Lost in Dublin? WAP to the rescue

You're lost. You're late. Your gorgeous date is sitting impatiently in a nearby pub and if you don't get there soon she will be gone forever. What do you do to rescue the situation?

If you have a WAP phone you could connect to a new, free Internet service developed by a student in his spare time. If you key in your nearest street name it will provide a map on the WAP screen and allow you to scroll around looking for nearby streets.

Mr Dave Burke is studying at University College Dublin, where he is a PhD student attempting to model electrical activity in the brain. He thought he might try some contract software programming to raise a few bob, but when he was told by one developer to go get a job in a burger restaurant, the die was cast.

"I thought, hell, I'll set up a company of my own," he explained. The result is called StreetWise.ie Mobile Internet Engineering. It has a working web site, http://www.streetwise.ie and, if you have a WAP phone and connect to it, you can get map details for any street within a two-kilometre square, centred on the GPO in O'Connell Street, Dublin.

He has access to data for a 20-kilometre square but he is developing the project on his own and with a shoestring budget. Preparing the software to squeeze usable maps on to the tiny and slow WAP screen is a challenge, he acknowledges.

"It is really pushing WAP to the limit. Because it is so new, there is no software for mobile phones, so I had to write proprietary software."

He started working on the project last March and it finally went live during the first week of August. He developed it on a budget of £1,000, but he is satisfied that it does the job nicely. He is also sure there is a market for his service.

"I don't know anyone who knows Dublin inside out. When you need a map is when you don't have one," he says. His system is based on something known as "vector data", licensed from Ordnance Survey Ireland. "It is literally just points and lines. I have written software which can access their point and line vector information and convert it to graphical information for a mobile phone," Mr Burke explained.

This is his "phase 1", to be followed by an enhanced version that can provide "geographical route finding" that will take you on the most direct route possible wherever you want to go.

His third phase would involve keying in the pub name and being given a map to your destination, all over your WAP phone.