New Wave of Apps Build ‘Where’ Into the Web
You just landed in Seattle.
You’re in town for a meeting later this afternoon, but first, you’ve got to pick up your rental car, grab a hot cup of coffee and probably spend a fair amount of time sitting in traffic.
Your colleagues are expecting you, but you can only guess as to when, exactly, you’ll arrive — there are too many uncontrollable factors slowing you down.
So, you pull out your phone and fire up an app called Glympse. You add a few e-mail addresses from your phone’s address book and hit send. Now, your colleagues will be able to go to a web page to see exactly where you are and see your estimated arrival time.
As you move closer to the city center, the Glympse app is using your phone’s built-in GPS to update your location every few seconds, keeping everything in real-time.
Of course, you don’t want to continue sharing your location with your colleagues once the meeting is over, so, after a couple of hours, the Glympse feed shuts down. Now you can safely go hit the bars and have some fun without anyone snooping on you.
“Sharing location is different than sharing photos or text messages,” says Glympse’s CEO and co-founder Bryan Trussel. “Location ebbs and flows from a personal thing to an impersonal thing, and we want to account for that.”
Glympse is just one of the companies presenting the latest in geo-aware technology at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference, which takes place this week in San Jose, California.
Where 2.0, now in its fifth year, is the tech industry’s biggest showcase for the latest geo-enabled hardware and software — an area that’s hit a new level of saturation as location-based tech rapidly moves into our smartphones, our laptops and, consequently, into our experience on the web.
“Location is no longer a differentiator — it’s going to become oxygen,” says Where 2.0 conference chair Brady Forrest. “We’re reaching a point on the web where everything is going to become location-aware,” he says.
Glympse is just one example. The company is debuting its service at Where 2.0. It’s available now as a free download for Android phones. It’s also in private beta on the iPhone and Windows Mobile phones. Versions for BlackBerry and Nokia platforms are in development.
The popularity of the iPhone and T-Mobile’s G1, both of which have GPS built in, is fueling much of the popularity around location-based apps. Another example is Waze, a mobile app that collects real-time traffic data from its network of users to recommend the best route home on your commute. It will even suggest the best place to look for parking.
But Where 2.0 isn’t just about mobile devices. The conference will hit all the points on the geo-aware map: Google Earth, data visualizations, open-source mapping projects, geo-enabled search, GPS gadgets — even the latest high-powered cameras being used to feed our collective mapping fetish.
All of this hardware and software adds up to a vast network of data streams the next wave of applications will be able to tap into. And while much of this technology has existed for years, getting it all to work together has been a big challenge. But that’s all about to change, says Forrest.
“We’re in the final stages of getting the platforms ready,” he says.
Where 2.0 will feature several presenters showing off new and easy ways for software developers to add location to their applications. Microsoft will present a new location platform it’s built into Windows 7. PhoneGap will demo its open-source platform for building location-aware apps for multiple devices using HTML and JavaScript.
The U.S. government will also talk about how it used simple web tools to improve geo-data on the battlefield in Iraq.
“These projects show how we’re moving away from monolithic GIS and closed databases to, ‘Anyone can do this,’” says Forrest.
Another like-minded project is DIYcity, a community site that encourages urban residents to build tools that aggregate publicly available data and improve the information supplied by cities, all using open web technologies.
“I felt like ordinary people were much more ready for this than their governments were, so I figured I would challenge people to go ahead and create these systems on their own, with or without their local governments,” says DIYcity co-creator John Geraci, who will present at Where 2.0 on Wednesday.
Recent innovations in location-aware apps have concentrated on improving public transportation systems and solving city traffic problems, areas many city-dwellers find painfully under-served by their local governments.
“It’s obvious low-hanging fruit,” Geraci says. “A tiny bit of real-time feedback and coordination at the street level could make things work better.”
To that end, some of the more active projects on DIYcity include bike sharing apps, rideshare apps and bus tracking apps. Geraci hopes that, at a certain point, the governments would get on the bandwagon and participate.
“To be honest, that’s happening a whole lot faster than I thought it would.”
The Where 2.0 Conference runs Tuesday May 19 through Thursday May 21. Webmonkey will provide on-site coverage starting Wednesday morning, May 20. Check the Events page for the latest posts. Also, you can follow Where 2.0 on Twitter at @where20.
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