Placemaker at #geomob

June 29th, 2009 at 10:59 am | posted by Gary Gale | in Geo Technologies

Whilst we’ve been a staunch supporter of the London based #geomob meetups, it’s been a while since Geo Technologies actually spoke to the enthusiastic and tech-savvy crowd that this event attracts.

June’s meetup is hosted by the British Computer Society at their headquarters in London’s Covent Garden and has a location based service meme:

Another diverse batch of speakers and topics, all interwoven with the theme of location. Looking forward to seeing you all there; it’s free and pre-registration/signup is essential.

Gary Gale, Director of Engineering, Yahoo! Geo Technologies.

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Yahoo! Maps – Our European Sites Get a Facelift

June 12th, 2009 at 8:09 am | posted by Gary Gale | in Maps

Yahoo! MapsAs we continue our focus on delivering a global product to our worldwide users, this week we launched new Yahoo! Maps in the UK, and in France. At the same time, we’ve discontinued the Dial-Up Map version while allows us to continue our effort on delivering an extraordinary customer experience on the new Yahoo! Maps

In response to your feedback we’ve made some major improvements to Maps:

• Faster loading time – No more waiting for the application to load!

• Language preference – Choose from one of the 5 European languages: English, French, Italian, Spanish and German.

• Interactive print page – Customize the print page to include only the information you need.

• Personalized routing – Don’t like the route we provided? No problem, simply customize the route via drag and drop.

• Saved locations – For your convenience, previously entered locations are automatically stored and available within Maps and elsewhere on Yahoo!, such as Local and Weather. We also help you quickly look up places through auto-completion.

• Waypoint support – Get driving directions for trips with multiple stops.

• Save driving directions – Two places to save, Yahoo! Bookmarks and delicious.

• Zoom bar – You asked, we listened. We reversed the zoom bar, now with the ‘+’ on top.

We’ll be rolling out the same set of Maps improvements in Germany in the coming weeks. Please continue to share your constructive feedback with us and we’ll keep working on making Maps more useful to you in everyday tasks.

Christine Ying, Yahoo! Maps Product Management

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GeoPlanet and Total Hotspots

May 20th, 2009 at 7:23 pm | posted by Gary Gale | in Geo Technologies

 

total-hotspots-logoTotal Hotspots is a London based startup, founded in 2004 by Alex Housley, that provides an independent wifi hotspot directory service, featuring 200,000 free and paid locations in over 100 countries via a web presence and an iPhone application, developed in conjunction with Rummble.

The original version of Total Hotspots relied heavily on search to allow users to discover a hotspot and were looking for a way of categorising hotspot locations to provide an alternate to search. Reflecting a hotspot’s location via a unique URL would allow for intuitive discovery by users as well and improving SEO for the site. “We moved towards a directory model which complements search” said Alex during talks with Geo Technologies in London earlier this month. “Our problem was that of maintenance; how best to categorise hotspot locations by area withvariable address formats, localisations and levels of accuracy“.

geoplanet1We’re pleased to say that Total Hotspots were able to solve their problems with the help of Yahoo! GeoPlanetand that their new directory of hotspots is now live on the web. “(GeoPlanet) allows us to surf through a comprehensive and regularly verified hierarchy of places and as GeoPlanet is maintained by Yahoo! Geo Technologies there are no maintenance overheads“.

Alex uses the WOEID metadata provided by GeoPlanet to allow each hotspot to automatically populate community information and personalised recommendations by combining their hotspot database and the Rummble API from their hotspot database; “(web) communities aren’t just based around (specific) locations, they’re based around places“.

geoplanet_totalhotspots

Gary Gale, Head of UK Engineering, Yahoo! Geo Technologies

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