Thursday, July 9. 2009

How Google Maps uses the W3C Geolocation API and Google Location Services

There's a lot of excitement (sample) about browsers (notably Firefox and Chrome, but actually any implementation that include Google Gears) implementing the W3C Geolocation API. Why? In the past few days Google announced that Google Maps (desktop) can now take advantage of it. All good. My concern: all this discussion may be "fuzzing up" what the API does and does not do.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, LBS, Standards, Wi-Fi at 17:13 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Skyhook's Morgan: Screen Size Challenges GPS Signals, Turn by Turn too Expensive

Rafe Needleman interviewed Skyhook's CEO Ted Morgan on the current state of things location, including FireFox going with Google's toolkit and not Skyhook's (not unexpected), the price of turn by turn directions in phones (too high), the need for location brokers like Fire Eagle (too early to know) and how the larger the screen in a device, the poorer the reception.

Furthermore, the bigger the screen of a device, the worse the GPS reception gets. Morgan says, "The bigger screens drown out the GPS signals." Although when I pressed him as to why, and he claimed to not be technical enough to fully understand it.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, GPS, Wi-Fi, Satellite Navigation, Geospatial Business at 08:28 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |