Location Stuff - Exile

Limbo buys Brightkite

2009-04-08T08:01:51Z

Okay, I've never even heard of Limbo, but they seem to be some kind of mobile company - and now they bought Brightkite and decided to shift their focus from their products so far to the Brightkite platform. Well now, let's see how this infusion of mobile thinking into Brightkite works out for them. Here is their blog post and here is something on TechCrunch.

Opera with Geolocation

2009-03-26T19:04:58Z

Opera, the browser that somehow everybody loves and no-ones uses, has a pre-release version with geolocation included. Just like Mozilla Geode it is using the technology from Skyhook Wireless. Sadly it is Windows-only at the moment - I'll try and report again, once it is available for OS X. [via]

Google Latitude

2009-02-04T10:43:36Z

Google Latitude is basically Plazes/Brightkite in lame. Sadly, there is no connection to outside services, i.e. FireEagle. There is a blog post, though.

The Wired GPS-Issue

2009-01-25T18:40:22Z

What a nice surprise: the recent issue of Wired Magazine covers some nice tools for the iPhone and Android-phones and has an interesting article about living with location-based services.

Google Gears, now with WiFi-Geolocation

2008-10-22T08:36:34Z

Introducing the Gears Geolocation API for all laptop WiFi users - I'd dare to bet they use the Skyhook Wireless data, too.

Geolocation by IP

2008-10-08T09:51:42Z

These days there are a bunch of services that allow a website owner to check the location of an IP - the MaxMind GeoIP database is the most established, new contenders in this area are the Google Location-API and the Creative Commons licensed WorldIP. [via]

All of those try to know - to various degrees of success - the location of the current user based on rather large databases that map IPs to locations. Those locations are either actual town-level locations or just return the country/country code.

Geode

2008-10-07T19:56:07Z

Someone at Mozilla Labs seemed to have re-written the Loki-Plugin from Skyhook Wireless to include the W3C Geolocation Specification - it is now both using that and the Loki-API to enable the browser to give location data, powered by the WiFi signal, to a webpage.

The whole thing is called Geode and will be included in future Firefox betas or can be installed into older Firefoxes directly from here. There is a blog entry and, of course, a TechCrunch article. Pownce and Fire Eagle have already integrated the specification into their services - and first tries show that it works amazingly accurate.

Flickr using OpenStreetMap data

2008-08-14T07:16:45Z

Flickr is using the street data from OpenStreetMap to map the inner city of Beijing for the Olympic games - their own Yahoo! maps just don't have any available data for this region. This might look like quite a surprising move for Yahoo/Flickr but then Yahoo! has been supporting the OpenStreetMap project for quite a while. [via]

Fire Eagle is now open for everyone

2008-08-13T08:54:37Z

The location broker Fire Eagle from Yahoo is now open to use by everyone - the private beta has ended as of today. Fire Eagle itself doesn't do much besides taking your location and brokering it in various levels of privacy to other services. As far as I know it is currently the biggest user of OAuth and a middle men to many different services. [via]

iPhone's Location-Aware Apps

2008-07-15T06:51:15Z

For those of you who are using an iPhone - over at the O'Reilly radar is a nice post about location-aware iPhone apps that covers Loopt, Whrrl, Where, OmniFocus, Urban Spoon, Twittelator and NearPics.

Geodata on Rivva

2008-07-14T08:30:13Z

The German memetracker Rivva is now actively using geo data to visualize the German-speaking blogosphere. Both a static map of all blogs and a live map of articles as they come in are available. The live map is oddly mesmerizing. [via]

iPhone-GPS

2008-07-10T06:51:47Z

One of the compelling reasons to get a second generation iPhone was the new in-built GPS that would extend the "XPS" from Skyhook Wireless that was powering the positioning system of the first iPhone. While it might be quite fun and useful for rather static location based services, there is one problem:

Unfortunately, there's not much you can do with the G.P.S. According to Apple, the iPhone's G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example.

- For iPhone, the 'New' Is Relative

That in itself makes the GPS a fun addition but nothing new for areas that were already covered by the XPS data before.

Travel Communities, cont.

2008-07-05T16:30:50Z

Markus Spath at netzwertig.com reviews three travel communities in German: triplib seems to be quite basic, tripwolf is built around content from the leading German travel book publisher and Geoflags is a quite cute maps mash-up.

Mapstraction

2008-07-05T16:06:08Z

Most mash-ups with geodata are using the Google Maps API, mostly because it is rather easy to use. A better way to use all kind of map APIs - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Open Street Map, MapQuest and many more - is the Mapstraction library. This OpenSource JavaScript library allows for quite easy embedding of all kinds of mapping and geodata display. [via Mike in IM]

A GPS dog collar.

2008-06-27T08:14:04Z

If I ever get a dog, I so need to get him the Garmin Astro DC 30 dog tracking collar.

This rugged, all-weather collar has an integrated GPS transmitter and antenna that work with the Astro® 220 to ensure that your dog will never be lost again. Plus, it's specially weighted so the antenna will always point to the sky for optimal signal.

Will be pretty useless for Joe Dog-owner, but it might be fun. [via]