Archive for March, 2010

File Under: APIs, Location, Web Services
Mar
31
2010

Where 2.0: Geomena Launches API to Feed its Open Location Database

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SAN JOSE, California — A new web service called Geomena is trying to build a geolocation database practically from scratch, and it’s taking a page from Wikipedia’s playbook to do it.

Geomena is an open wi-fi geo database — using a method similar to services from Skyhook and Google, any app plugged in to Geomena can use nearby wi-fi access points to determine your location.

The database is tiny right now. It has around 3,400 geo-tagged access points in the system, most of them around the project’s home base in Portland, Oregon. So, to grow the database as quickly as possible, the Geomena team has launched a new API that lets developers build apps that can enter new wi-fi access point locations.

So, if you’re making a location-based game, a location-sharing Firefox plug-in, or a web-app that relies on geodata, you can rig it up to write new wi-fi location points directly to Geomena’s database, helping it grow through good, old-fashioned crowdsourcing.

The emergence of location as an application platform has led to a bevy of new web services, each of them eager to provide developers with geodata to fuel the current flood of mobile and web-based apps. Most of the buzz at the all-things-location Where 2.0 conference, taking place here this week, has centered around SimpleGeo, a new web data store that just launched its “iTunes for geodata” — a pay-as-you-go solution for developers building location-based apps.

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File Under: Location, Web Services
Mar
31
2010

Where 2.0: SimpleGeo to Launch ‘iTunes for Geodata’

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SAN JOSE, California – If you’re building an app that incorporates location — whether it’s a game, a local search service, or even a Twitter client — you’re going to have to go somewhere to get your data.

As we noted Tuesday, location is now an application platform, and there’s a whole crop of location data stores opening up to serve the emerging market of applications.

SimpleGeo is the latest such company to join the scrum. The web startup is announcing the debut of its geodata service here at Where 2.0 on Wednesday afternoon, but Jenna Wortham of The New York Times leaked the news a little early.

From the NYT Bits blog:

The company has been working to create what he describes as “iTunes for geodata.” The idea is simple: Create a wide sampling of geographic datasets and technologies that developers can access free or, for heavier users, at a range of prices. [...]

The company offers two tools. The first is the SimpleGeo Marketplace, which gives developers access to different location datasets and technologies for a monthly fee. The second is called the SimpleGeo Storage Engine and allows developers to perform location queries on a pay-as-you-go basis.

To gather its data, SimpleGeo began consuming datastreams from Twitter, Gowalla, Foursquare, Brightkite, Flickr and other location-sharing web services.

The pay-as-you-go model will work well for SimpleGeo, which allows the first million API calls for free, according to TechCrunch. Prices then start at $300 for the next level and go up from there. The company claims to have over 4,000 partnered developers using its service.

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File Under: Programming, Software
Mar
31
2010

A Subversion User’s Guide to Mercurial Version Control

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mercurialWe’ve watched many of our favorite open source libraries migrate from Google Code hosting to BitBucket and GitHub lately. The main reason is that most of the projects wanted to move from centralized version control like Subversion (used by Google Code) to distributed version control systems like Mercurial (BitBucket) and Git (GitHub).

If you needed further proof that the world is moving toward distributed version control, last year Google Code began offering Mercurial as an alternative to Subversion (though Mercurial projects are still in the minority on Google Code).

Assuming you’ve already made the often painful migration from CVS to Subversion, you may be wondering why you would want to switch version control systems yet again.

The short answer is that if you’ve ever tried to branch and merge in Subversion then you already know the main advantage distributed systems have over Subversion — branching and merging your code is no longer a massive headache doomed to failure.

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File Under: Location, Mobile
Mar
31
2010

Where 2.0: Fly a Drone Helicopter and Fight Killer Robots With Your iPhone

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SAN JOSE, California — First unveiled at CES in January of this year, the Parrot AR.Drone is a flying wireless toy that’s the center of a new augmented reality game. It streams video and sends location information as it hovers and zips around, and you can control it with your iPhone or iPod Touch.

As you control it, you see the drone’s POV video stream on your phone’s screen. Tipping the phone in different ways makes the drone turn and fly around, as the software senses the iPhone’s accelerometer.

As if a remote-controlled helicopter isn’t cool enough: The Parrot drone’s control screen has cross hairs, and you can “shoot” at things you see on the screen. The drone detects tags that people have applied to inanimate objects, and as objects are tagged, they can be replaced on-screen by virtual objects. So, as you fly around, you can shoot at virtual killer robots that are layered over the real-world background video. You can also put two drones into battle mode and shoot at each other.

Martin Lefebure of Parrot, the company that makes the device, demonstrated the latest version of the drone on stage at the Where 2.0 conference here Wednesday. The thing flew around the room, and everyone in the audience was able to look up onto the big screen on stage, where they could see themselves waving at the drone’s video camera. Lefebure then did battle with some insect-like evil robots that were holding us hostage in the conference ballroom. Unfortunately, he got his ass handed to him.

