[Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco] Adding “Where” to Mobile and Web Applications
Ryan Sarver – Director of Consumer Products (Skyhook Wireless/Loki)
This session was about introducing practical tools that allow developers to add location capabilities to a website or application.
Location adds a new level of extra meaning and metadata so you can push meaningful data to the user based on a person’s location. This will give your users another level of context to work with based on where they are.
Location data comes in different variations:
1. Lat and long
2. Polygon area
3. Street address
4. Street intersections
5. Area title = “south of market”
Due to privacy risks there are means of blurring location such as using general location data like “I am in Fremont” vs a street address.
Some showcased tools:
My.loki.com
Here is an example website which will detect your current location based on wifi location (mapped out wireless access points ) and allow you to share location with friends. This site and its associated browser plugins is based on the Skyhook wireless SDK. www.skyhookwireless.com
Fireball: www.fireballapp.com
At the Web2.0 Expo, attendees were given access to a new application still in development called Fireball.
Taken from the Fireball site:
“Fireball is a location-based mashup designed to find out where your friends are. Instead of creating Yet Another Social Network, forcing you to re-add all your friends (AGAIN), we just tie together the best tools out there (that you probably already use). 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).”
The location input is through Twittering, so it requires a user to type in their location, while Loki only requires you to push a button to determine current location.
FireEagle.com a Yahoo! service
Taken from the FireEagle site:
“Fire Eagle is a system that brokers location information. It is designed to help users safely share information about their location with sites, services and people on the Internet.
The service has two major functions for users—it allows a user to update their location and then gives them full control of how and where they share that location. A user can perform these functions on the central site, but can also update or access their location data using any other authorized 3rd party application - on the web, on a desktop application or on a mobile device. Applications that access a user’s location information can then personalize their service accordingly.”
This system serves as repository for users to store location information. Applications are then developed against it to either query for location or input new location data. The system has tools which allow users to control application and data access to their own location data.
Geolocation Methods:
Triangulate
Determining position of an unknown object relative to known objects
• wifi (wireless access points - maps out wireless access points)
• gps (satellites - one meter)
• cell towers
Accuracy:
GPS - 1 meter
Wi-Fi - 20 meters
Cell Tower - 2000 meters
Here is a good link that describes the various location providers currently available.
http://www.locationaware.org/wiki/Location_providers
Here is a link to existing standards for location data
http://www.locationaware.org/wiki/Existing_Standards
Mobile Location APIs
- iPhone core location API
- WIFI, Cell tower
- Symbian S60 location api
- GPS, A-GPS
- J2ME JSR-179 (Java)
- GPS, device-specific
More info for developers
Skyhook SDK
www.skyhookwireless.com
Where Widgets
http://developer.where.com
Cell Tower Data:
- developer.yahoo.com/yrb/zonetag
- www.opencellid.org
- celldb.org
More ways to update your location:
* Get Dopplr to tell Fire Eagle the city you’re in
* Send your location to the Twitter user Firebot
* Install the Navizon client on your iPhone to update your location every few minutes
* Use ZoneTag on Nokia 60 phones to broadcast your location automatically
eTech TakeAways:
1. We can start exploring these new location aware technologies NOW and determine what works and doesn’t as it relates to the technology and more importantly privacy issues.
2. Start thinking about various possibilities here that would add real world value to our UW community.
3. Lets find a study problem that would be best served through location awareness and solve it.
Tags: mobile, web 2.0 expo
May 1st, 2008 at 9:33 am
Great post! Seems like there is a lot of promise in the area, but the hardware that people are using has to catch up before it will be meaningful…
May 5th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Good article, but I’m not sure about some of the numbers. Is Wi-Fi accuracy really 20 meters? That seems to me too good to be true - but I have to admit I haven’t experimented with that myself.
May 5th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Check with Ryan Sarver to see where he got the data from. I got the stats from his presentation slides (http://www.slideshare.net/rsarver/adding-where-to-mobile-and-web-applications) slide # 28.