Archive for the ‘Location’ Category

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: 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: 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.

Continue Reading “Kickball Plots Foursquare Domination With Better Maps” »

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File Under: Events, Location
Mar
12
2010

SXSW: See All Austin Check-ins in One Place

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Cliqset has produced this nifty web app that aggregates status updates and check-ins sent from people in and around Austin to all of the different major location-sharing services — Gowalla, Foursquare, Twitter, Brightkite and of course Cliqset. It’s called Cliqset Crowd

It’s a nice tool you can use to get in on the location sharing game if you, like me, are one of those people who prefers to observe from the outside. With this all inclusive map, you certainly won’t miss anything big.

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