MarCom Professional

Mobile Monday - "Enabling Location in Applications"

I popped down to MoMo London (Mobile Monday London) last night, which was held at the CBI Conference Center in Centre Point Tower.

Titled “Enabling Location in Applications”, the evening was sponsored by Skyhook Wireless. Whereas the last MoMo London featured a high-level panel discussion on current mobile trends from a media and marketing perspective, this event was more of a show and tell.

The people presenting their ideas were:

• Ted Morgan – Skyhook Wireless
• Ben Ward – Yahoo! Brickhouse
  
• Charles Wiles - Google Gears
• Andrew Scott – Rummble
• Justin Davis - BuddyPing
• Mark White - Locatrix

There were also some special guests in the from of various representatives of MoMo from around the world, including Germany, Estonia, Sweden, Spain, Boston, Italy and New York.

Below are the notes I took from the evening:

Ted Morgan – CEO, Skyhook Wireless

Intro to Skyhook Wireless:

• Provides the Wifi for Apple iPhone - restaurant finding, social network apps, location apps, geo tagging

• What Skyhook does:

- Brought global wifi system to market
- Compresses individual wifi sources into one channel to pinpoint your location
- 16 million access points mapped in Europe
- Reaches 130 million people in Europe
- 200 full time scannersHybrid Location – XPS – combined wifi, gps, 3G

• Delivers consumer ready location:

- Better accuracy
- Better availability
- Better Speed

• Cross platform, mobile and web
• Cheaper and easier to work with
• Growing worldwide developer community
• App Partners:
  

- BuddyPing
- Locle
- AOL Instant Messenger
- Rummble
- Eye-Fi
- Trapster

• Location enabled browsing
• W3C working group
• Standard API for websites to request location
• Mobile and web
• Browser developers and content sites
• Loki toolbar experience
• Loki for iPhone 2.0
• Organises content sites with location info - e.g. Google Maps, Qype – and uploads your location info to those websites
• Currently, websites can't find your location
• Soon, you can update your location on various sites, e.g. Facebook

Ben Ward – Yahoo! Brickhouse Team, London Representative

Ben presented his team's work with Fire Eagle

• Most location aware apps base on a fairly simple premise where one app gets the location of the user then the same app uses that location
• Better model is where a single service gets that location but then shares it with a range of other apps to use that location
• Fire Eagle sits in the middle – anyone can let it know where they are, then Fire Eagle tells the location apps where they are
• Tom Taylor - www.iamnear.net
• Click the Fire Eagle link
• Then grant permission to Fire Eagle to use the service as much as you want, e.g. exact location or just postcode
• iamnear.net then able to use Fire Eagle to tell you where nearest services – like banks, pubs, etc – are
• User has ability to hide themselves from sites and services authorised to use Fire Eagle
• Process of developing Fire Eagle:
  

- Get your api key
- Authenticate with user
- Make API calls to Fire Eagle

• 3 ways of updating:

- User based
- Lookup or update – London, UK or London, Canada?
- Within or recent – within a range or been in a range recently

• More ideas for uses of Fire Eagle:

- nabaztag
- Ambient Orb
- PacManhattan.com
- Last.fm: Location of where a track was scrobbled, e.g. Brian Eno in London City Airport

• Fire Eagle helps you:

- Control your data & privacy
- Easily build location services
- Share your location online

Charles Wiles - Product Manager, Google Gears

• Writing a rich mobile app across a wide range of mobile devices is an impossibly difficult challenge today
• The web is the platform, but mobile web apps suck!
• Gears makes apps fast, fluid and location aware
• It's fast, fluid and location aware
• Gears is much more than offline
• First new api will be the Geolocation API, which gives developers easy access to user location
• The Location api provides a common interface to location
• One-Shot and Repeated Position Updates
• Ability to get last known position cheaply

Matt Webber – W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

Matt briefly spoke about the work that W3C is doing to create a standardised geolocation API. They want an API that doesn't need a plug-in and has one way of presenting information to the browser.

Unfortunately, the last three presentations were sans text and were either clever presentations using only pictures or live demonstrations of the technology, so I didn't get a chance to write them up. But do have a look at all of their websites as they're doing some interesting stuff:

Andrew Scott – Rummble
Justin Davis - BuddyPing
Mark White - Locatrix

If Andrew, Justin, or Mark happens to come across this post, then I'd be happy to put your presentations up here.

Overall, it was another great MoMo London. Afterwards I got to meet Paul Walsh (Segalo and BIMA), Chris Kettle (my247.mobi) and James Parton (O2 Litmus).

• What did everyone who was there think was the most interesting idea presented?
  
• For those who want there, what do you think about the future of location-based apps based on the work that these people are doing?
• Are there potential revenue streams for these services?
• Are they even out to make money?
• What do you think is the future of location-based apps?
  

Also posted on puddingrelations.blogspot.com