Brady on O’Reilly Radar posted about Backseat Playground, a geolocation based game that tracks the location of a car and gives clues along the way for various mysteries and puzzles. (originally via Engadet who found it via The Raw Feed)

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.

With the rise of geographic-interest via map mashups, mobile location, and geotags, there is now a slew of sites rising up to start aggregating and collecting all the of the localized information and news.

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.

Rui Carmo of Tao of Mac has a good rundown of what the “found nugget” of Google url in iPhoto means. Really, very little. Besides, being a programmer, I toss in all kinds of little bits for testing and “look, cool!” internal playing that has nothing to do with any official partnerships/dealings.

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.

Plazes released a Mobile Plazer. They are using cell-tower geolocation, similar to GSMLoc. It will be interesting to see how they handle many locations belonging to a single Celltower location, as well as cell-towers being carrier specific.

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

The Gartner Hype Report has some interesting analysis of where various technologies currently lie along the hype curve.

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