However, what’s particularly neat about the application is that UrbanSpoon has been recording these “shakes” by location (inherent in the API call obviously) and created a great visualization showing the locations around the US over a day of “shaking”.

The heatmap essentially shows the evolving enquiry of people looking for a place to eat. There isn’t an actual time display or timeline slider to investigate – but I imagine there are interesting trends during meals, and particularly after normal eating times when people don’t have a plans on where to eat. In addition, a timezone lag that would show shaking progressing east to west.

Context mining of mobile devices, combined with geographic location – and especially via inferred geographic information instead of directly volunteered information can yield interesting trends on ambient behaviors. Imagine if UrbanSpoon could also collect the number of people in the group by detecting other repeatedly seen nearby bluetooth/wifi devices, previous meals of the day, and the ultimate destination and distance to the chosen restaurant.


curl -u USERNAME:PASSWORD -d location="Arlington, VA" http://twitter.com/account/update_location.json


You can even use GET, which means bookmarkable location settings (similar to FireEagle)


http://username:password@twitter.com/account/update_location.xml?location=Paris,+France


There has been a number of GeoTwitter clients and applications show up. And a lot of discussion on alternate picoformats for location markup.

By extracting this away to Twitter proper, it means any application can set this information how they want, and have it updated in the user’s profile. One thing that is lost is the ‘home’ location of that user as their profile potentially becomes very temporal.

FireEagle as the central store is a good option, however it is just one location store and Twitter’s location will no doubt serve as the centralized location store for a number of new applications. As more social or personal applications gain location storing and sharing support, there is a question of how synchronization between these services will easily happen.

I don’t want to have to set my location in multiple services. This is the same problem that troubles social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us and magnolia. This may become especially problematic if there were automatic updating services that detected a change in FireEagle and then updated your Twitter location, and vice versa – which then updates FireEagle from Twitter. Perhaps causing an implosion of the GeoWeb.

There have been, and are, other location sharing systems. Most recently, Plazes, TwitterVision, my.loki, Loopt, Dodgeball, and more coming online soon. However these systems were either hampered by being too much, not providing good interfaces, unclear security and authorization, and worst of all, user lock-in or siloing. Those services have great purpose and use and communities, but they aren’t the cross-application interfaces they could be.

What’s incredibly exciting about FireEagle is that it does one thing really well – and provides excellent hooks for using this information. It’s a service about user-geolocation enabling other applications. Its one of those services that a user comes to for signing up, but after that never needs to come back to FireEagle at all. Applications build in authorization, publishing, and accessing their location into their own interfaces.

And even better, you can publish your location from one system, say a mobile device, and have other applications access this, say from a social network site.

This concept follows the concept of loosely coupled systems. Other location sharing systems typically required all potential users to be members of that particular service, using that interface. For example, I can’t view locations of my twitter contacts in Plazes, or from a single mobile app – where a combined interface has utmost importance.

I’ve recently updated my blog, and included in the header my current location from FireEagle. I can now set my location via Dopplr, mobile phone, dashboard widget, or whatever cool next generation shoe tracking service, and have my site automatically get this – or view in FaceBook.

FireEagle will do for geolocation what GoogleMaps did for online maps, or Twitter did for small messaging exchange: Provide an underlying framework that developers can innovate on top of.

I explained before why the iPhone doesn’t need a GPS, and FireEagle makes this especially true. In the end, I just want it to be easy for me to share locations with people and use this for finding things around me. I don’t really care how that happens, I just want it to happen. And loosely coupled systems like FireEagle abstract away the geolocation method from the geolocation-sharing.

Unfortunately the blog is agog so far today with numerous posts by misunderstanding newszines that see it useful to bash FireEagle and comment on “lack of apps”, or “user base”. They’re not understanding the concept that FireEagle is a tool, not an endpoint.

I hope FireEagle doesn’t get feature-itis. Users and devs are asking for social networks, stored location names, and other features that each have their uses, in specific application spaces. But FireEagle is powerful for just the reason that it doesn’t do all these things. It’s like saying Amazon’s S3 needs to have “Friending”. External applications should be innovative with how they use and extend FireEagle.

