The Zillow Blog tells the story. Basically, the company is giving away its neighborhood boundaries in ESRI Shapefile format - and asking for help updating them.

via Spatially Adjusted (James Fee)

To apply visit the developer site. But be warned - they are being picky - "Selected partners will receive beta access to live location feeds."

Says TechCrunch:

Loopt is launching a beta program for developers on a new mobile social networking platform. The platform will free user’s data from the network and let developers incorporate it into new SMS, WAP, or mobile location based applications using Loopt’s APIs. Loopt’s API’s will feed geographical data from users who opt into the applications to a developers program.

via TechCrunch

"It’s probably the biggest publicity event any company can have."

- Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook Wireless, on Steve Jobs mention of the company's technology at MacWorld. Skyhook's tech powers location determination in several Apple products including the iPhone (along with cell tower triangulation). In Xconomy.

The project, called Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disaster (InSTEDD), is a nonprofit organization funding by Google.org, The Rockerfeller Foundation and others. It launches today and ties together free software like Twitter and Facebook and Google Earth to enable communications during disaster. The geo example:

One such application will be the so-called Twitter bot framework, which bridges the Web service and phones with a location-detection feature that can link to a layer in Google Earth, [Eric] Rasmussen [CEO] said. That way, for example, Rasmussen could send a message about a patient with untreated symptoms in Laos via SMS on his phone, which might only have one signal bar of service. That message could then be broadcast to anyone subscribed to his messages, including aid workers at UNICEF or InSTEDD's headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., which could show his location and note on a Google Earth map.

"We can send an SMS message onto Google Earth in an emergency center, and it sees a dot with a color-coded response, with my name and date. Right underneath that, there's a button that says reply, and (aid workers can send a note that says) we have the resources you need 2 miles north...Suddenly there's a two-way conversation using nothing but a cell phone with one bar," he said, adding: "We've done this."

- c|net

The press release popped up on Tuesday and here's the big news:

"The company today announced it has sold over 10,000 XMap licenses into the oil and gas, electric, solar, and wind energy markets."

I draw attention to it for a few reasons:

How many smaller companies offer any sort of measure of their user base?
How many smaller companies with a reputation that starts in consumer products shares new of its professional products?
How many of us would have pegged the number as being that high? (Not me!)
We recently spoke about GIS use in the energy sector in a podcast - for oil exploration and other resources.

That's how Linux Devices describes a new game, WiFi Army, shown at CES, for the still in the early days Android platform. It's from W2Pii and is Java-based.

[Once activated] the game scans for other users within 300 feet and sets up a direct WiFi connection, swapping photos of each player for identification purposes. The user tracks the other player via continually updated GPS coordinates on a Google map interface, and when a positive identification is made, the user can shoot to kill using the phone's camera. The photo is then uploaded to the W2Pi site to see if there's a match, and if so, the user is awarded points.

The game is free but enhanced weapons and armor require micropayments. Also of note: for the beta just 500 slots per city are available.