LightPole is another company offering a solution to do the work of taking your Web app and making it available with geo-context, on a cell phone. It's akin on first look to uLocate's WHERE platform in my mind, but the Industry Standard says it competes with: "Where, ULocate, Google Maps and Yahoo Local, which is also one of the partners. In the future, services such as Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and Google’s Android phones are to compete in the same space." I don't think Fire Eagle or Android are competitors, as far as I understand them.

How does it work? From the Industry Standard:

The software is a kind of translation service. LightPole’s customers put a Java-based widget on a web site. Users click on the widget, which looks like a mobile phone, so that they can load a mobile version of that site’s services onto a cell phone. Users type in their phone numbers, enter confirmation codes, download the application.

LightPole is announcing a bunch of partners today, including Yelp, Hotspotr, Mappy Hour, Yahoo Local, Zvents, The Bathroom Diaries, Gables and Fables, and Platial Mobile Map.

More good news for LightPole: $1.7 million first round of capital from Alloy Ventures and Stanford University was announced today.

A recent 911 call in Boston had responders head to the right address, but in the wrong neighborhood of the city. [Corrected to reflect that the error did not result in a fatality, as I originally suggested. 3/18] Boston has neighborhoods - they are formal, with real known boundaries - but still such things happen. So, until the whole thing is straightened out, when a "serious emergency" (crime in progress or act of violence) call comes in, responders will be dispatched to every such address in every neighborhood.

The event that triggered the change:

The caller told a 911 operator Sunday morning that the homicide occurred at 689 Washington St. Instead of sending police to Dorchester, the operator gave them the same address in Downtown Crossing. Officers ended up at a Malaysian restaurant two blocks from Boston Common and about 7 miles from the scene of the homicide.

The article in the Boston Globe suggests that the phone company did not code the wired line phone to the neighborhood and perhaps should. It further notes that ZIP Codes and exchanges (the second three numbers in the full phone number) can identify neighborhoods.

The new Knowledge Base article points users to Skyhook's data update page. There iPhone users can input the correct address to help update Skyhook's maps of wireless access points.


- iPhoneAtlas

This past week two of the many tech players with a toe in the geospatial waters, Apple and Yahoo, announced new developer offerings that will add to the twists and turns location based services have taken on the road to maturity. One of the services of the iPhone SDK is Core Location, meaning developers can develop native applications that take advantage of the pseudo-location abilities. We'll have a look at the iPhone SDK and Fire Eagle from a geospatial perspective plus explore what the real reason is for wanting navigation on your mobile device.

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Microsoft Research shows off its latest idea each year at TechFest. Among those of geo-interest this year were:

LucidTouch allows users to touch an alternate location to activate a touch screen. The demo showed users touching the back of a display. The big leap? Such a system gets around the fat finger problem - where a big finger hides what is of interest, or is not "fine enough" to zero in on a button or area of interest.

Another technology, unnamed, taps into cell phones, armed with accelerometers, to capture information about the commute - where potholes are, when and where horns are honked. The data is sent to a server for use by drivers to find the best route. I guess it could also be used to indentify where roads need to be repaired.

- InfoWorld

Reader Kyle passed along news of a new Facebook app called Friend Density. It does what you'd think - plots the density (thematic heat map of sorts) of where your friends are. Apparently at launch it was not worldwide, but is now.

A few comments on The Wall note that this app is of interest to a few geography majors. Says one:

As a geography major and frequent GIS user, this is the first facebook application that I felt compelled to get!

In other Facebook news, Net Ventures, a Sydney-based development outfit that built "Shout Out," won Sensis' app contest and $15,000. It locates friends either as a Facebook plug in or a stand-alone app. The contest is for apps that use Sensis' Whereis platform.

- ZDnet Australia