The announcement is on the official Google Mobile Blog. It includes an interesting YouTube video of Google's Charles Wells demonstrating a new mobile restaurant finder service from LastMinute.com called FoneFood (m.lastminute.com/fonefood/en) which uses the Gears Geolocation API to locate restaurents near you.

With or without the location feature, FoneFood is an interesting service in its own right. It's similar to OpenTable (review) but focused on Europe. FoneFone lets you search for restaurants by location and cuisine in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Holland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerlandand and the UK. Search results include a detailed description, approximate price range, "click to call" phone number and a Google mobile map. You can check availability and make reservations too. No credit card is needed to make a reservation, just your name, email and phone number.

The Google Mobile Blog also highlighted a second location aware moble web app that's using the Gears Geolocation API.  It's called Rummble (m.rummble.com) and is a location based social network. Rummble lets you build a network of friends and rate and share "things" like restaurants and clubs with your friends or the world.  Rated things are called "Rummbles". When you log the site, it displays nearby friends and Rummbles.   On the web, Rumble displays them on a Google map. The mobile interface makes do with a text list although you can bring up a map showing the location of a single Rummble.

The mobile location based social networking field is getting crowded.  Rummble competes directly with Zkout, Socialight, Molologo,  Loopt and Mobiluck. And most of these services have their own ways of autocratically detecting your location; Socialight, Molologo and Loopt with standalone GPS enabled applications and Zkout with a mashup of Navizon and Yahoo's Fire Eagle.  The Gears approach is certainly more scalable than expecting the user to install a different app for each location based service or the complicated setup required to get Zkout, Fire Eagle and Navizon all working together.

Mobile LBS has been a long time coming and I'm getting tired of waiting. Gears mobile is great but it really needs to move beyond Windows Mobile. An Android version of Gears is promised and it will help once the 'droid achieves critical mass.  But what about S60 and Blackberry with their huge market share?  Or a Java based browser like Opera Mini but with Gears built in? These are the sort of platforms that Gears needs to support to make mobile LBS ubiquitous.

Incidentally, the Google Mobile Blog doesn't have a mobile version (why not Google?) And if you use Google's GWT mobile transcoder (or Skweezer) to view the post the video gets stripped out.  At least Mowser gets it right and converts the embedded video into a link to YouTube's mobile version.

Via: Mobile Industry Review.

With Yahoo making Fire Eagle’s launch (of beta version) in March 2008; it is now open to public with 22 launch partners providing their services. Fire Eagle allows developers to build services tailored to the user’s geographic area, using its location-based middleware.

The process for enabling location-based service is such that it begins by asking the user for their location (country or even global coordinates), thereby completing Fire Eagle’s job – from there onwards, the applications built upon the service take command.

The applications range from a variety of devices and OS, though most are not cross-platform. The gallery of applications currently includes:

Social networking apps from Brightkite, Plazes, Loki and Zkout – which are all location-based apps.

• · Travel mapping apps from Dopplr, May My Tracks, eKit and Navizon
• · Point-of-interest and event listings from Lightpole, Outalot and Wikinear
• · Location-based search from Rummble
• · Messaging from Spot and Pownce, and
• · News from Outside

An internet-connected GPS (personal navigation) app is up for grabs from Dash, Fire Eagle widgets for the OSX dashboard, J2ME mobile location updater (for Nokia N95 w/GPS), iPhone geotagging from Metosphere, a Movable Type blog plug-in, and a Fllickr geotagging mashup for Nokia & Motorola phones known as Zonetag.

The Fire Eagle API is accessable through Yahoo’s Developer Center for developers wishing to grab this geo-aware infrastructure. Applications available are categorized in three types: Web, mobile and desktop – where each provides a different authentication type. So developers have to have a general idea of what they’re building before they can obtain an API key. Whereas, Yahoo provides some walkthroughs & examples for the developer’s assistance as well.

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Related Articles at Startup Meme:

KeyToss (m.keytoss.com) describes itself as a "Powerful, personalizable portal for smartphones".  I think that's a pretty good description.  The default KeyToss home page shows a search box offering a choice of search engines, current weather forecast, recent sports scores, stock quotes, a section of news headlines and about 20 well chosen links to frequently used information like movie show times and flight status.

KeyToss is highly customizable.  without even registering, users can change their location and favorite teams, choose which mobile links and search engines are displayed and add content from a list of 40 preselected RSS feeds. These changes are saved with a cookie. Registered users can make further customizations like adding pages and choosing from over 600 feeds on KeyToss' full web site. You can customize how each feed is displayed including whether to display summaries or just headlines, the number of items to show and whether external content should be transcoded. The choice of feeds does seems to be limited to the 600 preselected ones. Although KeyToss says "Is there a website or blog that you'd like to see? If it has an RSS or Atom news feed, you can add it yourself",  I could not find any way to add arbitrary feeds.  Update: once recieved and responded to the registration email (it was delayed over three hours), I could add feeds.

