I've been sifting through the internet, including the excellent Symbian Freeware site, looking at various packages available for live location tracking using the Nokia N95 handset. Our plan is to provide live location tracking of a car vs. bicycle journey that will visit the various Car Free Festivals on June 15th.

My search first brought me to AFTrack which seemed to offer what I was looking for but required an external Bluetooth GPS rather than being able to use the N95's built-in GPS receiver (this seems endemic to software in this class). It looks like they have a development version that will be released soon that will support the internal GPS but I don't have that much time. Besides their upload isn't smoothly integrated into a map interface which means I would have to figure that out myself!

The next stop was Nokia Lab's Sports Tracker beta. This package has been developed to assist with training and features a nice package for the handset that combines with a web service that your data get uploaded to. It will then show and allow you to share your various training times and routes for different activities. However, in spite of a feature named "live sharing" I wan't able to actually get it to show my locative progress in real time.

I finally found what I need with MapMyTracks - a java applet for my phone and an account with their web service and I was set to go. My first attempt with it only took a minute to get a fix on my location and have it appear on their Google map. As always there's a little drift with the GPS data but this looks like it will work perfectly for Vancouver Car Free Day on June 15. Their business model is typical of the genre - give away the software and a limited subset of functionality for free and then charge monthly for the enhanced experience.

Come back after June 15 for an update on how well it worked.