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Posts Tagged ‘Exact Location’

AT&T’s New FamilyMap App: Track Your Family On the Go

AT&T just launched FamilyMap, the company’s newest iPhone app, which allows you to track the location of your family members directly on your iPhone. The app (iTunes link) allows you to see the exact location of your cellphone toting family members. You can also set up recurring alerts, which allows you to check if your child arrived at school in the morning, for example. Given that this is an AT&T app, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the service is only available if you pay a monthly subscription fee. Tracking the location of two phones costs $9.99 per month. For $14.99 per month, you can track up to five phones.

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While AT&T already offered this service, you were only able to see your family member’s location by using a desktop computer. Now, you can just use your iPhone to see a map with your family member’s location. Your family members don’t need to have an iPhone for this service to work. Most AT&T phones now support this feature. If your phone doesn’t have a built-in GPS chip, AT&T will estimate a phone’s location based on data from nearby cellphone towers.

Interestingly, this launch comes just one day after Apple itself got a patent for a method of sharing location data during a phone call. While Apple’s method is completely permission-based, though, AT&T’s system isn’t. Instead, any FamilyMap enabled phone – once you activate the service – will send location data back when requested, without prompting the receiver for confirmation. Given that AT&T is mostly marketing this service to parents, this makes sense, though some people (including children and teenagers) will surely feel a bit uneasy about this feature.

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Displax plastic film can turn any surface into a touchscreen

Displax is revealing a new plastic film with multitouch sensing. It can be placed over any display or even non-display surfaces, making them into interactive devices.

Portugal-based Displax calls this a “multitouch skin” which can be thinner than paper. The company has been working on it for the past decade and plans to launch commercial products in July.

If it works as billed, it could become an easy way to retrofit passive surfaces — glass, plastic or wood — so that they become interactive. All it takes is glue the plastic onto the surface — flat or curved — and then use the inputs from touch sensing to control functions on a computer attached to the screen. The surfaces range from 7 inches to nine feet, diagonally. The plastic film is about 100 microns, or the width of a human hair.

It works like this. Displax places a grid of nanowires that can detect the presence of up to 16 fingers (on a 50-inch screen) at any given time (that number will go up over time). When you press your finger on the grid, which is embedded in plastic, the wires send a signal showing the exact location of your finger to a controller, which can then pass the data to a computer. The plastic film can be applied to a liquid crystal display, even after the display is built. Currently, capacitive multitouch sensors have to be built into the TV’s glass during the manufacturing process. The screens can even detect if someone blows on a surface.

The uses for the multitouch skins could be myriad. You can put one over a flat-panel display in a museum to turn it into a multitouch kiosk. And since it can detect up to 16 fingers, more than one person can interact with the screen at any given time. The controller works with standard universal serial bus cables and ports.

“This opens up new possibilities for applications of multitouch technology,” said Miguel Fonseca, chief business
officer of Displax, in an interview.

Among the ideas are museum kiosks, multitouch flat-panel TVs, multitouch tables, and even interactive glass windows for storefronts. You could wrap it around a globe and then point at certain countries to trigger a video or audio explanation of the region. There are also expected applications in gaming. Fonseca said there are a number of pilot projects using the technology in Europe. Industries that could use it include telecom, retail, real estate, broadcast, pharmaceutics, finance and games.

The company works with partners who can make applications that take advantage of the technology. It provides the software drivers that make the hardware work with Windows, Linux and Mac OS computers. Displax will include several business applications with its products at no cost. Those apps will let customers display photos and video, access Google Maps and social networks, and play games.

The project started as a research idea in 2000. The company started to work on a business plan in 2004 and has been working on its current products since 2004 as a division of the EDIGMA Group. The company has 52 employees.

Partners on pilot projects include Accenture and IBM. Pricing hasn’t been set yet. Investors include InovCapital, the Society of Risk Capital of reference of the Portuguese Ministry of Economy and Innovation. The company hasn’t disclosed how much money it has raised. Rivals include Microsoft and 3M.

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BlockChalk Is Location-Based Sidewalk Chalk For Your Mobile Device

With its new geolocation API, Twitter has the potential to delve into the realm of messages that are relevant based on location. But right now, most geotagged tweets are simply regular tweets that are being tagged with location, and really don’t have much specifically to do with it. Enter BlockChalk, a new service built around the idea of leaving simple messages directly tied to a specific location.

The service, created by Stephen Hood, the former product team lead for Delicious, and Dave Baggeroer of Stanford’s Institute of Design, works because they keep it simple. You load up the application on your mobile device, it locates you, and you leave a message. This can be whatever you want: A note about a good cafe, a tip of something in the neighborhood to watch out for, a request to borrow something that someone else may have in the neighborhood, etc. When other people also using the app come upon the area that you’ve pinned your “Chalk” (their word for message) to, they’ll see it on their screen in a stream of Chalks.

And you can do a bit more with these Chalks. With the service’s new iPhone app, if you use the syntax “[here],” BlockChalk will put in your exact location. You can also attach a link to a location on a map by inserting an actual address in those same brackets. If you don’t do either of these, BlockChalk will hide your exact location, and keep your message pinned to the general area instead.