Parrot first showed off its iPhone-controlled car — the first concept that eventually evolved into the Parrot — at the 2009 edition of Where 2.0.

The iPhone and the drone talk to each other over a standard wi-fi connection. It has a range of about 150 feet (it’s limited by the range of your wi-fi) and the battery lasts about 15 minutes.

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File Under: Identity, Social, Web Apps
Mar
31
2010

Gmail Now More Secure With OAuth Support

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Google has announced OAuth support for Gmail. The new features means that third-party applications can now access your Gmail account without needing your username and password.

OAuth allows outside applications to access your Gmail account with a single click — you’ll be redirected to Gmail where you can approve (or reject) applications that want access to your contacts and mail. Twitter has had OAuth support for a while, so if you’ve ever given a third-party website or application the permission to post something to your tweet stream, you’ve used this type of interaction before.

At the moment OAuth support is a Google Labs feature. Interested developers can get an overview of the process on the Google Labs site.

The most obvious benefit is social networking sites which often want to import your address book so you can find your friends on the new site. Previously, that meant handing over your username and password, something savvy users were loath to do. Now, outside sites can grab your address data without forcing you to give away the keys to your e-mail account.

Perhaps more important in the long-run, OAuth support also means that outside applications can interact with your mail. For the launch of OAuth support, Syphir has developed an iphone application that allows you to apply complex filters to your mail and use those filters to push, for example, only messages from your boss, on to your iPhone.

Unlike other push notification and Gmail apps in the iTunes Store, Syphir’s SmartPush never sees or stores your Gmail password thanks to the new OAuth support.

Other examples include Backupify, which will backup your Gmail account for safe, off-Google storage. Previously Backupify used traditional IMAP, which meant the site stored your username and password. Thanks to OAuth that’s no longer necessary.

Although OAuth is intended for webapps, it’s possible that desktop e-mail clients — like Mozilla’s Thunderbird — may also adopt the OAuth method.

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File Under: Events, Location, Mobile
Mar
30
2010

Location Isn’t Just a Feature Anymore, It’s a Platform

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The O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference runs through Thursday in San Jose, California.

The O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference runs through Thursday in San Jose, California.

Just when you thought the swell of popularity around location-based services has hit the high water mark, the tide keeps rising.

All of the major web search engines are location-aware. Twitter has its own geocoder and Facebook is including location data in status updates. The big photo-sharing services like Flickr and Picasa support geotagging. Social location apps from Foursquare and Yelp are all the rage, and augmented reality is being touted as the next big thing. The emerging HTML5 specification has its own geolocation controls that let webapps find a user’s location through the browser.

We’ve reached the point where the addition of location data inside an application isn’t a special “bells-and-whistles” add-on, an experimental feature or a layer that’s only useful to some users.

It’s a standard feature now, and it’s crept into every product we care about.

“Location is something that people are just going to expect from now on,” says Brady Forrest, program chair for the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference, the three-day event about all things location-based taking place in San Jose, California this week.

The location revolution was fueled by the proliferation of geo-enabled devices, Forrest says. Since most of us are carrying GPS devices in our pockets (every iPhone and Android phone has one, and most notebooks, too), it’s created a whole new application platform on which companies from different sectors — search, mapping, gaming, social networking, location-sharing — can compete.

“The platform is here,” he says. “Now, people are finding new ways to exploit it.”

Continue Reading “Location Isn’t Just a Feature Anymore, It’s a Platform” »

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File Under: Location, Mobile
Mar
30
2010

Kickball Plots Foursquare Domination With Better Maps

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The Kickball slogan.

The Kickball slogan.

A new iPhone app makes messing around on Foursquare a more-visual experience than ever before.

The app is called Kickball, and it more tightly incorporates maps into the Foursquare experience. It has many of the same features as the official Foursquare app, like check-ins, history, badges, tips and shouts, and the list view that shows all your friends’ statuses.

But Kickball (App Store link) ups the ante by letting you plot all of the current Foursquare activity within your network on a map. You can see where your friends are, zooming in and panning around to different neighborhoods. Also, at any time, you can pop up a map that shows you the 15 venues in the Foursquare system that are closest to your current location. Kickball uses Mixer Labs’ GeoAPI, which is now owned by Twitter, for location data.

This discovery feature is especially handy if you’re in a city or a neighborhood you don’t know that well. Even in a place I know all too well (the Wired office), I was able to see all the places within about 100 yards where I can go fight for mayorships. Oh, it’s ON.

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While you’re browsing one of these maps, and you zoom in on a friend or on a venue, you get a button that says, “I’m here too,” making it easy to check in with one click. Equally as accessible within the app is the “Off the grid” choice. There’s also the ability to view details about a place, view relevant tweets and add photos (something else missing from Foursquare).

