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Posts Tagged ‘Google Map’

Twitter Launches A Site So You Can Stalk Twitter Employees AT SXSW

While a lot of the smaller startups like Foursquare and Gowalla are getting much of the buzz at SXSW, Twitter isn’t sitting idly on the location sidelines. Sure, they launched location integration on their site a few days ago, but they’ve also apparently set up a sub-site totally around location for SXSW. But here’s the weird thing: It’s only for stalking their employees.

As co-founder Evan Williams tweeted out earlier, sxsw.twitter.com shows you a Google map of Austin, Texas (where SXSW is held) with tiny Twitter logos overlaid on it, showing Twitter employees at the conference tweeting.

The site, which is clearly tailored for mobile usage (it looks great on the iPhone, for example), has two areas: “Twitter People” and “To Meet.” The Twitter People area is the one that shows the map and the tweets overlaid on it. The To Meet area is interesting because it asks, “Which of these sound like awesome things to work on?” and gives you a few different options to click on.

For example, if you click on, “Making fast and sexy applications” it takes you to a list of various Twitter employees at SXSW that you should meet. If you click on “Partnering with Twitter,” you get a different list. Clearly, Twitter is using this site for both new employee recruitment, platform expansion, and partnership opportunities.

Twitter, while now fairly commonplace in the mainstream (especially the media), first rose to fame among early tech adopters during SXSW three years ago.

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Get a TUAW discount on Mac theft recovery service from hidden

Filed under: Software, iMac, Reviews, MacBook

Apple’s laptops and iMacs are attractive targets for thieves, since they’re easy to move and have a good resale value. We’ve seen several Mac applications or services that work to help you retrieve your favorite Apple product if it is ever stolen; LoJack for Laptops (US$39.95 per year), Undercover ($49.00 per year), and MacTrak ($24.95 per year) are all perfect examples of these programs.

Most of these apps have two things in common; they will attempt to locate the whereabouts of the computer and also send a picture of the thief using the built-in iSight camera. Now a new name has appeared in the field; hidden. The name is apt, since there’s no visible sign on the computer that the software has been installed. There’s no app in the applications folder, and no preference pane. To use the application, you simply download and install it, then restart your Mac.

Most of the time, your Mac won’t be sending out updates of its location. When it is stolen or lost, you go to the hiddenapp.com website, log in, and then change the status for the tracked computer from “not stolen” to “stolen.” The service begins looking for your Mac, and within minutes the site displays a Google map showing its approximate location (determined through Wi-Fi geolocation) and, more importantly, photos of the person using the Mac and screenshots of what they are doing. Location updates happen every 10 minutes and also include traceroute information including the public IP address of the Wi-Fi network being used by the thief. This information can be provided to ISPs and local police to help you get your computer back.Apple’s laptops and iMacs are attractive targets for thieves, since they’re easy to move and have a good resale value. We’ve seen several Mac applications or services that work to help you retrieve your favorite Apple product if it is ever stolen; LoJack for Laptops (US$39.95 per year), Undercover ($49.00 per year), and MacTrak ($24.95 per year) are all perfect examples of these programs.

Most of these apps have two things in common; they will attempt to locate the whereabouts of the computer and also send a picture of the thief using the built-in iSight camera. Now a new name has appeared in the field; hidden. The name is apt, since there’s no visible sign on the computer that the software has been installed. There’s no app in the applications folder, and no preference pane. To use the application, you simply download and install it, then restart your Mac.

Most of the time, your Mac won’t be sending out updates of its location. When it is stolen or lost, you go to the hiddenapp.com website, log in, and then change the status for the tracked computer from “not stolen” to “stolen.” The service begins looking for your Mac, and within minutes the site displays a Google map showing its approximate location (determined through Wi-Fi geolocation) and, more importantly, photos of the person using the Mac and screenshots of what they are doing. Location updates happen every 10 minutes and also include traceroute information including the public IP address of the Wi-Fi network being used by the thief. This information can be provided to ISPs and local police to help you get your computer back.

TUAWGet a TUAW discount on Mac theft recovery service from hidden originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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FoursquareX: Foursquare Addicts Need To Get This Desktop Fix Immediately

Use of the location-based service Foursquare is on the up and up. But it’s use is mainly limited to mobile phones currently. That makes sense since the service is all about sending your location when on the go. But it would be nice sometimes to use it on your computer (beyond visiting the rudimentary mobile site from your browser). Enter FoursquareX.

This new application built by software developer Eric Butler is easily the best way I’ve ever seen to interact with Foursquare on a computer. Using Foursquare’s API, Butler has made a OS X client that not only allows you to see where your friends are, but even allows you to check-in at venues. And when paired with the notification application Growl, it’s a great way to get alerted about what’s happening on Foursquare without having to check your phone every few minutes.

