"geolocation" entries

Four short links: 26 February 2016

Four short links: 26 February 2016

High-Performing Teams, Location Recognition, Assessing Computational Thinking, and Values in Practice

  1. What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team (NY Times) — As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion […] Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions, and other nonverbal cues.
  2. Photo Geolocation with Convolutional Neural Networks (arXiv) — 377MB gets you a neural net, trained on geotagged Web images, that can suggest location of the image. From MIT TR’s coverage: To measure the accuracy of their machine, they fed it 2.3 million geotagged images from Flickr to see whether it could correctly determine their location. “PlaNet is able to localize 3.6% of the images at street-level accuracy and 10.1% at city-level accuracy,” say Weyand and co. What’s more, the machine determines the country of origin in a further 28.4% of the photos and the continent in 48.0% of them.
  3. Assessing the Development of Computational Thinking (Harvard) — we have relied primarily on three approaches: (1) artifact-based interviews, (2) design scenarios, and (3) learner documentation. (via EdSurge)
  4. Values in Practice (Camille Fournier) — At some point, I realized there was a pattern. The people in the company who were beloved by all, happiest in their jobs, and arguably most productive, were the people who showed up for all of these values. They may not have been the people who went to the best schools, or who wrote the most beautiful code; in fact, they often weren’t the “on-paper” superstars. But when it came to the job, they were great, highly in-demand, and usually promoted quickly. They didn’t all look the same, they didn’t all work in the same team or have the same skill set. Their only common thread was that they didn’t have to stretch too much to live the company values because the company values overlapped with their own personal values.

What are iBeacons?

How to get started with proximity sensors.

Triangulated_Noise_Stinging_Eyes_Flickr

Editor’s note: This is the first post in a series looking at beacon technology and the burgeoning beacon ecosystem.

Apple galvanized the whole area of proximity-enabled applications and services when it launched iBeacon at WWDC in June 2013. When iOS7 launched later that year, it was the first time support for a variety of proximity use cases was both designed in — and available at scale in — a mobile platform.

Since then, hundreds of companies have become involved in different ways in the iBeacon ecosystem — what I call the “Beacosystem.” These companies are making beacon hardware, offering proximity/iBeacon software platforms, creating shopper marketing platforms, using beacons to deliver signals for location analytics and mobile marketing solutions, powering indoor location services, and more.

This post introduces proximity and iBeacon, covers some background on how it works, and explains why there is some excitement and hype around the uses of proximity in various verticals, including retail.

Read more…

How browsers get to know you in milliseconds

Behind the scenes of a real-time ad auction on the web.

A small technological marvel occurs on almost every visit to a web page. In the seconds that elapse between the user’s click and the display of the page, an ad auction takes place in which hundreds of bidders gather whatever information they can get on the user, determine which ads are likely to be of interest, place bids, and transmit the winning ad to be placed in the page.

How can all that happen in approximately 100 milliseconds? Let’s explore the timeline and find out what goes on behind the scenes in a modern ad auction. Most of the information I have comes from two companies that handle different stages of the auction: the ad exchange AppNexus and the demand side platform Yashi. Both store critical data in an Aerospike database running on flash to achieve sub-second speeds.

Read more…

Upward Mobility: Why iBeacons Matter

Get ready for a new generation of position-aware apps

Fans of near field communications payment solutions were, yet again, disappointed when the new batch of iPhones failed to include NFC in their list of features. While it might indeed be nifty for iPhone users to be able to join the Google Wallet revolution, another game-changing technology that Apple has launched has largely gone unnoticed. That would be the iBeacon framework built into iOS7.

iBeacon leverages Bluetooth Low Energy (part of the Bluetooth 4.0 standard), which has been incorporated into iPhones since the iPhone 4S. There are already a ton of applications using Bluetooth LE, notably the gaggle of Kickstarter-funded “find your lost keys” devices that use a small BLE dongle. What’s new is the framework, which allows applications to determine proximity to BLE beacons simply, and even when the app isn’t running. And BLE beacons are relatively cheap, you can get three of them for $99.

Read more…

Location Functionality in Mobile Apps

OSCON 2013 Speaker Series

Andy Gup (@agup) is a Developer Evangelist at ESRI and OSCON 2013 Speaker. In this interview we talk about location capabilities in apps as well as location analytics.

NOTE: If you are interested in attending OSCON to check out Andy’s talk or the many other cool sessions, click over to the OSCON website where you can use the discount code OS13PROG to get 20% your registration fee.

Key highlights include:

  • Mobile apps must have location capabilities [Discussed at 0:25]
  • Consider your goals when incorporating location into an app [Discussed at 1:05]
  • Is it difficult to add location functionality? [Discussed at 2:19]
  • A real-world example of where it made a big difference [Discussed at 3:32]
  • Location analytics are very powerful [Discussed at 5:11]
  • Augmented reality and location capabilities [Discussed at 6:38]

You can view the full interview here:

Read more…

Christopher Schmitt and Simon St. Laurent discuss HTML5

What to watch for in HTML5, CSS, and the open web.

HTML5 author Christopher Schmitt talks with O'Reilly editor Simon St. Laurent about why it's a great time to be a web developer.

Understanding place and space in a digital Babel

The nuances of location language.

Robert Munro, a computational linguist and speaker at Where 2012, says the subtleties of spatial distinctions are growing in importance as more of the world's digital information takes the form of non-English, unstructured text.

Why Uber's data fascinates a neuroscientist

The unique relationship between a brain expert and a car-sharing service.

Neuroscientist Bradley Voytek's interest in networks and nodes goes beyond the human brain. Here, he discusses the data generated by car-service company Uber and how the company has influenced his research.

Why Uber’s data fascinates a neuroscientist

The unique relationship between a brain expert and a car-sharing service.

Neuroscientist Bradley Voytek's interest in networks and nodes goes beyond the human brain. Here, he discusses the data generated by car-service company Uber and how the company has influenced his research.

Makers and hackers: The Where Conference is looking for you

Visualizations, RFID installs and a Mini Maker Faire will be featured at Where 2012.

The 2012 Where Conference is looking for makers, hackers, developers and do-it-yourselfers who are working in the geolocation and mapping spaces.