The Yahoo! Geo Technologies Blog

On Wednesday September 24th, the British Computer Society, North London Branch, in association with the BCS Geospatial Specialist Group, hosted an event on Mobile Location Based Services at BCS headquarters in London.

I was invited to attend this event and presented a talk entitled The Open Location Ecosystem and the Mobile Internet, together with Justin Davies from NinetyTen and Buddyping and Andrew Grill, a mobile advertising evangelist.

Mobile Location-Based Services (LBS) have been ‘the next big thing’ for years now, but have not materialised due to a mixture of technical and business constraints. With increasing numbers of mobile phones being equipped with Wi-Fi and GPS receivers, this looks set to change.

What are the main location technologies and how do they work? What technical, business and social challenges do companies face when developing LBS for mobiles? What LBS can we expect to see on mobiles in the next 2-3 years? How will current favourites such as social networking and online advertising evolve in a location-aware world? This talk will address these questions and more.

Join us at this dynamic free event to learn more and share your views.

Our expert presenters are:

* JUSTIN DAVIES Founder & CTO, NinetyTen/Buddyping,
http://www.ninetyten.com http://www.buddyping.com
* GARY GALE Head of UK Engineering, Yahoo! Geo Technologies,
http://www.ygeoblog.com, http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/
* ANDREW GRILL Mobile Advertising Evangelist
http://www.andrewgrill.com/blog/

Yahoo! received a very warm welcome from the BCS, from the other presenters and from the audience; the hot topics for Yahoo! at the Q&A session afterwards were GeoPlanet, use of WOEIDs and Fire Eagle. The deck I presented is available for download here.

The resources referred to in the Yahoo! presentation are listed below.

• Yahoo! Geo Technologies blog - http://www.ygeoblog.com
• Fire Eagle: http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/
• Fire Eagle Developer APIs: http://developer.yahoo.com/fireeagle/
• Yahoo! GeoPlanet: http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/
• Yahoo! BluePrint: http://mobile.yahoo.com/developers/roadmap

More outreach and talks of this type are being planned and you’ll be able to read about them here on the Yahoo! Geo Technologies blog first.

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

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Fire Eagle, GeoPlanet, News, WOEIDs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.