During christmas time a common activity is to track either your own sent packages or your receiving packages. The postal system in Norway (posten.no) provides a solution for finding the path of a package sent. One can say the system is driven by geographical attributes, however, no map is ever utilized. I found this a bit strange and during a late evening some days ago I set out on the mission to try to prototype such a solution. The solution became a system wrapping the package tracking web-site from posten.no, extracting the geographic location (postal code and place name), geocoding them on-the-fly and visualizing the information in a map with lines indicating the path. The system can be found in the sandbox; package tracking. If you don’t have a package to track you can test with this package; sm128209247no

Snapshot of prototype

I wonder why they don’t have a solution like this already? Fairly easy to prototype, fairly free-of-charge, easy to scale… What’s the downside? Creativity?

Oh, btw!

Merry Christmas everybody!