New Zealand Interactive Route Map by The KiwiExperience
Friday, May 29th, 2009I had the honor to complete a web mapping project for the KiwiExperience which is New Zealand’s major operator of bus passes for travelers and backpackers.
This mapping solution included mashing up operators information and available bus routes throughout New Zealand with spatial data provided using the Google Maps API.
One of the main achievements in this project was to provide a rich fast user experience while distributing content over several continents for users across the world, this was done by following the latency requirements I have posted last year through my latency research ensuring the optimisation of South Pacific content for international customers.
With the latest take over of Sun Microsystems by Oracle and the global economic slow down, the ability of web content originated from AU/NZ data centers to provide competitive user experience world wide will highly depend on utilization of cloud computing and resources.
A good example will be solutions where content is stored and maintained locally but where possible combined with resources available by content provider positioned closer to the Internets backbone (Tier I providers neighbors) such as maps and media available by Google, Akamai, Flickr and Data stores such as amazon (AWS/EC2).
Being involved in several VOIP integration projects in its early days I have noticed the effect of latency on voice quality and the ability to minimise this effect by locating the VOIP termination servers (where the signal turns from IP to PSTN circuit i.e. traditional analog line) as close as possible to the major target audience.
Following the rule of “make the product at its source but serve it from as close as possible to its customer destination.” has been used by traditional supply chains for centuries and still applies to the latest web architectures for maximizing your clients user experience.
Update October 2009:
The site has also won a Microsoft NZ Collaboration Award ;o)