Web 2.0 Expo: Adding “Where” to Mobile and Web Applications

Last session before lunch. Freaking hungry (no boiled eggs at breakie this morning). Might take off a bit early to get a jump on lunch and battery charging.

Presenter: Ryan Sarver

• Context is about location — what’s nearby?
• Location comes in different flavours (geocodes, street addresses, polygons, lat/longs, etc.)
  • also level of detail (at a specific point vs. city vs. neighbourhood)
  • Location names (e.g. SoMa) are also contextual — it might make sense in San Fran, but not in London
• Markers on maps can be tricky, since the marker might not necessarily be where the person is (oh, how we know this one…)
• my.loki.com shares location with friends (I think I have an account there… can’t remember)
• geotargeting rules of thumb:
  • offer everything you can
  • degrade gracefully
  • allow the user to change it
  • know your users, know your use cases!
• tip: if you’re building a site, work on lat/long (or geocode), not zip/address
• where does location happen? client and network!
• Fire Eagle links in with Dopplr to sync future destinations based on travel
• desktop web profile
  • stationary sessions (single location lookups, initial hits)
  • gps and cell towers don’t work (no line of site, bad accuracy)
  • easier data entry
  • more complex data can be displayed
• mobile profile
  • transient sessions (always moving)
  • indoors and outdoors (ip doesn’t work)
  • difficult data entry (keyboard’s a pain, so think shortcuts)
  • small screen size, low computing power — be “power-aware”
• geolocation methods
  • triangulate (Wi-Fi, GPS, cell tower; GPS most accurate)
  • association
    • match an ip address to a physical location
    • best for city-level geotargetting
    • false positivies and only ~85% in the same State (let alone country)
    • Quova, IP2Location, MaxMind major vendors (validates that we chose a good one)
  • geo term extraction
    • resolve an arbitrary string into a geographical point or area (“food in cambridge” = “food” in “Cambridge, Mass., USA”)
  • • metacarta query parser (metacarta.com)
    • urban mapping geomods (urbanmapping.com)
  • geocoding
    • resolving a geographically based string into a geographical point or area
    • several vendors for this (missed it due to a phone call)
• Location in the browser
  • locationaware.org
  • navigator.getGeolocation()
  • Anyone else think this is making too big a hope? Sure, the W3C is working on a standard, but this strikes me as something that’ll never happen.
• mobile location
  • iPhone Core Location API (WiFi, cell tower); not available in browser, but can be used through API
  • Symbian S60 Location API (GPS, A-GPS)
  • J2ME JSR-179 (GPS, device-specific)
  • Skyhook SDK (shyhookwireless.com)
  • WHERE Widgets (developer.where.com); made deals with many of the US carriers, and created a widget set to cover the functionality
• Cell tower apps
  • Zone Tag (Yahoo)
  • OpenCellID
  • CellDB
• Not a lot of international APIs, most are US-only