"location" entries
Radar Theme: The Physical Web
[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly] The next step for computing is to move out from the computers. Every device has the potential to become network-connected, delivering information to or from a web service. The mobile phones in our pockets also let us take apps and…
Greasepocket: Bridging the Browser to the Client
The iPhone knows my location, but it doesn't let me share it with websites via the built-in browser. For an application developer to auto-magically provide me location-aware benefits they need to write a client app. Greasepocket is a version of Greasemonkey for the iPhone. Just like Greasemonkey userscripts can be installed via the web. These scripts can access the…
GeoCommons + Mapufacture: Consolidation in the Where 2.0 Space
Today FortiusOne announced its acquisition of Mapufacture, the web's original geo-feed aggregator. FortiusOne is the creator of GeoCommons, a geo-data repository with analysis tools (Radar post). This acquisition brings Fortiusone both talent and the technology to handle third-party feeds. Mapufacture was created by Andrew Turner and Mikel Maron, two well-known geohackers. In addition to collaborating on Mapufacture they have…
Earthmine: Imagery for a 3D Geoweb
The geoweb is going 3D. Google is bringing Google Earth into the browser via a plug-in. Photosynth, 3D photo collection creator and viewer, is moving into the Microsoft's Virtual Earth team (this was posted about on July 26th; the post was removed, but is still findable in the cache's of both Google and Live). Google's Panoramio, a location-oriented photo-sharing…
O'Reilly Events on Dopplr
Dopplr, the traveler's social network, has added events. In this initial implementation you have to use one of the supplied URLs. Here are the URLs for the next six O'Reilly conferences. OSCON – http://dplr.it/oscon08 EuroRails – http://dplr.it/eurorailsconf08 Web 2.0 Expo NYC – http://dplr.it/w2exponyc Web 2.0 Expo Europe – http://dplr.it/w2expoeurope Web 2.0 Summit – http://dplr.it/w2summit08 MoneyTech – http://dplr.it/moneytech09 If you…
Location Awareness on the iPhone
I spent part of yesterday relocking, unbricking and upgrading my iPhone so that I could check out some of the new apps. After some trial and error, it worked (hint: you have to upgrade iTunes to 7.7 first!). I was curious which apps would use location (more than I expected) and whether or not I can make do without…
Google's GeoData, Open Street Map and Tele Atlas
Recently there have been a number of interesting announcements from Google on their geo data plans. Two weeks ago Google launched Mapmaker, a site that will let anyone edit the mapping data for a series of countries. Last week Google signed a five year deal to share mapping data with Tele Atlas, the world's second largest navigation data provider…
Nokia Acquires Plazes: To Be Ovi's New Mapping App
Nokia, the world's leading handset manufacturer, has announced its intention to acquire LBS web app Plazes. Berlin-based Plazes will provide Nokia with a social mapping property for Ovi, its new web portal. Congratulations to CEO Felix Peterson and the rest of the Plazes team! Nokia is getting a full-featured web property. Plazes has been around for a long time…
Hacking TCP/IP To Support Location Aware Services
The idea here is to enable devices to automatically search for other
addresses that are mapped to physical locations. If a device
knows its latitude and longitude, it can scan the address space
to find other devices in the local zone. This
can probably be done most efficiently by sending a multicast message
that routers repeat to devices that are nearby with the matching
public IP addresses (e.g., “I am trying to contact all mobile phones
near 37.46N / 122.26W”).
The combination of these techniques would make device discovery and
search open and vendor-neutral. Once devices have discovered each
other, they can communicate using existing Internet services, such as
email, XMPP, SIP, etc. via conventional IP addresses. The key idea is
to create a peer-to-peer discovery mechanism that is not dependent on
centralized services or proprietary vendor APIs. With that in place,
any device should be able to find and talk to other devices within a
cell or group of cells defined by latitude and longitude coordinates.
Citysense: Lets You Know What Everybody's Doing
What is everybody in my city doing right now? Sense Networks aims to answer that question for you with their new product Citysense (more info). Citysense shows you how active locations are right now (top screenshot) and which ones are abnormally active (second screenshot). In addition to these sexy visualizations they included an alarm lock that will wake you…