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

On Tuesday the talented team at Brickhouse launched Fire Eagle, Yahoo!’s user location management platform, to loud acclaim.

I’ve been a huge fan of Fire Eagle since its inception — as a business driver it was conceived to slice horizontally through the vertical towers that now dominate the Location Based Services landscape. Its launch not only returns ownership of User Location to the hands of the user, but undoubtedly triggers the tearing out of hair and significant re-writing of business plans; this can only be good — opening user location ensures that new businesses are built on the opportunities this affords, and not on the ‘captive audience, closed service’ concepts that currently dominate.

The product ethos is focused wholly on protecting user privacy while exposing the power of location; this is what really is most impressive. While developers usually tout the ‘heavy lifting’ that Fire Eagle does to make geolocation appear easy (more on this below), I would suggest that Fire Eagle’s greatest success is the care and attention evident in the product to ensure that users have complete control over who has access to their location, and at what granularity this is exposed. Far from shying away from the complex and at times intractably confused technical and policy issues surrounding user location, privacy, and geolocation, the Fire Eagle Team has carefully met them head-on and delivered a well-conceived, innovative, and enabling technology. This is delicate ground, certainly, and each subsequent step must be taken with similar diligence, but I am very excited to see what new ideas, products, and businesses emerge from Open User Location.

I am, of course, hardly an unbiased observer: the Yahoo! Geo Technologies team provides the machinery that performs the aforementioned ‘heavy lifting’. Our tech helps Fire Eagle determine where on earth its users are, assists with its geographic granularity protection, and ensures that developers can integrate the geographic data returned by Fire Eagle with other systems via ‘where on earth’ IDs (WOEIDs) and our GeoPlanet Web service. In a similar manner we also power the geoinformatics underlying Flickr’s new geotagging service. Combined with the significant geo wizardry and craft of the Fire Eagle, Flickr, and other teams at Yahoo!, we are continuing to provide the tools and platforms to spatially enable the Web and provide our users with the most personally georelevant experience possible.

Tyler Bell, Advanced Products Manager, Yahoo! Geo Technologies