The app is mainly meant to run in the background in your menu bar to serve you notifications (again, via Growl) when friends check-in places. But the more interesting part of the app may be its map component. If you open that up, you’ll get a window displaying a Google Map with all of your friends’ Foursquare icons overlaid on it to show where they are in the world. You can zoom in or out to show more detail of where they are. Or you can click on their names displayed in a timeline to the left of the map to bring up more details about their latest check-in.

There’s another view to this map too which gives you a visual representation of the Foursquare venues close to where you currently are. Clicking on any of them allows you to easily check-in. To the right of this map view there is a list of the venues currently trending on Foursquare (where multiple people are checking-in) as well as your “favorites” (the venues you check-in to the most).

There is also a setting for the app that lets you get notifications when other people check-in to the same venue you’re checked-in at, even if you don’t know them. Some people may not like that, but if you’re interested in meeting new people that you have at least one thing in common with (your use of Foursquare), it’s kind of an interesting way to do that.

Again, this app is currently Mac-only (and specifically, Snow Leopard-only), but if you’re addicted to Foursquare, it’s a must-have. Find it here.

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Wanted: Your Weather Reports, Geotagged and Tweeted

If your natural reflex when the weather gets rough is to tweet about it, that reflex can now help the National Weather Service do its job better thanks to a new Twitter storm reporting program.

The NWS has always solicited severe weather reports from the public. After all, no amount of technology can ever be a substitute for an accurate report of what’s actually happening on the ground. Because of the new Twitter geolocation API and the increasing number of applications that support it (TweetDeck for iPhone is the latest to add geotagging support), it’s become very simple for the public to submit severe weather reports and for the NWS to pinpoint where they happened.

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How does it work? According to the program’s documentation, a system monitors Twitter for tweets starting with the hashtag #wxreport. These tweets are then plotted on a Google map using the tweet’s geolocation information, or in cases where the geotag data is not available, an approximation of the reporter’s location within the tweet using the format WW [location] WW. Finally, the report is relayed to the appropriate NWS field office for use by the office’s meteorologists in a variety of ways, including possible inclusion in an official storm report.

It’s not just the NWS that could benefit, either. The public already will be more informed simply by watching the #wxreport tag, regardless of whether one of those reports is released in an official storm report. Sites such as Weather Underground, which already hosts an extensive network of citizen-owned weather stations, could further integrate these reports into its own products. Media outlets monitoring Twitter for storm information can use the tweets in their own reporting; The Weather Channel already does a good job of this.

You can see some of these reports in action today. Check out the Twitter search for #wxreport to see how much snow fell from a winter storm that’s hit much of the U.S. We can’t help but wonder what this search will look like once spring rolls around and the severe weather season kicks off. Hopefully, the NWS has the tools in place to handle a high volume of tweets and an effective way of dismissing hashtag spam and other Twitter nuisances.

The National Weather Service program demonstrates how powerful geolocation on Twitter can be, and we can’t help but wonder what else will be created with geolocated tweets. Look for even more creative uses of geolocation throughout 2010.

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Google City Tours creates custom walking maps

A Google application that builds walkable tours of city (or country) attractions has been significantly upgraded to make it much, much easier to use.

Google City Tours, one of the in-progress projects on the Google Labs site, has been overhauled to l0ok, feel and work a lot more like Google Maps. A Google software engineer who blogged about it from the company’s Zurich office calls the upgrades “a whole bunch of small user interface improvements.” What he should have said is, “Finally, finally you can figure it out.”

City Tours has been upgraded on three fronts. First, it now includes complete walking directions and times for tours. The tours can be customized to a specific day and time, and Google will modify the tour to avoid sending you to sites it believes will be closed at that hour.

Second, City Tours now allows anyone to import their own map points and tour paths. Other users can then call up that tour to relive it, and customize it to the date and time of their planned visit. For example, this walking tour of New York bookstores tells you to plan on spending 45 minutes at Patners & Crime and won’t send you to the Mysterious Bookshop after 7 PM..

But the best news is that City Tours is now what user interface wonks call “intuitive” for users who’ve spent any amount of time playing with Google Maps. The City Tours engineers tweaked their custom interface so that it emulates a regular Google map as much as possible. (Still missing: the Print / Send / Link buttons that make it so easy to embed a Google map in a web page or email.)

I’m sure that compared to creating the magical tour software, replicating Google Maps’ interface, control by control, was boring work. But it’s an example that might inspire Facebook’s user interface team, who seem determined to make every single Facebook control as unique and special as a snowflake.

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FanGuide self-guided architectural tours for iPhone

Filed under: Multimedia, Software, App Store, App Review

Fans of great architecture love to take guided or self-guided tours to learn more about the buildings or homes designed by classic architects like Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Sullivan. Guided tours are usually somewhat expensive and subject to the knowledge and whims of the tour guide, while self-guided tours can force architecture buffs to juggle books, maps, and MP3 players while searching for the details of a particular architect or style.

