Plazes is a service for connecting wireless access points into physical locations. Previously this has only worked with Wi-FI networks, but now they have launched a mobile version that uses the cell phone network base station identifiers for the same thing.

I’m using Plazes as a way to collect locations I’ve been in to provide position metadata into all information I produce. This like: Where was this blog posted? What photos were taken near that photo? This data is then fed to the Midgard positioning service which does all the necessary calculations and metadata handling.

Having a mobile version of Plazes that doesn’t require me to carry a computer or find a Wi-Fi hotspot is cool. It means I don’t need to carry a GPS receiver to accurately (within cell phone base station area) position photos I take. It also means I have an easy way of querying the Plazes database for open Wi-Fi access points on the go.

Good work, Plazes team!

In the other news, Geominder uses the cell phone base station identifiers for connecting TODO items into different locations.

Updated 2006-08-20: Andrew Turner wrote:

Geolocation by mobile without a GPS system is key to Location-Based technologies to take off and be generally accepted. Plazes is leading the edge of the community-based geolocated networks. Now time to build some services on top of their framework.

Fully agreed. Plazes position is already fully integrated into the Midgard Framework making it easy to build position-based web services.