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Wired reports on this day in tech in 1854. It’s the day John Snow convinced authorities to remove the handle from the Broad Street pump and thus he invent modern epidemiology and spurred lots of health related GIS use.
It seems no one from our geo space was at last week’s event, but I found a succinct review by Stuart Dredge at Mobile Entertainment. He reviewed the top takeaways from the event (something we like to do at Directions, too).
Among the top 10 takeaways: 2. It’s all about the maps this year
One of the big issues with the iPhone and GPS is that it can’t run in the background. That means that you must turn on the app itself to “check in” to share location information. But now, Loopt has swung a deal (for a $3.99 fee per month) to have AT&T do background updates. I’m not sure how that meshes with Apple’s restrictions, but it does give Loopt an advantage over “everyone else” including Google’s Latitude.
There’s a free trial for the first 5000 folks, but I suspect that’s full already since the news broke Sept 4.
It’s probably the most successful mobile/location-based/social app out there, but only last week did Foursquare close its first round of financing: $1.3 million from Union Square (a Twitter investor) and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.
Ok, I’ve been reading about iPhone apps, specifically location-based ones. for quite a while. None have made me think, “wow, I want that”...until today. Seek ‘n Spell is a letter hunting game played in a park - the game downloads a satellite image for you to use as a map and you capture virtual VW Beetle sized letters by running to them, to spell words for points. This sounds fun - but then I used to play Scrabble competitively and am a runner…
