Location-based Services

At the Creating the Policy and Legal Framework for a Location-enabled Society conference in Boston, Kirk Goldsberry, who is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard, gave a fascinatng presentation with the help of two of his students on the topic of personal geographic...

The University of Southern Canlifornia USC Map Data API: The University of Southern California’s Map Data API provides a RESTful interface for retrieving content from the University’s online map. The API supports JSON and JSONP formats. Users can search for locations, building codes and...

TruePosition released testing results of its indoor location technology in April. These tests put the company squarely into the Federal Communication Commission explorations of indoor locating for emergency response. Directions Magazine interviewed Rob Andersen, chief technology officer of...

China's largest Internet company Alibaba has made a significant investment into AutoNavi, a key provider of mobile maps and directions. Alibaba is handing over $294 million for a 28% stake in AutoNavi Holdings, which boasts a 100 million-plus user base and  30% ownerhip of the mobile mapping...

Google announced new location services APIs, a new Google Maps and a visual refresh for Google Maps at Google I/O last week. There was lots of descriptive coverage from the mainstream and tech press. But there was very little response from the geospatial community - except from Esri. Who should or...

The announcements come from Google I/O, an event in San Francisco this week. The APIs are additions to Google's location services for Android. Fuse Location Provider enhances device location determination. It speeds up the process and makes the location accuracy higher. There's also a "location...

An innovative website allows people in the Coachella Valley and the Imperial Valley to report environmental hazards, channel their complaints to government agencies and track actions taken in response using online maps that flag each report with a colored dot. The website, called IVAN,...

An old feature of Foursquare that appeals to the datanerd in many tech users pops up information about location based behavior at check-in. So, after a few days of checking in at work you might learn it's the longest streak you've had of a daily check-in. This week, Foursquare upped the ante. Now...

Glass Navigation is pretty darn great. It prevents fumbling with devices and, unlike phones and some dedicated navigation devices, doesn’t require you take your eyes completely off the road in order to properly navigate. There are some obvious bugs to fix, but with a beta product they’re...

OpenSignal is the team that offers and app you run on your cell phone to crowdsource carrier coverage. Now it's launched WeatherSignal, which does the same thing, but for weather. Alas only the latest (Samsung Galaxy S4) phones have all the sensors the app can tap, but older ones can at least...