Wade Roush's Library tagged locationbasedservices →  View Popular

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.

So you can virtually stroll up and down city streets. Big whoop. A new startup called EveryScape promises to take that interactivity one step further. Unlike Microsoft and Google's virtual maps, EveryScape will let users explore both the outside and inside of major cities.

On Tuesday, the company will launch four mapped virtual cities: San Francisco, Boston, New York and Seattle. In addition to giving online tourists the standard street level views, users can also access the insides of restaurants, hotels, stores and many other landmarks while on their virtual tours.

Turns out, the latter feature isn't that far a leap for EveryScape. Previously known as Mok3, the company has actually been selling mapping technology and services to hotels and resorts for five years. But extending that experience to entire cities is no small endeavor. In that vein, EveryScape's taking a smart approach.

Visitors to the site are not only encouraged to tour various cities and towns, but also to collaborate and share in the very creation of them, according to an earlier press release. "For example, while 'walking' through Union Square in San Francisco via EveryScape.com, users can window-shop storefronts as well as tour the inside of those stores, see their offerings, and access published reviews and other information," the company said.

Furthermore, you can also add your own personalized content, including relevant links, reviews, rankings and so on. EveryScape previously said it plans to launch 10 major metropolitan areas by the end of 2007. While those plans may have been a bit ambitious, the company is nevertheless asking users to vote on additional cities and towns to be created. Members of the local communities will then be enlisted to help in the creation of those online experiences.

CORRECTION: The launch cities we listed this morning were incorrect, according EveryScape. The company has yet to release precise details on which cities will get the mapping treatment. We regret the error.

We believe that millions of people accustomed to the immediacy and richness of the web will seek the quickest and easiest method of getting information, entertainment and social experiences when they are away from their desktop PC or TV. That immediacy will come via the mobile phone connecting and controlling media on out-of-home networks.

As a result, we are creating new opportunities for businesses to engage with mobile consumers in venues such as bars, cafes, campuses, stores, airports and hotels

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.