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Tomorrow, Motorola will announce that it plans to replace Google's location services on its Android phones with Skyhook 's location engine. By default, all Android devices currently use Google's own location services to determine a phone's location based on GPS data from the phone and the location of nearby Wi-Fi access points and cellular towers. Skyhook, which pioneered this method to determine a device's location, made its name as the default location provider for Apple's iPhone and desktop operating systems. Adding Motorola to its partners will give Skyhook a strong foothold in the booming market for Android phones and applications. Sponsor Developers Won't Have to Change Anything The first Motorola devices with Skyhook's location services as the default will ship later this year. According to Skyhook, developers won't have to make any changes to their Android apps to work with Skyhook's location engine. Motorola will simply replace Google's libraries with Skyhook's Core Location services. As location becomes a more important part of a growing array of mobile apps, being able to quickly determine a phone's location even when inside and without a line of sight to the nearest GPS satellites becomes a necessity for developers. Skyhook, which launched in 2003, pioneered this system of using Wi-Fi access points to determine a device's location. Clearly, the engineers at Motorola felt that Skyhook's solution is currently superior to Google's services. Over the last few months, a number of the Android developers we talked to voiced frustration with the quality of Google's location services on Android. Indeed, some of the most popular location-based applications on Android like ShopSavvy and Flixster already use Skyhook's Android libraries instead of Google's built-in services. Discuss
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Android: Motorola Replaces Google's Location Engine With Skyhook
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The neighborhood boundary data provider used by Google, Twitter, EveryBlock, CitySearch and other companies has expanded to include top cities in South America, Middle East, Africa and Asia. Norwich, Vermont based Maponics says it now also offers deeper coverage for leading US and Canadian markets, with new neighborhoods in 100 cities. Maponics says it is the first service to provide neighborhood boundaries on every populated continent on earth. Sponsor The company uses a combination of proprietary algorithmic and manual methods to determine where a neighborhood begins and ends; boundaries are updated quarterly. The data becomes most exciting when it's cross-referenced with other data sets. Twitter users, for example, will now be able to geotag and view Tweets by neighborhood in countries all over the world. If you're interested in learning more about Maponics, its sector and its relationship with Twitter, check out the excellent podcast interview DirectionsMag did with CEO Darrin Clement two weeks ago . Discuss
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Maponics Releases "Ultra-Local" Data Internationally
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Google is now accepting applications from businesses to be among the first places the company sends photographers to take panoramic photographs of the insides of buildings. Street view? You aint seen nothing yet. We reported in February on rumors that this project was in the works. The company says the photographs will be taken by professionals trained in low-lighting, will be as unobtrusive as possible, will initially be traditional in format and will be stitched together to form panoramas in the future. Sponsor In September we wrote about a company called Micello , billed as Google Maps for the Indoors, which is creating floor maps for places like shopping malls around the country. That would make a nice compliment to the new indoor photography feature. Startups like Micello are probably no more worried about Google stepping on their toes than they were before, but the new indoor photography launch does have at least one independent professional photographer worried. "Did Google just put low- to mid-range commercial photographers out of business?," social photography blogger Aaron Hockley tweeted this morning. If that was a consequence of Google's new feature, the world would be much poorer for it. Discuss
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Beyond Street View: Google Photographers Begin Going Inside Businesses
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One of the motifs you keep coming across when reading about Foursquare and Gowalla, the mobile location apps, is that they are games, and the games are fun. The most important thing when it comes to gaming is the most subjective, whether the players are having fun. But it's not the whole story. Were these apps structured to have gameplay, a through-line with obstacles and rewards? Are Foursquare and Gowalla, and apps like them, games by design? And if so, is the gameplay good? Sponsor If you're unfamiliar with the applications, users visit various real-world locations and check in via mobile device. On Foursquare, they score "badges" for visits and, if they've visited a given location more than any other place, they become the "Mayor" of that locale. "Parents often make chores a game to get their kids to do them," said Dylan Romero, Community Manager for The Great Game Experiment. "They hit the part of the brain dealing with achievement and reward to get more desirable results. I think Foursquare is more a game in this sense. If you want to incentivize customers, videogame or not, give them something to shoot for." "The game mechanics are designed