Thread: WHERE Location Aware Widgets For S60 Devices

Forum Nokia Innovation Series
WHERE Location Aware Widgets
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WHEREWhere are you now? With this simple question and the assistance of the WHERE application from uLocate Communications, Inc. you can find myriad useful answers.

You can use WHERE's location-based widgets to answer questions ranging from where is the nearest brew pub, to where are my friends right now? You can also find answers to questions that you might not have even thought about previously.

With WHERE from uLocate Communications, Inc. it is easy to add applications that give you information based on where you are at the moment.

It's almost like your phone has answers. Answers to questions like: I just got off the plane, what will the weather be like here tomorrow morning? Or: I've never been in this part of the city before, where is the nearest brew pub? Or even: I don't want to have dinner alone, where are my friends right now?

WHERE applications make it easy to act on the answers with such features as click-to-call, get directions to, or see a map based on the answer. Users can also send the location of their selection to a friend via short message service (SMS).

WHERE widgets are small applications that are built on the WHERE platform. One reason there are already more than 40 widgets available for Nokia devices is that the platform makes it simple for developers to access a device's global positioning system (GPS) data through an easy-to-use scripting language.

"The WHERE platform allows developers to focus on creativity instead of application plumbing," notes Dan Gilmartin, vice president of marketing, uLocate Communications, "and creativity pays off. Location-based services (LBS) built on the WHERE platform were awarded ten of the fifteen semifinalist nominations in the 2008 NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge - Americas."
WHERE Location Aware Widgets
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"S60 3rd Edition offers great simplicity and usability for our users and a reliable platform for our internal development team."- Dan Gilmartin, vice president of marketing, uLocate Communications

WHERE widgets at NAVTEQ Global Challenge

Four top awards were given out in the 2008 NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge - Americas, and WHERE widgets captured three of the top spots. The WildLab from the Mediated Spaces team enables citizen scientists to collect real-time scientific data on their mobile devices. For example, a bird watcher can enter hot spots from which they record what species they observe, tagged with time and location of sighting.

The widget heywhat'sthat from the company of the same name tells hikers and other outdoor enthusists what they're looking at. The widget takes a GPS reading and renders a 360-degree panoramic sketch of your location, complete with elevation profiles and the names of mountain peaks. And America's Emergency Network (AEN) was recognized for its AEN Mobile GPS Edition, which alerts users about natural or man-made disasters within range of their device.

The alerts are drawn from the AEN central database of emergency bulletins covering everything from wildfires and floods to school shootings. In addition to the recent award winners, more than 40 widgets are already available for Nokia devices, with more coming all the time. Some widgets are obvious but useful, like the Weather and driving Directions widgets.

Others are more whimsical, like the World's Largest widget that can direct you to the world's largest ball of twine, or use Digging to China to learn exactly where you would emerge if you dug a hole straight through the earth from your current location.

Some widgets are quite serious, like ThinAir, which provides air quality readings at your current location, and Eventful Politics, which locates political events near you. In addition to providing a platform for developers, uLocate Communications creates and distributes its own application widgets, including the mobile friend-finding application Buddy Beacon. Buddy Beacon uses GPS technology to let users connect with their friends by posting their location and updating their status across a variety of online social networking sites, including Facebook.

For example, Buddy Beacon users can update their status to "making dinner" (entered by the user) "near Main St. in Boston, MA" (captured from the GPS receiver), and choose to have their status history appear in their Facebook minifeed. For privacy reasons, even when the user changes location, Buddy Beacon does not update the status unless the user requests an update. The Buddy Beacon widget contains a list of a person's friends who also use the service, and clicking on a buddy's name allows the user to see a map of the friend's latest location or prompt the user to update their status.

uLocate's business strategy uLocate provides the WHERE platform and most of the applications built on it free to consumers. The WHERE Web site ([Only registered and activated users can see links. ]) steps the user through the single process required to download the platform and a few useful widgets. The Web site includes a list of all supported Nokia devices. Having no subscription fee for Nokia devices simplifies the process. "Some applications just work better when the consumer is not forced to pay a subscription fee before accessing the service," notes Gilmartin. "We are working with Nokia Interactive because we trust them to deliver relevant, nonintrusive advertising that consumers actually want to see. We will make our money off the advertising."

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you have to pay for it...