You’re already seeing applications add integration. Dopplr will set your location once per day based on your trips, PresenceRouter helps join FireEagle into the other geolocation services. Dangerday is a Twitter bot that will allow you to publish to FireEagle from the plethora of Twitter applications and sites out there. FireWidget is a Mac OS X dashboard widget, and FireWrench is a GreaseMonkey script for polling your location in Firefox. There are a couple of other really exciting applications and interfaces to FireEagle that can be found with some lurking around (I leave this as an exercise to you the reader until the apps officially announce themself).

We’ve also built in FireEagle support into Mapufacture and will soon be showing off some of the really interesting things FireEagle lets us do for our users.

Jesse Newland has a very good ruby library, and I believe the Yahoo Developer Network will be putting up libraries for PHP, Python, Javascript, Java, Objective-C, and C#.

FireEagle is also using the new OAuth specification – one of the first large scale service to do so. Along the way they’ll have to do a lot of developer education on how to use OAuth, but it’s a leap in the right direction. Using OAuth it makes it simple to connect to multiple services without having to cater to as many unique authentication mechanisms. The pain is early in development but pays off in the end.

So developers – this is a call to you, go out and build cool stuff with FireEagle!

Macworld disagrees (via Directions Magazine). Specifically, Macworld said:

Add GPS support … [the iPhone] would be the ultimate mapping application if it knew where you actually were at all times

They’re confusing the issue. Geolocation does not mean GPS. GPS is a specific technology implementation of getting a location fix. It is also frought with complications that are most apparent in areas that people may use a mobile phone to find out what’s going on around them – that being urban areas, indoors, or anywhere that doesn’t have good sky coverage.

I have an N95 – that’s because I’m a geo-geek. I wanted to have programmatic access to my precise location so that I could write prototype applications for mapping, geolocation, and so forth.

I am not an average user

In fact, one of the most complained about features in the N95 has been it’s slow to fix GPS. Nokia finally got it better, from 74 seconds to 57 seconds, with their firmware upgrade.

That’s still almost 1 minute from turning GPS on (which doesn’t always happen automatically) to getting a location fix. That’s also probably in a decently clear area. This is all well and good – now I can see a moving dot in MGMaps (though not GoogleMap yet), or precisely geotag my photos.

Another problem with GPS – it’s a battery hog. I’ve killed my battery in several hours when using GPS, and even shorter if I leave the GPS on and indoors – leaving the processor to be constantly trying to calculate find GPS signals and parse their GOLD-codes (read more about how GPS works).

Personally, I get rather frustrated standing there (and anyone else waiting with me more so) staring at my phone, hoping for a fix so I can then take a photo. And remember, I’m a geek, I live for this pain – your average user won’t.

But I want my geo-aware iPhone!

My point is, geolocation does not mean having a GPS. There are numerous methods of automatically locating yourself that doesn’t require listening to satellites 24,000 miles away.

Cell Towers and WiFi are both simple, and accurate, methods of getting your location within 10 feet. This is the type of accuracy you may expect from GPS anyways. But you can get a cellular location or WiFi location in seconds – not a minute.

It also works indoors – and best of all (with respect to this post), the current revision of the iPhone has the hardware already. In fact, it would just be a software update to turn on geolocation on the iPhone.

The future is now

So I hope to hear less of people bemoaning the iPhone’s lack of a GPS chip – and instead ask the more reasonable question “Why doesn’t the iPhone do geolocation by cell or WiFi?” And while you’re at it, ask that the location gets exposed with Javascript hooks through Safari so web applications can make use of it.

You can still have your geotagged photos (what’s more interesting, that you were at [-23.538809, -46.618423] or São Paulo, Brazil?), find friends in the area, local pub search, or even maps near me.

If you want to see how something like that works – install the Loki Toolbar – which uses WiFi Geolocation – and then go to Mapufacture Search for automatic ‘nearby’ searching – no GPS required.

