It’s been a big year for location-based applications and services. The release of Apple’s 3G iPhone and Apps Store has given millions of consumers their first access to LBS products. And the movement is being further pushed along by T-Mobile’s G1 and other touchscreen smart phones that use the LBS-enabling Android operating system.

Next year, look for established players to continue developing their revenue models, while more competitors start up, drawn to the new opportunities. Here’s our list of five location-based service providers or application developers to keep an eye on in 2009 (in alphabetical order)

Posted in General |

by Anne Galloway

We often think of mobile technologies simply in terms of their communication capabilities, but their increasing ability to trace our movements and collect information about the spaces through which we pass, can also make it easier for people to keep track of the places and things that matter most to them. From geo-visualisations and mapping mash-ups, to the mobile geospatial web and location-based services, people’s relationships to places (and each other) are changing. 

Community mapping and sensing projects that use commonly available consumer electronics as environmental measurement devices, enable people to collect and view a wide array of location-based data. As a form of public science, such projects stand to reinvigorate environmentally focused civic engagement. However, given public concerns around environmental risks and their connections to technological progress, I believe that this kind of active citizenship should promote more critical reflection on the values and goals of the very projects that expect to create such profound changes in these domains, and carefully consider the limits of its own power.  

From Vodafone Receiver Magazine 

Posted in Location-based |

It's been in stores for only one week, but Mirror's Edge (a first-person video game developed by Electronic Arts, Inc.) is apparently causing quite a stir. Literally. People playing the game have reported feeling dizzy and, in some cases, so nauseous that they vomit, writes Clive Thompson in his Wired.com blog, "Games without Frontiers."

Mirror's Edge, available for Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360 (a PC version of Mirror’s Edgewill ship in North America in January 2009), is set in a police state in the near future. The game has its players assume the persona of Faith, a courier whose mission is to deliver sensitive information, which requires a lot of leaping between rooftops to elude agents of the totalitarian government. Whereas many other first-person shooter games stabilize a player's vision as their characters perform, in Mirror's Edge, players can see their arms and legs pumping as they run, and their perspective is jostled when they jump, slide, fight or climb over obstacles. The action is reminiscent of Parkour, which involves a lot of running, hopping fences, climbing parking garages—anything to get from Point A to Point B as efficiently as possible. (Several examples are can be seen at the Parkour.tv Web site.)

 Read more

 

Posted in General |

Blast Theory are presenting Can You See Me Now? as part of the Arte.Mov festival in Belo Horizonte along with TRUCOLD & Other Works in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Can You See Me Now? is a chase game played online and on the streets. Players are dropped at random locations into a virtual map of Belo Horizonte. Tracked by satellites, Blast Theory's runners appear online next to your player. The runners use handheld computers showing the positions of online players to guide them in the chase. Can You See Me Now? won the Golden Nica for Interactive Art at Prix Ars Electronica and was nominated for a BAFTA Award.

Belo Horizonte Performance Dates: November 20th and 21st 4pm - 7pm (BRST) and 22nd 11am - 2pm (BRST)
Artist Talk: Blast Theory artist Ju Row Farr will give an artist talk on November 23rd, 4pm at Palácio das Artes.
Arte.Mov then moves on to Sao Paulo where Blast Theory will be presenting TRUCOLD & Other Works. Blast Theory artist Nick Tandavanitj will also be presenting a discussion on Blast Theory's work on November 27th from 7pm - 10 pm (BRST).
Location: LAB-MIS, AV, Europa, 158, Jardim Europa, Sao Paulo.

For more details:
www.artemov.net
www.canyouseemenow.co.uk
www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_trucold.html

Posted in Location-based |

by Jonathan Follett

There is a world of information that we can't immediately see in the streets we walk and drive in, and in the buildings in which we work, play and live. The great potential of the mobile web – whether it is delivered by smart phone, automobile navigation system, or other device – is to reveal this hidden world to us, by adding geospatial and timing data to the user experience. In this way, the mobile web is poised to become the delivery mechanism for a new generation of location-aware applications.