Once you drill down to a specific Chalk, you can choose to “Chalkback” (respond publicly to a message), “Reply Privately” (respond just to the user who left the Chalk), “Bury,” or “Share,” the chalk.

While I noted the service’s new iPhone app (which you can find in the App Store here as a free download), it’s already available on a number of other platforms thanks to some more advanced web technology. For example, you can use it on Android phones (or the mobile web of the iPhone, for that matter) because the web-based version of BlockChalk uses HTML5 to access location through the browser, Hood tells us. Obviously, that’s a vital part of the app. There is also a webOS BlockChalk app already that will work on the Palm Pre or Pixi. Hood notes that they are currently working on native apps for Android and BlackBerry as we speak.

Thanks to this mobile web usage, BlockChalk is already available in some 93 countries, 6751 cities and 10910 neighborhoods. And while the obvious integration with Twitter’s new location feature is pretty loose right now, Hood tells us that in the next release, it will be much tighter.

The company is in the process of raising a seed round of funding. And while obviously they’ve declined to say how much they’re looking to raise, we hear Hood’s old Delicious counterpart Joshua Schachter is interested. That shouldn’t be surprising given his recent location-based investments.

Learn more in the video below:

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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Evolution Robotics Mint bot is the Swiffer of Roombas, keeps track of its positioning

If you haven’t figured out how to clean your floor robotically by now, you might be a lost cause, but Evolution Robotics is willing to give it a try with its new Mint machine. The bot uses regular Swiffer pads, and is designed for cleaning hard floors with a shove of the wet-nap. Outside of its lack of vacuum, the Mint also differentiates itself with its “NorthStar” positioning tech, which lets the bot keep track of its exact location with GPS-style tech, relative to a base station, ensuring that it hits every spot and doesn’t waste time with random meandering. Mint should hit retail in Q4 of this year for under $250. Check out a video of it in action after the break.

Continue reading Evolution Robotics Mint bot is the Swiffer of Roombas, keeps track of its positioning

Evolution Robotics Mint bot is the Swiffer of Roombas, keeps track of its positioning originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Layar Adds Foursquare, Beatlemania and Civic Projects to its AR Offerings

Augmented reality browser Layar recently launched it’s v3 publishing site chock full of developer tools. The launch signifies more than 1000 active developers being given the chance to showcase their 3rd party applications. By exposing this immersive platform to outsiders, the company is solidifying its title as a pioneer in the “future of augmented reality”. In a recent blog post Layar outlined 5 cases to demonstrate the power of the platform. In addition to some of the company’s earlier 3rd party releases, below are some of our favorite layars.

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1. Civic Projects and Politics: A Netherlands-based Provast created a layar where users can see the final plans for the currently unfinished construction of the Markthal Rotterdam. Meanwhile developer Andree Toonk worked with NetKnowledge.ca on a slightly more political project. His layar gives information on all of the projects that receive funding from the Canadian government as part of Canada’s Economic Action Plan.

2. History and Landmarks: Those visiting Liverpool and London can walk down music’s memory lane with a visual tour of Beatles-related points of interest. Layar developer Augmentedreality.co.uk created a layar where users can follow the exploits of the Fab Four. Meanwhile a number of developers have looked to historical landmarks as inspirations for their work. Similar to Junaio’s editable AR app, BuildAR lets you create your own points of interest and customize your layars to suit your needs.

3. Social: Dutch Squio.nl engineer Johannes la Poutré has a number of social applications for Layar. Similar to TwittARound, Tweeps Around queries Twitter for posts and marks the exact location that the post is given on an augmented reality layar. In his Foursquare application Poutré gives users access to the latest Foursquare venues and tips.

4. Advertising and Inventory: In addition to obvious product finding and advertising-based layars, Masternaut created a layar that allows users to track vehicles and assets across cities. Meanwhile developer Bastian Voight created a real time ship tracker for Vesseltracker with a layar that displays the position of moored ships in the world’s largest ports.

5. Specialized Reference: Developer Pablo Garcia created the Elipse Golf layar where users can find the exact location of a golf hole and tee up for success. Smallroomstudios.net developer Patrick O’Reilly focused on transportation with both a Dublin bus location layar and a layar for Dublin’s public bicycle program. Other layars also exist to locate hospitals, apartments for rent and wireless hotspots.

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Insignia’s Little Buddy Child Tracker encourages kids to run away, disown parents

With a name like “Little Buddy Child Tracker,” you know this thing has to be awful, right? Insignia, Best Buy’s house brand, has just listed an incredibly invasive and humiliating new GPS tracker on its site, and rather than promoting it as just that, the marketing brains have decided it best to aim this at paranoid mums and dads who’ve done such a poor job raising their offspring that they can’t even trust ‘em to trek out on their own. All sensationalism aside, there’s little Insignia can say or do to remedy the product labeling job, but if you’re okay with shoving this extra-small stick into your youngster’s lunch box, you can keep tabs on his / her exact location and have alerts sent to you via SMS if they leave a designated area. Just make sure they don’t ever know that you were responsible for planting this thing on their person, else you can forget about junior footing those nursing home bills when the time comes.

[Via Navigadget]

Continue reading Insignia’s Little Buddy Child Tracker encourages kids to run away, disown parents

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Insignia’s Little Buddy Child Tracker encourages kids to run away, disown parents originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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