What this means is that hardware devices will be able to use a single solution to get both GPS Satellite positioning as well as WiFi positioning, essentially providing both a clear sky and urban-canyon/indoor positioning solution.

Therefore, these devices will be able to rely on positioning regardless of the visibility of the user to the sky – and provide LBS with a higher reliability.

There’s no word on when the first devices (looks like an iRiver media player) will roll out – or what their interface to applications will look like (single “what is my location?” queries?), but whatever it is, it will no doubt be very exciting.

Tags: sirf, gps, wifi, loki, skyhook, iriver, geo, positioning, geolocation

There are all kinds of really neat things you can do with such a simple tracking device for pedometry (relative distance when GPS/cell geolocation falls out), location (you are at any number of places a sensor station is setup), tracking devices in races (they use expensive/proprietary tracking devices now), and so on.

But leave it to the media to do a hype piece and scare tactic on the cool technology. Here is a CNN video on the “bad things” you can do with it.

While the information and knowledge is good, they could have done better in talking about how useful it is, the potentially good and interesting things you can do with it, but also be aware of…

Tags: geo, neogeography, mapping, geolocation, gps, nike, ipod, sportkit, apple, cnn,

The research is sponsored by Microsoft and the Ordinance Survey, obviously both very large organizations that want to find commercial uses for their data/services.

Like the Come Out & Play festival, geolocation games can become much more common as devices come with Geolocation technology built-in, whether it be by GPS, WiFi, Cell, or whatever.

Are geolocated games the cure for the modern sloth of gaming? The Nintendo Wii already has gamers bowling in their living rooms.

Now if you can create great platforms for people to easily develop their own games, say by making waypoint, boundaries, rules, targets, objectives. And possibly use Splines/Blogjects to leave as markers, treasure, icons, etc. that users would carry around, pass off, leave, find, etc. Just wrap a nice story around it: buried treasure, Trouble with Tribbles, Pac-Man, Hunt the Wumpus etc. Really, you could probably take any old-skool game and make it into a really great geolocation game.

PlaceBlogger is apparently just about to start. It’s an aggregation of localized blogs. Blogs with posts about specific locations, like the neighborhood or suburb rather than just a larger metro area – dubbed hyperlocal. You can see a mockup here. It’s like a Yahoo frontpage, but centered around neighborhoods or areas of interest. (via Susan Mernit

Another site is outside.in (read the announcement and some thoughts here) which is already released and has data. At first it wasn’t quite apparent how to start contributing to the site or marking up locations. They refer to the GMAP format, but I’m not sure what that really means.

All of these sites and tools are really exciting. This is the purpose behind tools I’ve been working on like GeoPress and Mapufacture. I hope these other local-news aggregators also use and support broader, open formats that we can all share and play along together.

Also check out LocoBlog, which is a mobile-phone blogging application and site as well.

I mean, I’m all for an Apple device that supports geolocation via GPS, Wifi, moss growth, Fido’s nose. Bring it on, I will buy.

However, the neat thing I did like about Rui’s post was a short demo of how easy it is to add Geographic coordinates and links to a Wiki:

Put

Geo http://maps.google.com/maps?t=k&q=

in your InterWikiMap, and then you can put:

[Sample|Geo:42.4376472, -83.4727 (Northville, MI)]

to embed a location.

They address the issue in their FAQ:

After setting a Plaze the first time (e.g. by entering an address), it was necessary to enter an address again the next time I started the application at the same location. Why?

A newly discovered Plaze is bound to the GSM cell tower your mobile was connected to. The areas of cell towers overlap, so sometimes your mobile is connected to a different tower at the same location. Simply enter an address an set the Plaze a second time, then Plazes knows both cell towers and it will work better next time.

This is really cool. Geolocation by mobile without a GPS system is key to Location-Based technologies to take off and be generally accepted. Plazes is leading the edge of the community-based geolocated networks. Now time to build some services on top of their framework.

