With our virtual world growing, moving and changing at an amazing rate developers and entrepreneurs look to other aspects of our lives that they add a technological touch to. An area that has been grabbing the headlines recently is geolocation technology.

Telematics especially in cars has seen a recent boom. Location tracking devices report much sought after information about driving habits. As you can imagine this is very interesting for insurance companies. As well as reporting the location of the car if broken down, statistics varying from car speed, road types used and hours spent driving are all collected.

For drivers the attraction to telematics and reportingdata to their insurers is to prove they’re good drivers. The movement towards individual risk profiling may become more popular due to the recent European Court of Justice’s decision to prohibit gender-based distinctions in insurance rates.

Technology in cars has made such a leap autonomous cars are a thing of the near future. Reductions in traffic police and car insurance prices will be more attainable due to them. Recent reports of the Google Self-Driving Car and its test drives have been excitedly received around the globe. Google is patenting the autonomous software ‘Google Chauffeur’.  These cars will prove safer and so will more than likely have higher speed limits. The car is claimed to have fewer accidents due to the system having faster reaction times than humans.

Already present infrastructure and databases such as GPS or Google maps will be used for navigation of these cars as well as cameras and sensors placed around the car.

Slightly more close to home than driver-less cars, in Spring 2015 2.2million households across the country will receive details of their new postcode. The Government officially agreed the designs for ‘Eircode’ last spring and also stated updates to their databases had already begun.

Source: EirCode.ie

The codes have been described by Capita Ireland, the company licensed to manage the operation, as a unique seven character (letters and numbers) code. The system aims to speed up postal deliveries as up to 35pc of households, mainly rural, do not have a definitive number or name.

When Minister Rabbitte was asked at the launch in April if EirCode was being developed to collect taxes such as water charges he stated it “all our interest” if governmental agencies could get accurate data efficiently.

The code’s design has a “flexible structure with plenty of spare capacity” and so is future-proofed. Later this year businesses around Ireland will also be encouraged to embrace the code later this year.