South Pacific Web Mapping

Being far from it’s major holiday visitors centres (Europe,Asia and the Americas), the New Zealand tourism industry will be one of the first adopters for location based mobile and web technologies.

Those technologies and advertising mechanisms will allow overseas visitors to be targeted for the efficient advertisement during the trip planning stage together with ongoing offers and promotions during the stay in New Zealand.

A Good example for those marketing strategies and methods could be demonstrated in the following example.

An activity provider from Queenstown has noticed that most of its customer our from a particular part of Europe, this feature could result by targeting its online advertisement budget for page views coming from that origin.

Those opportunities could be enhanced using mobile technologies by sending promotions and discounts relevant to the area the visitor is currently in.

During the last six years I have been involved in several distributed web application design and developments that has involved presenting front end products and services provided by Australian and New Zealand companies that were targeting overseas potential customers.

This implementation provided several content distribution challenges giving the geographic and physical distance between the content provider and the end point consumer.

Issues such as the number of intermediate routers and signal latency could drastically affect the user experience quality of the site and even reduce visits to purchase conversion rates and site stickiness.

Content and services providers prefer to have physical access or close geographic proximity to the data center service provider and tends to give those features a higher priority then getting their content as close as possible to the end point customer device.

This requirement make a lot of sense when it comes to data that is sometimes fed directly from the companies database and needs to be managed and maintained frequently.

On the other hand, providing up to date valuable data with high latency rates and low quality user experience in some scenarios could reduce sales and prevent the end users from optimizing their web experience while browsing the site.

Those challenges could be approached with a few cost efficient web architectures while utilizing technologies such as user origin detection, clear separation of content, presentation and behavior (Such as XHTML/CSS and Javascript feeding techniques and utilizing CDNs and distributed HTTP content.

A Good working implementation is the RAS GIS Server where bitmap and static presentation files are fed from highly scalable HTTP providers and enterprise location based data will be reverse peroxided from the companies data center.