- via Henri Bergius

Tags: plazes, mobile, geolocation, location, gsm, gsmloc,

Particularly interesting to me is the analysis of LBS.

Location-aware technologies should hit maturity in less than two years. Location-aware technology is the use of GPS (global positioning system), assisted GPS (A-GPS), Enhanced Observed Time Difference (EOTD), enhanced GPS (E-GPS), and other technologies in the cellular network and handset to locate a mobile user.

Location-aware applications will hit mainsteam adoption in the next two to five years.

Nextel phones in the US already have exposed the location API to developers. Lots of other devices are using them now for finding friends or getting info on various locations.

Interesting, they also state that maintstream adoption of the semantic web is five to ten years away. I’m surprised that they predict so far out with the growing support for Microformats and other semantic technologies that are being used by Yahoo, Technorati, and search engines such as Swoogle which require content to already exist in order to have something to search. See the article Geospatial Semantic Web Blog: Pinging the Semantic Web for some more discussion on how to spread the use of the semantic web using ping services

Tags: geolocation, location, lbs, mobile, gps, hype, gartner, mologogo, dodgeball, geovector, swoogle, semantic, microformats, ping,

I would also suggest checking out and/or subscribing to bookmark lists like http://del.icio.us/tag/geolocation+wifi.

Wifi Positioning Technologies

PlaceLab

Intel R&D lab, have a large number of papers, software, and dbs on location using wifi and other techniques

Loki

Commercial company (part of Skyhook Wireless) that has a Windows client

Navizon

another commercial option, GPS/GSM/Wifi and clients for variety of
mobile devices

Plazes

social network using geolocation techniques

Herecast

Open infrastructure with a community built database

Microsoft Research RADAR

An In-Building RF-Based User Location and Tracking System. There is a package for people who may beinterested in using RADAR and that the package includes source code. It should be easy to obtain coming from a university.

HawkTour: A Mobile, Context-Aware Tour Guide System

HawkTour, installed on a TabletPC, allows visitors to tour the IIT main campus and learn about the university including its world-renowned architecture, excellent academic programs, and student life.

Location Estimation for Activity Recognition

University of Washington video where Dieter Fox illustrates how Bayesian filtering can be applied to estimate the location of a person using sensors such as GPS, infrared, or WiFi.

Ekahau

this might be the most popular WiFi positioning system

PanGo Locator

Wi-Fi-based, active RFID wireless asset tracking solution

WhereNet

Using TDOA measurement rather than Signal Strength, hence
the standard 802.11 AP and NIC can not be used.

WPI Precision Indoor/Outdoor Personnel Location Project

The overall goal of this project is to protect the lives of emergency responders and to enhance their ability to accomplish their missions through research and development of systems for personnel location and tracking, physiological status monitor

Citation

These links came from the following contributors:

• Andrew Turner – aka ‘me’
• Kris Kolodziej
• Mateusz Loskot
• Binghao Li
• Mike Liebhold

Please feel free to let me know of any more that you may know of.

Reverse geocoding is converting Latitude & Longitude to a place name. This is the other side of the mirror from traditional geocoding, which converts a place name into latitude & longitude. Why would someone want to reverse geocode you ask? With reverse geocoding you can convert your GPS tracklogs into meaningful locations easily, or allow users to click on a map and get back actual location of where they’re clicking.

The GeoNames API provides an interface for getting nearby postal codes, country, or most specific: place names.

Example

HighEarthOrbit offices: http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPlaceName?lat=42.4266&lng=-83.4931&style=full

returns:

<geonames>
  <geoname>
    <name>Northville</name>
    <lat>42.43111</lat>
    <lng>-83.48333</lng>
    <geonameid>5003956</geonameid>
    <countrycode>US</countrycode>
    <countryname>United States</countryname>
    <fcl>P</fcl>
    <fcode>PPL</fcode>
    <fclname>city, village,...</fclname>
    <fcodename>populated place</fcodename>
    <population>6360</population>
    <elevation>252</elevation>
    <admincode1>MI</admincode1>
    <adminname1>Michigan</adminname1>
    <admincode2 />
    <adminname2 />
  </geoname>
</geonames>

The whole geo-enchilada

Lastly, to make you really feel warm and good inside, the GeoNames database is provided for direct download under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Yum, free data.

