Plazes goes Nokia
A more interesting piece of news today was that Nokia has acquired Plazes, the WiFi positioning company. I've been a Plazes user for quite a while and am using it as a position source for my website in addition to Fireeagle.
I hope the acquisition will increase Plazes' resources to develop and expand the service to new areas of mobile positioning. The Rails port of Plazes a year ago seemed to hurt their usage numbers quite badly, but the new directions they've been recently following have been promising.
Maybe a good time to start preparing a new release of MaemoPlazer, our Plazes client for Nokia's Linux platform?
Continue reading
Browser geolocation without GPS: quite accurate enough
In our various GeoClue presentations we've been arguing that location comes in many flavors, of which GPS is only one. In many cases cell tower position or even WiFi connection can provide quite "good enough" location. On Mozilla Hacks they write about an OpenStreetMap-based browser location demo. I'd say the results are quite convincing: This is just a gentle reminder...
GeoClue status update
I sat down with GeoClue maintainer (and my former SoC student) Jussi Kukkonen to discuss how the project has been moving forward, and the situation is looking quite good. To those unfamiliar with GeoClue, here is a quick intro: GeoClue is a modular geoinformation service built on top of the D-Bus messaging system. The goal of the GeoClue project is...