to lead people through the experience of using the product," said Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare. In other words, gameplay is not in service to the game, but in service to the product. "The 'game' for me is to see if I can get a response or, even better, a perk out if it," Klavars, a Foursquare user, Tweeted. Although there is currently no reward, other than regard among the Foursquare community, presumably, some venues offer specials to Foursquare users. Gowalla differs in some important respects from Foursquare. Gowalla uses a series of icon-based rewards called stamps. Given that Gowalla was born from a design company, it's no surprise that the symbols are very attractive. Likewise its "items." Locations are sometimes tied to items that show up when you've checked in. You can hold the items or drop them off elsewhere, which means a given place may have more items than it had originally. The scoring of these items seems more traditionally game-oriented than Foursquare's simple badges. Gowalla also has the equivalent of badges in its pins which can be strung together into itineraries for trips.gowallaferry.png Gowalla also has the equivalent of badges in its pins which can be strung together into itineraries for trips. However, according to Gowalla's Josh Williams, the company doesn't see it as a game at all. "While there is certainly an element of entertainment and fun to be had while using Gowalla," he told us, "we view it first and foremost as a social networking service." "The iconic items are a bit of an experiment for us. Can we lay a transient piece of data across the service and allow people to interact with it by moving it from place to place, attaching meta-data to it (like a digital message in a bottle), or even attaching real world value to it, as in the case of the NBA tickets given away to a Nets basketball game last week. They're simply another way to interact with the world around you." Gowalla requires GPS and that's how a user checks in. Foursquare only requires you enter the address, which has led to cheating. However, gaming is not just in the rules but in the expectations. With Foursquare, the unwritten expectation is that if you check in at a place, you will be there for some time. Here the location app aspect of Foursquare creates an expectation in its gameplay. On Gowalla it is perfectly acceptable to check in to a place you can't really stay, like a landmark. It seems, then, that neither company has consciously designed their services to be games. But much in the same way that a kid finds a baseball diamond in a clearing in the woods, perhaps the users are the ones who've identified and acted upon, the latent gameplay. Because although Foursquare and Gowalla may not be games, there is a game that is being played with them. Gowalla, in requiring GPS and requiring no any real relationship to the place, might be less appealing on the location side of things. Playing Foursquare is also arguably simpler, and therefor more appealing to more people. I think it's fair to say that people with higher gameplay expectations will probably find Gowalla more appealing, regardless of creator intent. People who want quick fun with more of a social aspect may favor Foursquare. Discuss
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If Location Apps are Games, How's the Gameplay?
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In our recent posts about Structured Data , we've emphasized that most of the current initiatives have been around uploading new data to the Web - whatever the format. The U.S. and U.K. governments have led the way with their 'open data' websites, but much of that data isn't 'linked' yet . In other words, it's online - but siloed. So how do we get to the next stage of the Semantic Web, linking disparate data sets together so that people can begin to use that data? The tipping point for the long-awaited Semantic Web may be when you can query a set of data about someone not too famous, and get a long list of structured results in return. I've decided to term this 'The Modigliani Test.' Sponsor Amedeo Modigliani is one of my favorite artists. He was moderately famous during the early 20th century and has something of a cult following nowadays. But he's not Da Vinci or Picasso famous. What I'd like to do in a Semantic Web is type the following query into a search engine and get back a large list of results: tell me the locations of all the original paintings of Modigliani. As of today, there's no place to type that query in and get a list of structured data . The closest I can find to doing that is the Artcyclopedia entry for Modigliani, which has a list of locations for Modigliani artworks. It's great that they have the location data listed on one web page. However it's not structured data, so we can't query it. There's also not much order to the data, we have no idea if this is a comprehensive list, it's not verified data, and so on. In summary, there's a lot of data on the Web about the location of original art works - but much of it is in traditional 'document' web pages. What we're after is a giant database of art works, which anybody can query and re-use. Here's an early, overly geeky view at what a Linked Data of painting locations would look like (hat-tip @dakoller ): The above is a far from comprehensive list of art works by Hieronymus Bosch (a search for Modigliani, by the way, brought up zero results). Plus of course we need a much more intuitive UI, so that non-geeks can use it too. What do you think, when will The Modigliani Test be passed on the Web? Discuss
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The Modigliani Test: The Semantic Web's Tipping Point
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