See the GeoNames Blog post about it.

They mentioned having a public GeoParser API available for developers to play around with. So I passed in one of the output feeds from FoFRedux (a feed aggregator that supports GeoRSS) through the Metacarta GeoParser to produce a map of locations that show up in my feeds.

FoFRedux -> Metacarta Example: SlashDot article locations

So now you can use a feed aggregator to display, say locations of articles and posts for your friends feeds. Or locations of Flickr photos, or even UPS/Fedex package tracking. The example just shows the image output, but the GeoParser can output GML or GeoMarkup XML, and JSON for better intergration into other applications.

Unfortunately, it’s not available until Fall 2006.

I have been gathering a lot of waypoints, tracks, location histories, notes, geo-photographs, etc. Yet when I want to put my location in a blog post, an email, a website, an article, or add metadata to a file, I have to dig through many programs, files, and then copy and paste. Perhaps even convert between DMS and DDMMSS.

This application should be enable me to store my waypoints and tracks. These would either be loaded from GPX files, hand entered, CSV files, drawn on a map, or geolocated by an street address. In addition, these tracks and waypoints could have time component.

I can then add notes or photographs to these locations and tracks, share these with friends, or easily search for things like “what photos have I taken in Southern Germany before 2004?”, or “what’s a good 3-5 mile hike I’ve done?”

Lastly, this tool would easily allow me to do local searches, enter the location latitude/longitude, address, or track information into text fields, as GeoRSS, XML, Microformat, or anything else. Place it directly on my clipboard for pasting, or pop-up a window with the information for me to edit, fill-in, then copy and paste. Or provide a Mac OS X service/hotkey that I would quickly enter this information into the current field in a program, or website.

Any other ideas on what this type of application should do or look-like? Is it a web-application? A desktop application would let me use it “in the field” where I may not have net access. So it could run a local-webserver if that were the case. But my data would have to be able to be private, though shareable is nice too. I could bundle up a track and photos/notes and send them to a friend or post them to a webpage.

I agree with Matt Croydon’s take on the 5/15-minute presentation schedule. It seems very “lightning round”, but also a really good way to get lots of ideas out and then move the interesting discussion to the sideline and various nightly gatherings.

In particular, the Birds of a Feather (BoF) meetings should be great. There is a Microformats meeting to discuss the possible directions microformat. also hope to meet with some of the GeoRSS developers and bloggers.

I’ve even secured a place at the Google Geo Developers day on June 12 – so I should get a chance to show off my cool mashup projects. Not to mention discussing other possibilities of visualizing geo-specific driving simulations in GoogleEarth.

I think my biggest concern about attending is wanting to meet everyone and discuss all the current ideas and possibilities in location information & mapping.

Of course, to get to California, I’m heading out of Vienna early, by way of Detroit, then on to San Francisco. Yay lots of time on a plane. Here’s to hoping for flying on something nice like an Airbus 330.

Technorati Tags: google, mapping, maps, where2.0

Mesh networks are simple: everything is a sensor and can connect to other sensors. She referred to it as “Ad Hoc Wireless networking”, but I think that confuses the issue, because then people start thinking it just means WiFi everywhere.

What it really means is that all of these sensors and network devices can talk to one another, gather, share, and use information. For example, if every car was a member of the mesh network, they would all share traffic information, road conditions, and driver destination, perhaps. Then your in-dash display would update real-time traffic ahead of you as each of these cars shared their data. Also, you may be able to get internet down the line as you all shared a common network system.

Other examples that have popped up in the past include finding potential mates/friends around you by a profile you broadcast, or tracking birds with RFID.

