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