There has been a pretty consistent buzz about mobile internet access growing as well as location based services. It’s not a stretch to see a lot of ways these would work well together. When you add in the popularity of the iPhone and other phones that are location aware it makes it even more […]
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Location based mobile browsing is the future
Facebook has announced modifications to its developer application programming interface so that the creators of third-party applications can restrict their reach by demographic–more specifically, by age or location.
The update is designed to help developers who may run into legal issues if they make their applications available to all Facebook users, regardless of how old they are or what countries they live in.
This could apply, for example, to promotional applications created by liquor companies that need to restrict access to those over 21 in the United States, or to game makers that have only been licensed in certain countries. We’ve seen this already with the two versions of board game Scrabble on Facebook: one created on behalf of Hasbro, which licenses the game in the U.S. and Canada, and one by Mattel, which publishes it overseas.
The new demographic restrictions in the API use Facebook profile data to determine age and location, and profile data is not always totally accurate. As a result, the social network recommends that developers also ask up-front about those details.
“You can and should consider implementing additional consent or confirmation in your application, as appropriate,” a post on Facebook’s developer blog by engineer Nick Gianos read. “For example, if, for legal reasons, your application requires the user to affirm that they are of a certain age or are in a certain location, you should continue to solicit that explicit affirmation, and not regard the fact that the user passed through the Demographic Restrictions as equivalent.”
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Facebook developers to factor in age, location
The battle of the open source CMS continues. Well some might not consider it a battle, but there is a definite push to stay at the top by the leaders of the pack. WordPress is no slouch where that is concerned. In the news again, WordPress announced the release of version 2.6 — a month ahead of their original schedule no less.
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WordPress 2.6 Hits the Street One Month Early
What if your nightlife agenda was dictated not by text messages, phone calls, or your city edition of Time Out, but by a shifting pattern of dots on a Google Map?
As absurd as it may sound, a New York company called Sense Networks thinks that’s the solution. On Monday, the company emerged from stealth mode and simultaneously released an “experimental” product called CitySense, an urban navigation product that puts a new spin on the hot market of location-based mobile networking.
A Citysense map of San Francisco.
(Credit: Sense Networks)
Backed by hedge funds rather than the venture firms that typically fuel tech start-ups, Sense Networks wants to do a whole lot more than just tell you where your friends are. Rather, the company plans to use its database of location-based information–sourced not only from people who download its mobile client but also from previously untapped resources like taxicab GPS logs–to create both consumer- and enterprise-oriented products. It’s calling that mapping technology “Macrosense.”
CEO and co-founder Greg Skibiski described Macrosense to me as a platform for crunching and analyzing location-based data in real time. That has major implications for the retail and financial services industries, he told me–if it’s accurate, it could be a huge asset for predictive markets–as well as possibilities for some cool consumer applications.
The first of those, Citysense, has been unveiled along with its more corporate sibling. Currently available as a free download for BlackBerry and iPhone handsets, Citysense displays what look like heat maps to show where the most human activity is going on at that moment, down to the street intersection; future releases of the product may make those locations even more detailed, but Skibiski said that’s not yet decided due to the important issue of privacy concerns.
In its initial alpha phase, it’s limited to San Francisco. Other cities, including New York, are in development.
Citysense can also show you where, based on historic data, the most “unusual” levels of activity are going on. You then have the option of looking up nearby businesses on Yelp and Google Maps, or bookmarking locations on Socialight, thanks to external APIs built in.
Then, using the location-aware technology built into the handset, Citysense eventually begins to “learn” where you spend most of your time, and as the product grows beyond San Francisco, eventually it’ll be able to suggest nightlife options to you in cities around the country–all this without taking any kind of user registration information.
That’s a crucial talking point, considering some people are inevitably going to find Citysense and its brethren more than a little bit Big Brother-ish. CEO Skibiski stressed to me that it’s not for meeting people, it’s for “meeting” places: No personal information is mined, he said, users have the option to completely erase their past navigation histories if they wish, and there’s no way to track other users in the system.
Citysense, with its focus on “unusual activity” and machine learning, might be a bit too wacky for the average BlackBerry user, but that’s not a big deal for SenseNetworks. The company plans to profit primarily from business clients purchasing deeper data from the Macrosense platform; Citysense and all future consumer applications are intended to be strictly icing on the cake.
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Meet Sense Networks, the latest player in the hot ‘geo’ market