Of course, now that you have all this data, how do you share it? Robin says she envisions all of this being built on open-source technologies, to allow for “innovation” (aka ‘good hacking’). Open standards like GeoRSS could also be used to begin disseminating all of this data as it streams in and share it between devices. See the notes on Mikel’s XTech talk for more inspiration along those lines.

If the devices are cheap (< $100), open-design, and run on open-software, this is a great future. If, however, it is run by proprietary, expensive technology, and closed standards, then you’ll have a future where you get fast connections in your Ford car from other Ford cars, but no connection to all those BMW’s or Toyotas on the road.

What happens when users have the ability to hijack sites and how they expect to be used? For example, there are scripts to provide mapping functionality within Flickr!, or to compare book prices on Amazon.com with other vendors.

MapThis! overrides the “Map This!” link that shows up in GMail when an address is detected. Instead of linking to just a plain-ol’ googlemap, the link is “hijacked” to provide routing directions from the user’s geolocated position (using HostIP) to the address in the email.

This is useful, for example, if a friend sends you the address of their house, or that cool roller-rink with disco ball that you’re meeting up at and you want to quickly get directions.

It also demonstrates how a user isn’t limited by the interface a site-designer supplied, allowing them to customize and use the site as they wan.

This article will give a short overview of how to use the BlueLogger for a variety of applications. I use it primarily for geolocating photographs, but it’s also nice for any location-based activity.

The Bluelogger comes with the following:

• Bluelogger device
• Carrying case (with belt loop)
• Car charger
• Wall charger
• Charging stand (can work with either car or wall charger)
• Bluelogger Windows software

Connecting to GPS

To connect to the Bluelogger, you will need a bluetooth adapter. Many computers now come with bluetooth built-in or as an add-on option. If this isn’t the case, I would recommend the D-Link DBT-120. It’s probably the only D-Link product I can recommend, but I’ve had great luck with them, and never run into any device that it hasn’t worked with (and I have had problems with other BT adapters, especially on my Mac).

Once you have a bluetooth adapter, you will need to setup a connection to the device by pairing them. See your devices’/operating systems’ manuals on how to do this.

A very slick option is to run gpsd, which is a service-daemon running in the background that allows multiple connections to the single GPS device. Normally, only 1 software instance can connect at a time. With GPSd, you can “serve” your location. What would be really cool is to have GPSd be able to connect in with Geolocation by IP or Wifi as well as an actual GPS device to seamlessly switch between location technique.

GPSUtility is a nice, compact, graphical GPS application for Mac OS X. It can connect either directly to the GPS bluetooth port, or via gpsd. You can view location, satellite strengths, verbose NMEA output, and speed.

KisMac, while not a GPS-specific applicaiton, has excellent GPS support. KisMac is actually a wireless stumbler, which can also mark the latitude, longitude, and strength of detected networks and plot these on a map.

Storing & Viewing tracks

The Bluelogger software (currently Windows only) can export the tracks as GPL files. GPSBabel can convert these to a more useful format, such as GPX, which an XML format for GPS data.

Since using the bluelogger usually entails turning it on and off often, the entire track log will contain many separate trips. GPSBabel supports splitting up tracks based on a time separation. Each segment will be a self-contained track.

The following example will convert a GPL file to a GPX file, and make a individual track for any separation of 4 hours between points.

$ gpsbabel
  -i gpl -f Track_2005_11_23.gpl
  -x track,pack,split=4h,title="LOG # %c"
  -o gpx -F Track_2005_11_23.gpx

Displaying tracks

There are several options for displaying your tracks:

GPX Tracks

GPXLoader

• GPX Tracks HTML file

GPS and Nokia 770

ThoughtFix has a fairly comprehensive tutorial on setting up GPSDrive with a Bluetooth GPS receiver. They went with the i-Blue High Sensitivity Bluetooth GPS, which looks like a nice unit, but lacks logging.

Resources

• NMEA Protocol fields
• GPS Running Log -> GoogleMap on website
• Geocode Photos
• RoboGeo Windows photo-geocoding
• OziPhotoTool