Something that makes KeyToss unique among mobile portals is that it acts as a location broker.  When you access location aware sites through the KeyToss portal, your current location is passed to the site.  It's not GPS, you do have to set your location manually in KeyToss, and it's only grandular down to the city name for international locations or zip code for US ones, but is a real timesaver to not have to enter your location on Google Local, Yelp or jWire's WiFi finder.  I'd like to see KeyToss integrate this functionality with Yahoo's FireEagle, which when combined with Navizon, can pass GPS or cell tower location through an API.

KeyToss also has a download repository, you can upload content to KeyToss from a PC and downlaod it to your mobile.

The KeyToss mobile site is clearly intended for handsets with relatively large screens. They do say "for smartphones" after all. Layout is optimized for devices with 320px wide screens like Treos, Blackberries and QVGA devices in landscape orientation. It's a fluid rather than a fixed width design using max-width : 306. The site's formatting holds up well on 240px wide screens but starts to break up or require horizontal scrolling on anything smaller. KeyToss' memory requirements are modest, under 20 KB for the default homepage, so it loads fast and is responsive even on most dumbhone browsers.

I'm quite impressed by KeyToss.  It's always nice when a startup comes up with something that rivals the big boys like Google and Yahoo.  So how does KeyToss compare with the mobile version of iGoogle?

Key Toss Pros:

• iGoogle for mobile (unlike the full and iPhone versions) is quite limited in the gadgets you can add.  For example, you are restricted to Google Search and Google Stock Quotes, KeyToss offers many alternate search engines and Yahoo or Market Watch quotes.
• KeyToss offers links to a range of 3rd party mobile sites, Google doesn't.
• KeyToss lets you share your location with third party sites.
• KeyToss has a sports scores module which mobile iGoogle lacks.
• On the target devices I think KeyToss is more attractive and has a little better usability than Google.

iGoogle Advantages:

• Google can display your unread gMail headers right on the portal, with KeyToss you have to click through to the site.
• Integration with Google Reader means feeds are synchronized across mobile and PC.
• IGoogle optimizes the display and feature set for various devices. It works well on anything from a RAZR to the iPhone.  KeyToss' "one size fits all" design scales surprisingly well but is at it's best on the smartphones it's optimized for.

Overall it's a tossup. I'd say KeyToss wins if you have a Treo or Blackberry or if seeing sports scores at a glance is a priory for you.  On the other hand, If you live in gMail and Google Reader or your phone has a small screen or really lousy browser, iGoogle is a better choice.

Opinions? If you use a customizable mobile portal like iGoogle, KeyToss or something else, we'd love to hear about it.  Leave a comment.

Via: BerryReview

Mobile Link: m.keytoss.com

Ratings: Content: Usability:

Filed in: Mobile Site Directory - Portals

Yahoo has just launched Fire Eagle out of beta, a platform that makes it easy for people to share their location. It’s not a social network, rather they make it possible for existing services including social networks, to incorporate your location. They also have a mobile version available so that when you are on the go, you can easily update your location, or hide yourself which essentially means that Fire Eagle will not share you location with any service.

Examples of how Fire Eagle is integrated into services you may be familiar with include:

1. Pownce - have your messages geotagged with your Fire Eagle location
2. Rummble - location based social discovery tool to help you find people and places nearby
3. Movable Type - display your location on your blog, automatically updated whenever you rebuild

Those are just three examples of how Fire Eagle is being used. Yahoo has a whole gallery of applications that make use of Fire Eagle. For those who don’t want anybody to know an actual location, you can make it up, although that then defeats the purpose of the platform.

The official Yahoo Blog, Yodel Anecdotal wrote about Fire Eagle and talked about how easy it is for developers to create location-enhanced applications. They described is being all about “making everything on the Internet more useful, fun or interesting by adding the element of location.”

For those of you who want to start using Fire Eagle, checkout the list of services and web apps that are already taking advantage of the platform to see if any of them interest you and then use your Yahoo ID, if you have one (or just sign-up) to get started. When you want to update your location you can manually do it, or use one of the following apps:

• Dopplr - will tell Fire Eagle the city you’re in
• Brightkite
• Fire Widgets - update your location on your Mac OS X dashboard
• Zone Tag, My Loki or Navizon - will broadcast your location automatically
• Searchquest GPS for iPhone (get it from the App store)

The most natural thing for Yahoo to do would be to integrate the Fire Eagle service with Yahoo Maps so that you could track and view locations of your friends and family.

Checkout Fire Eagle

Copyright © 2008 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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Yahoo has just launched Fire Eagle out of beta, a platform that makes it easy for people to share their location. It’s not a social network, rather they make it possible for existing services including social networks, to incorporate your location. They also have a mobile version available so that when you are on the go, you can easily update your location, or hide yourself which essentially means that Fire Eagle will not share you location with any service.

Examples of how Fire Eagle is integrated into services you may be familiar with include:

1. Pownce - have your messages geotagged with your Fire Eagle location
2. Rummble - location based social discovery tool to help you find people and places nearby
3. Movable Type - display your location on your blog, automatically updated whenever you rebuild

Those are just three examples of how Fire Eagle is being used. Yahoo has a whole gallery of applications that make use of Fire Eagle. For those who don’t want anybody to know an actual location, you can make it up, although that then defeats the purpose of the platform.