These frustrations were the impetus behind the creation of the FanGuide Tour & Audio Companion iPhone apps by Prairie Design Group. I recently had an opportunity to test the Chicago Loop Architecture Guide [US$2.99, iTunes Link], and wish that this app had been available a few years back when I was visiting the Windy City.

Featuring an elegant and easy-navigated user interface, the Chicago Loop Architecture Guide provides six tours, each with anywhere from 5 to 9 stops. The tours range in length from 30 minutes to a full hour, and stops for food, coffee, or photography can stretch out the time. Tapping on a globe icon during a tour provides a Google map view of a stop, overlaid with a photo of the building and arrows that point you to the previous or next stop. You don’t need a cellular connection to use the app; there are also self-contained offline maps that are more than sufficient to provide you with location information.Fans of great architecture love to take guided or self-guided tours to learn more about the buildings or homes designed by classic architects like Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Sullivan. Guided tours are usually somewhat expensive and subject to the knowledge and whims of the tour guide, while self-guided tours can force architecture buffs to juggle books, maps, and MP3 players while searching for the details of a particular architect or style.

These frustrations were the impetus behind the creation of the FanGuide Tour & Audio Companion iPhone apps by Prairie Design Group. I recently had an opportunity to test the Chicago Loop Architecture Guide [US$2.99, iTunes Link], and wish that this app had been available a few years back when I was visiting the Windy City.

Featuring an elegant and easy-navigated user interface, the Chicago Loop Architecture Guide provides six tours, each with anywhere from 5 to 9 stops. The tours range in length from 30 minutes to a full hour, and stops for food, coffee, or photography can stretch out the time. Tapping on a globe icon during a tour provides a Google map view of a stop, overlaid with a photo of the building and arrows that point you to the previous or next stop. You don’t need a cellular connection to use the app; there are also self-contained offline maps that are more than sufficient to provide you with location information.

TUAWFanGuide self-guided architectural tours for iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 20 Dec 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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4mapper Puts Foursquare On The Map

As one of the hot social-location properties, Foursquare has a wealth of information about where you go. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really offer many good ways to visualize it. In fact, Foursquare only focuses on providing a text stream of your check-ins. A new app takes that data and puts it on a map.

4mapper, built by John Wiseman, is a very simple application. Once you authorize it to use your Foursquare data (via Foursquare’s new API), it will pull your location information and place it on top of a Google Map. Your check-ins are displayed as white dots on the map. The more times you have check-in to a certain place, the larger the dot will be. Clicking on these dots will give you more information about where you checked-in. And you can zoom in on the map for better detail about your check-ins.

As I said, this is a very simple app, built on Google App Engine, but it’s interesting. It’s sort of like a heat map to show where you frequent in any given city. It’s similar to what Social Great has been doing with Foursquare data, only this is personalized, whereas that is an aggregator of data in various cities.

While Foursquare, the service, is interesting for a number of reasons, namely its gaming element and the potential business component, the geolocation data served up via the API may also prove to be a great source of some new apps. After coding this using Foursquare’s API, Wiseman also came up with a Python module for accessing the API. You can find that here.

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Wikitude Breaks From the Pack; Releases Augmented Reality Browser API

Augmented Reality (AR), the class of technologies that places sets of data on top of other views of the world around a user, is fast becoming a very crowded market. Austrian AR browser maker Wikitude has taken a very competitive step this afternoon with the release of its Application Programming Interface (API) to power AR browsers on any other application.

The company says its API “represents the emergence of an open AR development platform which could further drive the adoption of Wikitude as a potential standard for developers who want to create their own mobile AR experience.” Get ready to see Augmented Reality come to far more mobile applications and for Wikitude’s competitors to respond.

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Wikitude displays Wikipedia and user-contributed Points of Interest over the camera view of Android phones, over a Google map or in list form. Wikitude.me provides an easy way for anyone to add Points of Interest that are immediately available to Wikitude mobile users. The company has said in the past that it intends to put all of that data under a Creative Commons license. The new API will allow an Augmented Reality camera view to be added to any other Android application that contains geographic data. Hopefully an API will be available from iPhone apps when the next version of the iPhone operating system is released. (We’ve asked Wikitude about that.)

Wikitude says it worked with more than 100 developers from 25 countries in building its API. Both commercial and non-commercial API keys are available to remove the watermark placed over non-keyed implementations. The API allows developers to customize the actions that occur when info-balloon overlays are clicked on and change the menu options for the AR browser.

Will competitors like Layar, AcrossAir, Tochnidot, RobotVision and others release APIs soon as well? They have to be working on it, but Wikitude appears to have the most open disposition, one of the broadest developer communities and thus may be the best suited to become the AR platform of choice.

There are enough players in the AR field already that the competition will likely come down to two things: usability of interfaces and developer-friendliness. May the games begin!

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