations in 84 post office branches. The integration is expected to start within the next few weeks.

The Russian Post is expecting to increase the efficiency of it’s fleet and reach up to 20% savings within the first year. The system is expected to pay for itself within the first 20 months, saving about $12M (388M Rubles) annually. More on this here, here and here.

Let’s hope this is the first step to enabling package tracking.

Update: All packages have arrived even without GPS!

Public transportation is very popular in Russia, but there is one huge problem: it isn’t very reliable. More accurately, you never for sure whether or when your bus is going to show up. This week the city of Novosibirsk rolled out a city-wide transit tracking system which solves that exact problem. From now on, anyone can check the location of city’s buses, trolleys and route taxis in real time.

Implemented using Google Maps and Russia’s GLONASS, the application allows you to select a bus route and see all vehicles currently on the road. You can drill down to each vehicle to see its schedule and exact location. The application works on both desktop and mobile browsers.

In addition to solving the problem of tracking, applications like this might create new revenue opportunities (advertisement, data licensing) for municipalities, increase the efficiency of the system and, as a side benefit, decrease the number of freezing Russians. I would love to see the Novosibirsk government partner with Waze and OpenStreetMap on the data front.