Location Stuff - Exile

Okay, I've never even heard of Limbo, but they seem to be some kind of mobile company - and now they bought Brightkite and decided to shift their focus from their products so far to the Brightkite platform. Well now, let's see how this infusion of mobile thinking into Brightkite works out for them. Here is their blog post and here is something on TechCrunch.

Opera, the browser that somehow everybody loves and no-ones uses, has a pre-release version with geolocation included. Just like Mozilla Geode it is using the technology from Skyhook Wireless. Sadly it is Windows-only at the moment - I'll try and report again, once it is available for OS X. [via]

Google Latitude is basically Plazes/Brightkite in lame. Sadly, there is no connection to outside services, i.e. FireEagle. There is a blog post, though.

What a nice surprise: the recent issue of Wired Magazine covers some nice tools for the iPhone and Android-phones and has an interesting article about living with location-based services.

Introducing the Gears Geolocation API for all laptop WiFi users - I'd dare to bet they use the Skyhook Wireless data, too.

These days there are a bunch of services that allow a website owner to check the location of an IP - the MaxMind GeoIP database is the most established, new contenders in this area are the Google Location-API and the Creative Commons licensed WorldIP. [via]

All of those try to know - to various degrees of success - the location of the current user based on rather large databases that map IPs to locations. Those locations are either actual town-level locations or just return the country/country code.

Someone at Mozilla Labs seemed to have re-written the Loki-Plugin from Skyhook Wireless to include the W3C Geolocation Specification - it is now both using that and the Loki-API to enable the browser to give location data, powered by the WiFi signal, to a webpage.

The whole thing is called Geode and will be included in future Firefox betas or can be installed into older Firefoxes directly from here. There is a blog entry and, of course, a TechCrunch article. Pownce and Fire Eagle have already integrated the specification into their services - and first tries show that it works amazingly accurate.

Flickr is using the street data from OpenStreetMap to map the inner city of Beijing for the Olympic games - their own Yahoo! maps just don't have any available data for this region. This might look like quite a surprising move for Yahoo/Flickr but then Yahoo! has been supporting the OpenStreetMap project for quite a while. [via]

The location broker Fire Eagle from Yahoo is now open to use by everyone - the private beta has ended as of today. Fire Eagle itself doesn't do much besides taking your location and brokering it in various levels of privacy to other services. As far as I know it is currently the biggest user of OAuth and a middle men to many different services. [via]

For those of you who are using an iPhone - over at the O'Reilly radar is a nice post about location-aware iPhone apps that covers Loopt, Whrrl, Where, OmniFocus, Urban Spoon, Twittelator and NearPics.