I’ve been using both Kickball and Foursquare’s official iPhone apps side by side for a couple of days, and the map experience in Kickball is far better than the map experience in Foursquare. The user interface in Kickball is also a little less chaotic than Foursquare. Both have their ups and downs, but if you’ve been wanting a stronger, more elegant integration of maps, Kickball is your answer.

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File Under: Databases, Visual Design
Mar
29
2010

Sunlight Labs Offering $5K for Best Government Data Mashups

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Artists, web developers and data visualization geniuses, here’s a chance to strut your stuff, serve your country and win some serious money in the process.

Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides tools to make government data more transparent, has announced a new contest called Design for America. Billed as a “design and data visualization extravaganza,” Sunlight is encouraging the public to create and publish data visualizations that help make complex government data easier for people to digest and interact with.

There are several different categories open for submission, including: visualizations of Recovery.gov data that shows how the stimulus money is being spent, visualizations showing how a bill becomes a law, a redesign of a .gov website, and a redesign of any government form. Top prize in each category is a cool $5,000.

Creations can be in any form — a website, a game, a poster, a sculpture, whatever — though we suspect most of the entries will be either posters or interactive Flash graphics.

The contest is being run by Sunlight Labs, the skunkworks wing of the larger Sunlight Foundation. The Sunlight group spends most of its energy collecting government data, organizing it into publicly accessible databases, then creating tools that make it easier for ordinary people to access that data. The non-profit works with organizations like OpenCongress, MapLight, FollowTheMoney and USASpending.gov. Sunlight also maintains a list of APIs developers can use to access the data.

The Design for America contest encourages participants to sift through the vast datasets available from all of these organizations, as well as the datasets maintained by Sunlight Foundation and any raw government data that’s available. As the Sunlight Labs blog says, the goal of the contest is to “tell interesting stories” that go beyond what can be an overwhelming amount of unfiltered data.

Visualizations can be in any medium, not just the web, so if you’re a video or infographic specialist, you can still enter the contest. The main criteria for judging are the visual quality of the artwork and how well the underlying information is conveyed.

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File Under: Social, Web Apps, Web Services
Mar
26
2010

Making Contact With Mr. Gmail

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Google's Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz

Google’s Todd Jackson carries the weight of the web on his shoulders. As the product manager for Gmail, it’s his responsibility to make sure your inbox experience is fast, secure and always available. Jackson is also the product manager for Buzz, Google’s real-time social sharing system that launched in February and was promptly criticized over privacy issues and its “noise” problem. Talk about a tough gig.

We got the chance to ask Jackson about the inner workings of the Gmail team, what’s ahead for Buzz as far as user controls, and what it feels like to bear the collective rage of Gmail’s 140-million-plus users when the system takes a dive.

Webmonkey: Do you think we’re going to see the death of the desktop e-mail client anytime soon?

Todd Jackson: We don’t like to think of it that way (laughs). No comment! Seriously, though, we think deploying an app in the browser is something that easily makes sense to users now. They can log in on any computer, all their stuff is in the cloud. It’s just easier. And for us, we can push frequent updates and improve the product iteratively.

At Google, we run our own business on Gmail — we call this “eating our own dog food.”

Webmonkey: So do you suffer the same service outages as the general public?

Jackson: We do. When Gmail goes down, it goes down for us. That’s one of our first alerts.

Webmonkey: What happens in your office at Google when Gmail goes down?

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File Under: Frameworks, JavaScript, Visual Design
Mar
26
2010

Beautiful Websites: Former Apple Designer’s Amazing Photo Gallery

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Slick photo gallery plug-ins for JQuery, Dojo and other JavaScript libraries mean that the days of the boring thumbnail grids are well behind us. But the same ease-of-use means that slick slideshows are everywhere — it’s hard to stand out.

Unless you’re Mike Matas. The former Apple designer and co-founder of Delicious Monster recently unveiled a new photo blog that has perhaps the slickest, yet simplest, gallery script we’ve ever seen.

Perhaps more impressive than the clever slide navigation and the blurred background photos, what’s really amazing about the site is how simple the interface is — Matas manages to pack in everything from embedded maps to comments without overwhelming the photos.

The only caveat is that the site requires a modern web browser with support for emerging standards. Internet Explorer users; nothing to see here. Also note that performance lags a bit in Firefox 3.6 compared to WebKit browsers like Safari and Chrome.

We’d hate to see a million ripoffs of this design, but if you want to do something similar, the site’s developers, Chi Wai Lau and Nefaur Khandker, say that it was built using the MooTools JavaScript framework.

Check out our three-part MooTools tutorial on Webmonkey if you want to learn more about using the free UI framework.

One very nice touch we like on the site is that scrolling changes the URL so there’s no back-button breakage. Unfortunately, if you turn off JavaScript entirely you notice that the site doesn’t function at all, which is worth remembering should you consider doing something similar.

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