I love open source, I love hacking, I love guerilla marketing, I love figuring out ways to take tech gadgets and apply them to real estate.

Here is a technology that is fairly new, but coming on strong. GPS Navigation on cell phones.

I bought Trang the Tomtom GPS for her Treo 650 this year, and it’s great. Easy set up, works perfectly, and was half the price of a stand alone GPS system for her car. The cool thing is, I can take the GPS receiver and play with it on my Treo 650 without the maps, and just get my location.

I got this idea from my friend Alain (ak4life.com)

Off topic: Alain as Borat for Halloween

Alain Navigating us through Livermore Wine Country

Back on topic…
Tomtom for Treo comes with CD’s that include all the maps for America, and the GPS receiver. I loaded them up on trangs Treo, but I have not put them on mine. I don’t even know if I can, there is an activation code, doesn’t matter, I don’t want them anyways, I just want the GPS receiver.

My goal is to track where I am, get the logitude and latitude so I plot it on a google map.

I found a lot of products that will do this, but I don’t want to pay…this sounds like fun, but not for $50. I finally come across a product called cotogps. This is an awesome product, Just follow the instructions, and install to your Treo. You have to install the palm mathlib first, which you can also get from cotogps website.

It installed with no problems, Just had to make the ’serial port’ accept bluetooth and I’m off and running. ready to start tracking my location.

cotogps, tracks a lot of data, your location, speed, direction, elevation… It has a track sytem to record your location every 1 second, 2 seconds, 10 secs, or 1 minute. I set it to 10 seconds, jump in my car and head off to Best Buy…I lost my stylus, so I need another one. Every 10 seconds the palm beeps to let me know it recorded my location. it also keeps the palm on, so make sure you have a lot of battery life.

After I get back from Best Buy, I want to view my path. You can see your path from your palm, but not very much info. I need to get the data off the phone and into a gpx file to put it on a map. The palm will not directly export it. I have to download another tool from the cotogps website called cotoGPSDT. Another very cool tool, This guy did a great job.
I sync my palm with my computer, and go to my backup folder and find the track that I plotted. I open that in cotoGPSDT and it creates some very neat images.

This is the path and elevation. Looks like I fell off a cliff.

The cotoGPSDT program lets you export you path as a gpx file. A gpx file is nothing more then an xml file.
I export it to my desktop, and search on Google for ‘gpx to google map’ and come across this page:
http://www.tom-carden.co.uk/googlegpx/

Simply upload you gpx file and it puts it on a google map. In satellite mode, you can actually see which parking spot I was in. Another cool thing is that cotogps tracks your speed and allows you to add markers to your path. you can take pictures and connect them to your path.

Ok, so how does this help realtors…

If you can find your exact location, you can find all the homes for sale or open houses around you.

You can take your clients on a home tour, and create a path, mark the homes you were in, with pictures, and then create a website with that path. Your clients will love it, they will remember a lot more if they see the path to the houses.

There is also a game called geocaching, which is like a high tech treasure hunt. You can get together with other realtors and create a game for open houses. create a path, and tell your clients to follow it. I know it sounds aweful but give it some thought, it might work.

any suggestions for this technology is welcome…I’m jumping on my mountain bike and hitting the hills. I’ll have a new path later.

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