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