The official Yahoo Blog, Yodel Anecdotal wrote about Fire Eagle and talked about how easy it is for developers to create location-enhanced applications. They described is being all about “making everything on the Internet more useful, fun or interesting by adding the element of location.”

For those of you who want to start using Fire Eagle, checkout the list of services and web apps that are already taking advantage of the platform to see if any of them interest you and then use your Yahoo ID, if you have one (or just sign-up) to get started. When you want to update your location you can manually do it, or use one of the following apps:

• Dopplr - will tell Fire Eagle the city you’re in
• Brightkite
• Fire Widgets - update your location on your Mac OS X dashboard
• Zone Tag, My Loki or Navizon - will broadcast your location automatically
• Searchquest GPS for iPhone (get it from the App store)

The most natural thing for Yahoo to do would be to integrate the Fire Eagle service with Yahoo Maps so that you could track and view locations of your friends and family.

Checkout Fire Eagle

Copyright © 2008 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox
Update Your Location with Yahoo’s Fire Eagle Platform

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• HP Recalls 679,000 Cameras Because Of Fire Hazard
• iPod Nano Catches on Fire - Is a Battery Recall Coming?
• What do you Think of Facebook Platform Apps?
• Is The Fox Really A Fox In Firefox?
• Infamous Harry Potter Photographer Left Evidence

Fire Eagle, Yahoo's formerly experimental geolocation platform, is officially opening up to all users, and several companies are announcing products that work with it.

A refresher: Fire Eagle is a storehouse for personal location information. If you tell Fire Eagle where you are, or have applications or devices that can do so on your behalf, then other applications can grab that info (with your permission) and provide you geo-related services or social network features.

Tom Coates launches Fire Eagle at Yahoo's Brickhouse technology incubator.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

One of the most interesting parts of Fire Eagle is its variable privacy feature. Even if Fire Eagle knows precisely at what address you are, you can set it to only release more general information, like the city, to certain apps or certain groups, or you can restrict location reporting by time. There's also a "hide me" button you can press if you want to shut down location reporting for a period of time.

At the Fire Eagle launch event today, Yahoo highlighted three companies using the service:

• Pownce, the Twitter-ish nanoblog service. Having location available in this type of product really does change how users interact. See also Twinkle, a Twitter-compatible nanoblog service for the iPhone.

• Movable Type. The blog platform will get automatic location reporting for its authors and in its Action Stream service. It wasn't discussed at the launch but one assumes the new social network products will also get support.

• Outside.in, a local news and community site. It will use Fire Eagle to automatically find the info that's relevant to your location.

Other companies announcing services that work with Fire Eagle include: Brightkite, Dash, Dipity, Dopplr, ekit, Lightpole, Navizon, Loki, Outalot, Plazes, Spot, and Zkout. These companies are primarily location service providers or rudimentary social networks. I am looking forward to seeing major social nets (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed) and other data and news sites (Google Maps, Digg, CNN, Eventful), add Fire Eagle support.

The business
Asked what was in this initiative for Yahoo, there are two official answers. Yahoo co-founder David Filo told me, "We really wanted this functionality for Yahoo services. But by opening it up for the rest of the Web, consumers are more likely to adopt it."

Fire Eagle czar Tom Coates also said that there are possible direct revenues from the service, if Yahoo at some point decides to create a business version of the service for heavy users, like advertisers.

Yes, advertisers. While Fire Eagle will not be advertising-supported, marketers could create location-based programs that use the service. The Yahoo team is adamant that Fire Eagle will be permission-based, though, so users won't end up giving their location away to services without their knowledge.

Previous coverage:
You are here, sort of.
Fire Eagle geolocation service: Halfway there.
Fire Eagle's missing apps.

When you first open NavizonGPS, after installing it, you will need to set-up an account. You will get a pop-up with the options to select Ok to set-up an account or to select Cancel if you already have an account. If you select Ok, it will open a browser in which you can register for an account. After you have created your account, you can go back to the application on your SpringBoard. This time when you open the application, select Cancel. This will bring you to the main menu.

… [visit site to read more]

Remember Navizon?  It was the first pseudo-GPS app for the iPhone, and its jailbreak version still has some cool features that you don’t get with the Google Maps application.

Now a new feature called MobFindr has been added, which gives you an ability to send an SMS to the iPhone from any phone - using a special passphrase that you setup in the program - and have it send back a text with its exact current location details.

Pretty cool if your baby goes missing or, as the demo video suggests, perhaps for keeping tabs on your kid / kid’s iPhone.

This feature is available now in the current version of Navizon.  To see a video demo of the feature in action, just click the graphic at the top of this post.

Now the only question is how many will still be using Navizon in coming months, as I haven’t seen anything on it coming to the App Store, it seems likely to remain a jailbreak-only app …

Via: Engadget Mobile

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Navizon is a software-only wireless positioning system that triangulates signals broadcasted from Wi-Fi access points and Cellular towers to help the users find their way in most major metropolitan areas worldwide.