mobile apps — GPS Obsessed

Citysense: Nightlife Hotspots On A Mobile Heatmap

by Justin

Citysense Location-Based Application

Living in Winnipeg, Canada doesn’t lend itself to an application such as Citysense, not because Citysense isn’t a great app, but because Winnipeg’s a little low on nightlife hotspots. In my honest opinion anyway. As you could probably tell from my opening statement, CitySense is a mobile application that uses heat maps to help you locate the hottest night spots in a given location. Developed by Sense Networks, founded as a research project back in 2003 by a couple of computer scientists, Alex Pentland and Tony Jebara, Citysense is built on top of the company’s technology platform Macrosense.

It works like this:

Everyone’s cell phone gives out information from which its location can be derived. By clustering these points, it finds the places with the most activity (the hot spots), then links them into Yelp or Google to help you find out what’s happening at each spot. Sporting a little intelligence, over time Citysense detects what type of activities you like, and what others it deems like you like and points you to where they are. The company ingests as much cellular based location info as it can and then using algorithms indexes and ranks real world locations. Kind of like a real world Google. And then of course, the most popular location are visible on a heat map on your mobile phone’s screen, identifiable by their dark red coloring.

Available soon for the iPhone, Citysense only works right now in San Francisco and is already supported by a variety of Blackberry Pearl, Gamma Ray, and Curve models.

via techcrunch

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June 10, 2008 2 Comments

Loopt Wins Qualcomm’s BREW Award For Best Community/Social Networking Application

by Justin

Loopt Logo We’ve mentioned mobile social mapping service Loopt here before, will today and probably will again in the future because the service has just been awarded Qualcomm’s BREW award for the Best Community/Social Networking Application at the BREW 2008 Developer Award in San Diego. The BREW awards reward excellence in mobile entertainment based on criteria such as ease of use, originality, features, success of likelihood of success and perhaps most importantly, overall “coolness”.

Loopt is a location-based application that:

shows users where friends are located and what they are doing via detailed, interactive maps on their mobile phones. The service helps friends connect on the fly and navigate their social lives by orienting them to people, places and events. Users can also share location updates, geo-tagged photos and comments with friends in their mobile address book or on online social networks, communities and blogs. Loopt was designed with user privacy at its core and offers a variety of effective and intuitive privacy controls.

Loopt is already available with a few wireless carriers including Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, and Boost Mobile.

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June 3, 2008 2 Comments

Google’s Location API Will Include Cell Tower Locations And Wi-Fi Hotspots

by Justin

Google’s taking its Location API a step further than GPS over at Google Gears, apparently working at acquiring location info for cell phone towers and wireless hotspots in order to help mobile app developers be able to more accurately pinpoint users’ location.Â GPS signals aren’t always the most accurate indoors or in places with alot of interference such as under bridges or in the middle of a downtown location surrounding by highrises.Â With other types of data added to the location API, developers will be able to track an accurate location no matter where an application user is located.Â For those of you who are driving around looking for a Wi-fi hotspot, save some time by tapping into the Location API and finding all the spots closest to you.Â I’ve headed over to the Location API page and its doesn’t look like this project is very far along; I couldn’t actually find any info, but apparently it should be freely accessible in the future.

via dslreports