A Wider Net

The folks at Trimble were showing their Trimble Outdoors line of GPS-Phone products. These are applications that hopefully will be coming to your mobile phone via your cellular carrier soon. Trimble Outdoors makes a fitness training application, an off-road navigation application, a turn-by-turn driving direction application, and my favorite - a geocaching adventure application called Geocache Navigator.

If you’re not familiar with geocaching, check out geocaching.com for a good overview. In a nutshell, geocaching is treasure hunting of a sort, and it has a worldwide following. As an outdoor activity, it combines “adventure game” with “walking”. And it requires a handheld GPS navigation device.

The Geocaching Navigator program makes geocaching with a GPS-enabled phone not only possible, but super-easy to do. Of course, you don’t have to plant the cache directly at the GPS coordinates. Often times the cache is located several clues away from the initial GPS coordinate - hence the treasure-hunting feel.

This will make a great team-building solution for meetings. Geocaching could be used as a high-tech version of a scavenger hunt, and a well-organized geocaching adventure can be a great way to get the team out of the building and into a focussed adventure together.