Adeje hosts Canaries' first Mapping Party

[Janet]

Adeje Ayuntamiento held a press conference earlier today to announce that it will be host this Saturday to the Canaries' first ever 'mapping party', which will see up to 45 people in groups of three virtually mapping Adeje town, creating an online data base of places in the municipality for residents and visitors to access online with ease and accuracy. Each group of three will comprise experts in geo-localisation (i.e pinpointing your location), social networks fans, and in fact anyone who would like to sign up to the project.

There are still places available for anyone who would like to take part, working between 11am to 1pm to map the town, using a number of specialised online applications to provide new geo-references for Adeje's businesses, small and large, building a much more complete virtual picture of the area. They will visit the businesses, confirm addresses, webpages, phone numbers, take photographs, etc, creating an invaluable data base. To add an extra incentive, the winning group will win a hotel stay for two donated by Iberostar.

There will also be other events taking place in and around the CDTCA, the Centre for Tourism Development, Costa Adeje, where the project is based. The group behind the mapping party say that once this project has been evaluated the project will be expanding into other zones, but for now Las Torres, El Galeon, Los Olivos and La Postura will be the first parts to be mapped.

Councillor for economic development Ermitas Moreira García said that businesses in the area are fully behind the project, and given the importance of the internet today in every aspect of life, for residents and more so in this case for visitors, they can only benefit. Event director, Francis Ortiz (photo above), a self-confessed geolocalisation and geomarketing fanatic, said that a staggering 98% of Canarian companies are not mapped in Google Places, and many that are, including hotels and tourist businesses, are incorrectly located, or show wrong or out of date contact details. If a visitor is looking for the nearest hairdresser to their hotel in Costa Adeje online, given the lack of information, they could well be sent to Puerto de la Cruz, he said! These days, he added, Google Maps is the most used application on mobile phones world wide, underling the importance of the use of geolocalisation.

The information gathered at the mapping party will be shared by the Council with OpenStreetMaps to incorporate all the new data from the centre of Adeje, businesses, cultural and special interest places, all accessible online, and for free.

JA

[poker]

Did he get a brown envelope from Google ?