Location, Location, Mobile

(hosted by Mobile Manifest, Leeds 14/07/11)

This event was all about Location based services offered via mobile and Samsung was able to present their own (developed at SERI) Location based Social Networking app on bada - BuddyFix.

BuddyFix is a open source project, which can be downloaded here. We've also put some videos together to help you get started using the BuddyFix code (viewable on our YouTube channel, or directly here)

Sameer, doing his best phone hacking ecosystem mashup

The presentation, by our own Sameer Ballewar, was an overview of both the bada ecosystem and BuddyFix, the most social location based application we know of! 

Location is an interesting topic, which doesnt seem to have been fully monetised yet... I wonder if there is room at the table for a small (low cost) location based advertising firm? Perhaps this is a growth area for our current map providers, NAVTEQ? All they would need is a good CMS & some campaign managers to sell the results?

*****

Sameer's presentation is currently available to view on Slideshare if you've not seen it before,

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NAVTEQ Berlin Developer Day

Ahh Berlin, City that never sleeps and always knows where it is, thanks to Location Based Services provided by NAVTEQ!
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NAVTEQ sure know how to do a Dev Day!

Yesterday we managed to sneak out of the office to attend the excellent NAVTEQ Dev Day near Tower Bridge in London. Although I was slightly delayed, NAVTEQ pulled a great line-up of speakers together, looking at the current range of opportunities available to developers using map or location data in their apps.

Some excellent networking followed where I was able to get a really good understanding of how NAVTEQ is paying for all of this, where it's looking to develop and how its going to get there. I'd thoroughly recommend making it to the Berlin event if you can!

For more info about NAVTEQ check www.nn4d.com

NAVTEQ App Warehouse

NN4D is pleased to inform you that we've launched our new NAVTEQ App Warehouse. This online app catalog allows viewers to browse and explore location apps that are using NAVTEQ® map data and content running on various devices and platforms.  This is an extraordinary opportunity for you to get your location apps in front of a highly qualified audience – at no cost!

Benefits of participating in the NAVTEQ App Warehouse are:

• Prime placement in front of worldwide viewers, covering thousands of potential buyers.
• Extreme visibility across internal teams at NAVTEQ, giving us the opportunity to refer your solution to NAVTEQ partners and customers who are interested in working with you.
• Your own personal repository to highlight your app, available for updates as often as you desire – plus participating developers are eligible to be included in NAVTEQ press, events, social media outreach and coverage on NN4D.com promotions.

This App Warehouse is not an App Store. It’s the place for you to showcase your location apps to buyers, looking for the latest trends in location solutions.

If you're interested in this exciting experience, we encourage you to apply today. 

Viafo Apps

I wanted to check, is anyone else used ViaSearchz_Lite yet? I logged in today and had a look - it seems to be a really nice location based recommendation tool allowing you to home in on what's available all around you (I NEED PIZZA etc.). You can also search by Tweets, allowing geo-tagged locations to become more useful and event focused. You could tweet about a great offer in a coffee shop, and within minutes have other users checking it out and joining in! 









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LBS bada Tutorial - Locations and maps with bada

Providing an insight into Location Based Services on bada, this video looks at the functionality for exploiting geographic information and location-based services. We start with a short introduction to location-based services, and how they can be realised in bada. We show an application example where we give an overview of the essential classes offered by our libraries. By using the bada IDE, we explain the source code required to load maps, get locations and display them on the screen. Finally, we demonstrate the compiled example using the bada Simulator together with the Event Injector, which are included in the SDK and provide a comprehensive and convenient test environment. (Video after the jump!)

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Location, location, location...

MoMo London
Last night our resident Technical Author, Ben Morris, attended MoMo London. Ben has a healthy(?) scepticism for anything he considers “trendy” or “marketing” so his thoughts on this month’s MoMo theme Location (a topic that continues to capture the imagination of both trend-setters and marketers alike) were always destined to be interesting.

Find them below…

Location has been the "new new thing" since, ooh, about Y2K, and was the theme at last night's MoMo London with some nice app demos and a panel discussion. A couple of key themes emerged:

• The cool new apps are using location as an added dimension to their main function/service and not as the primary service. Pure maps and navigation thus gives way to "where was I when I heard that song...?"

• There's still a place for pure location though, as Vodafone 360 demoed with its "location nudge" - on the new LiMo based 360 phones from Samsung

• The jury is still out on location based advertising. Biggest boo of the evening was for intrusive advertising along the lines of "when you walk past the store/coffee shop it can send you an offer". What we want instead are apps that add location to enable us to make the choices we want to make...

• In other words we want location browsing, and as if to make the point - the Flook demo seemed to offer us exactly that. Can't wait!

• The elephant in the room was privacy. It was the question I was going to ask, but Dan Appelquist beat me to it. The dystopian vision is of the mobile phone as a self-inflicted surveillance tool. The big question is - do we care/who cares? The optimistic view - perhaps "hide in plain sight" will save us.

• Best use case of the evening - "Let's me find myself when I'm in a bar!"

Loads of people, standing room only, tolerable wine, bags of chat and discussion afterwards until chucking out time.

Considering Ben is also a wine producer, “tolerable” is quite high praise.

Map out your future and get into the fast lane.
That’s the message from our partners NAVTEQ who are once again running their LBS Challenge, this year there is a special category for Touch UI apps in their annual LBS developer competition. The competition is open for location-aware applications based on any platform, including Symbian and Windows Mobile. This presents the perfect opportunity for any Samsung Mobile Innovator members currently developing LBS apps for Samsung's Windows Mobile Samsung Omnia range or the Symbian powered i8910 HD to participate.

For further details see www.LBSChallenge.com