Geo-specific information will enable real connections between the digital world and the physical one, so that people can freely interact with virtual data in real spaces. An old friend from out of town is at the restaurant down the block right now; your dry cleaner is closing early due to the holiday, but he has your suit ready; and an apartment in the building you're passing by just went on the market. As location-based mobile products and services increase in popularity, all these pieces of data become immediately knowable and useable in real time.

Location-based data has the ability to not only enhance the communication, productivity, and entertainment applications for which we regularly use mobile devices, but also to create a new hybrid experience at the intersection of real and virtual worlds. This mobile geospatial web will allow the information and imagination that runs freely in cyberspace, to become increasingly available and integrated in our physical space – and with that comes both possibilities and problems.

Read more at the Vodafone Receiver Magazine.

Posted in Location-based |

Luci Gutiérrez
By RANDALL STROSS

Justine Cassell, director of Northwestern University?s Center for Technology & Social Behavior, has written about the efforts in the 1990s to create computer games that would appeal to girls and, ultimately, increase the representation of women in computer science. In commenting as a co-contributor in a new book, ?Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming,? Ms. Cassell writes of the failure of these efforts, ?The girls game movement failed to dislodge the sense among both boys and girls that computers were ?boys? toys? and that true girls didn?t play with computers.? She said last week that some people in the field still believed that the answer to reversing declining enrollment was building the right game.

More at the NYT.

Posted in General |

By BRUCE LAMBERT

Maxine Hicks for The New York Times

I BRAG to people that I was probably the first kid to play a video game,” said Robert Dvorak Jr. That happened half a century ago here at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where Mr. Dvorak’s father had assembled what was arguably the first video game, called Tennis for Two.

The game, primitive by modern standards, featured two control boxes whose buttons prompted a bright green ball of streaking light to bounce back and forth over a symbolic net. The action took place on a round oscilloscope screen that measured all of five inches across. “It was very simple to operate,” said Mr. Dvorak, now 57 and an electrical engineer in Saugerties.

More at the NYT.

Posted in General |

Mobile games - they're an ongoing problem. I've been writing about them for ten years; longer, perhaps, than any other UK technology journalist. There have been some wonderful examples, up there with the better DS titles. But there has also been a lot of unforgivable s**t, contributing to a customer churn rate that would have a console games publishers in floods of uncontrollable tears. According to Nokia, 78% more phone users are downloading games than they were three years ago. But we're still looking at a tiny fraction of the Java phone userbase.

So anyway, I was at the Nokia Games Summit in Rome last week, and here's some of what I took away about the future of this much-maligned sector. (The joke around the summit was, if videogames are the new Hollywood, mobile games are the new porn industry - the slightly shadier, muckier step-brother to the real glamour player...)

Read more here.

Posted in Location-based |

By Tim Scannell

Just as in real estate, the mobile world is increasingly realizing the value of location, location, location. But while the housing market wrestles with woes stemming from the subprime mortgage implosion, vendors of location-based services (LBS) for messaging, marketing and advertising are struggling to overcome their own obstacles.

Chief among these is consumer privacy in a highly connected and always-available mobile environment. Wireless carriers already know, more or less, where their subscribers are. Now advertisers are getting the tools to easily piece together a profile based on mobile Web surfing and online activities from increasingly powerful Web-based phones. Not surprisingly, many consumers aren't thrilled at the prospect.

Read more here.

Posted in Location-based |

by Andrew Gil

Location in a mobile context is the Holy Grail for many people. The one item we carry with us almost all the time is uniquely positioned (pun intended) to be able to add location information to everything we do whilst mobile.

In theory, getting the current location of a mobile phone and working out an approximate location should not be that difficult. TV shows such as CSI and movies like Minority Report reflect an always-on society where information on a person’s whereabouts is instantly available. In practice however, location is quite difficult and expensive to deliver to a mass market audience.

From Vodafone Receiver Magazine.

Posted in Location-based |