I was glancing through my issue of GITA’s Conference News that came today and I noticed a little writeup about the expansion of GITA’s “Location for Education” program, which allows middle and high school teachers to include GPS and location based exercises in their classes. Kits are available for 2-week periods, and include 12 GPS […]
Starting next month, stores in the Ginza district in Tokyo will be beaming coupons, special notices, and other information to shoppers and passers-by through the use of RFID tags and wireless transmitters. The initiative, called the Tokyo Ubiquitous Network Project, will allow shoppers to rent a prototype reader or get messages on their own cell […]
Min Zeng over at the Google Maps team posted an interesting blog post/feature announcement. They’ve added a feature where you can store your phone number in your google account, search for a store in Google Maps, then click on the map to have google call the store and your phone at the same time, no […]
The town of Burnley Wood in the UK has become a test bed for a new system that will help local residents visualize how proposed development will change what their town looks like. The Augmented Reality Interactive Environment System (ARIES) consists of a 3D representation of what the area will look like following the planned […]
If you haven’t read them already, you should definitely check out the articles in National Geographic’s Digital Places Special News Series. They cover topics relating to Second Life, to mobile gaming, privacy issues, GeoRSS, and next week, using Google Earth to monitor environmental damage. I think the articles offer a nice introduction to some of […]
Microsoft has a new prototype mobile application called Slam (Social, Location, Annotation, Mobile) that lets users send messages and photos back and forth to members of a group, or “slam” Group members can also see each other’s locations mapped using Virtual Earth. The SLAM server handles all the messages and mapping, as it periodically polls […]
Listener Eric pointed out a news item that discusses how police in the Dutch city of Groningen will be testing a handheld-based computer system which will allow them to access information specific to the areas they are patroling. The article also seems to say that information can be pushed out the systems and that they […]
The city of Norwich in the UK has set up a city-wide wi-fi that is open to the public at 256kbs and open to municipal employees at 1Mbs. One of the goals of implementing the technology is to not only create access to the internet but to allow for public workers to access relevant data […]
ESA News has a really interesting article about a prototype satellite navigation system for the visually impaired that was successfully tested in Madrid, Spain. The system uses a mobile phone with a location receiver and a voice synthesizer. The phone’s position is tracked accurately enough to give turn-by-turn directions in an urban setting, which are […]
One of the projects Microsoft researchers are working on is called SenseWeb, and Technology Review has a nice article that gives an overview of SenseWeb which, when incorporated into Windows Live Local, will allow searching for real-time location-based information, such as local restaurant specials or even gas prices. Local search and LBS will continue to […]