Wade Roush's Library tagged location →  View Popular

This includes using Twitter (for messaging and your social/attention network), Upcoming (for event and place names) and Fire Eagle (for location queries and updates).

A couple days ago, a friend of mine sent me an invite for Fire Eagle, Yahoo! Research Berkley’s nifty closed-Alpha location storage and query engine, and I’ve been hooked ever since. For the rest of you without access, here’s a brief overview of what FireEagle does, straight from the FAQ page:









Fire Eagle is a site that keeps track of your current location and helps you share it with other sites and services safely. There are hundreds of potential applications.












Fire Eagle allows you to share your locations with other sites and services safely, through a secure server – you are always in control. You can decide to share your location with any application that can use it, and even choose how much detail to give that application (exact point, neighborhood, city, state, country).









So, I whipped up a quick Fire Eagle Rubygem to make it easier to deal with Fire Eagle’s API. The next logical step? A twitter bot.






Fire Eagle, meet Danger Day






If you’re lucky enough to have an invite to Fire Eagle, here’s how you can use it on Twitter:







1. Follow Danger Day on Twitter
2. Sign in to Fire Eagle
3. Authorize Danger Day with your FireEagle account
4. Get a mobile token to confirm your authentication with Danger Day
5. Send a direct message to Danger Day with your token.
6. u Atlanta, GA
7. u Belize
8. u 30022
9. u 123 Anytown USA
10. etc
11. d dangerday u Atlanta, GA
12. q jnewland
13. q cjmartin
14. q plasticbagUK
15. d dangerday q jnewland





What’s next?






I’m getting married in a week, so I leave the creation of cooler Fire Eagle apps as an exercise to the reader. Extra bonus points if you use the Fire Eagle Rubygem. If you’ve got a great idea for a Fire Eagle app and don’t have an invite, get in touch with me – I might be able to make that happen.






PS: If you hack up a Fire Eagle javascript sidebar widget that works on pages served as application/xml (preferably using the brilliant wedje technique) AND embraces the draft geo microformat, I’ll buy you a pony. Seriously. Here’s my location in XML – go to town.

The New York Times’ article, When it comes to innovation, geography is destiny, Greg Zachary, a former colleague writes that “where you live often trumps who you are.”

While I was hoping to read a piece about how your geography can define your innovation and technology. Instead it turned into a piece that took an all familiar route: Silicon Valley is destiny manifest, since it attracts the best ideas and there are venture capitalists who are ready to fund them. Sure, Silicon Valley’s advantages cannot be underscored, but everything isn’t as black and white.

To argue that India and China will replace SV as the center of tech universe is just a futile exercise. And to argue that innovations happen more in SV is also not quite on the mark either. Lets use Zachary’s own examples.

I visited the thriving code-writing communities in Tallinn, Estonia; Reykjavik, Iceland; and Helsinki, Finland, three Nordic cities that were being transformed by advances in cellphones, mobile computing and the Internet. Their tight-knit network of engineers seemed poised to create the tools required to make good on a much-hyped prediction: the death of distance… Yet these Nordic innovators were blindsided by two Silicon Valley engineers whose tools we experience whenever we “Google” the Web.

Is that really so?

Everytime my Nokia phone rings in New Delhi, though someone called me on my New York number trying to reach me in my San Francisco office, it proves that the distance is dead. And remember Skype! It was a nordic creation that killed the distance, and for a few million, made voice calls free.

As Vinnie reminds us, an ecosystem is not just the innovators, but the actual end users, who have a very active role to play in defining what innovations succeed.

For a while the technology was easily available to those of us in the West, especially in the US. Naturally, Silicon Valley, became the super hub. Now Asians and Europeans are adopting faster broadband and mobile technologies, and it is natural to see innovations come from these locales.

No wonder I am in 100% agreement with the title of Zachary’s piece: When it comes to innovation, geography is destiny!

Sprint and Craig McCaw's Clearwire Corp. said last week they would use a technology called WiMax to build a wireless network that's more than five times faster than today's standard.

Shares of Sprint fell 77 cents to $20.89 in New York Stock Exchange trading. Kirkland, Wash.-based Clearwire gained 25 cents to $31.66 on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Google, in Mountain View, Calif., fell $1.76 to $508.

WiMax networks have a wider range than current WiFi technology and can encompass entire cities, providing high-speed access to mobile phones and other gadgets. Sprint plans to start selling WiMax service in April.

Skyhoook's Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) is the world's first location platform to use the native 802.11 radio already on a mobile device to deliver accurate positioning across the US. And soon the world.

With WPS, Device Manufacturers, Application Developers, and Operators can easily deliver location-based services to any of the 100's of millions of Wi-Fi devices that don't have GPS. If they do, WPS' sub-second time-to-fix, +99% indoor availability and 10-20m accuracy in urban areas is the perfect compliment to GPS' known limitations.