SportsDo is yet another mobile sports tracking service, but this one has snow sports features for ski and snowboard enthusiasts. Their deal with Mountain Dynamics sports 3D DEM maps with more realistic perspective views resembling the paper trail maps resorts distribute onsite. Considering content differentiation alone, I suspect riders might use this over alternatives despite the Bluetooth-tethered GPS ugliness. But you tell me. Here are three different views of a run at Keystone.

1. Would you want this?


2. This?


3. Or This?

With broadband 4G technologies such as WiMax, Mobility (i.e. Connectivity & Location) finds its way into every product and service and thereby makes those products and services more valuable—according to McGuire’s Law. Products that increase in value through Mobility might include portable PCs, ultra mobile PCs, personal media players, mp3 players, digital cameras, digital video recorders, PC cards, PNDs, PDAs, Smartphone’s, mobile phones, and any other electronic device that benefits from broadband connectivity and Location derived context-awareness. The services atop these devices similarly increase in value with both the number of devices they are able to support, and the more creatively they fuse information, entertainment, and communications experiences. This fusion assumes user-identification uniformity across all devices and services, but currently, network-based location derived context is confined to mobile phones and their associated phone number identities. This is the problem…

Existing mobile location network API standards request and retrieve Location data based on a phone number—the cellular world’s identity-management primary key. But PCs have media access control (MAC) addresses, mp3 players have serial numbers, other devices may have some other unique semantic ID specific to a manufacturing practice or perhaps even an application service married to a dedicated device. In tomorrow’s converged 4G world, the lack of a uniform user-ID common to all devices requires rewriting or inventing new Location API standards to support holistic service experiences that run across multiple devices. In addition to a consistent cross-device user ID framework, cross-application user identity aliasing and federated repositories are also needed to support fused service interoperability. Where will these new standards live? W3C, the IEEE, OMA, the WiMax Forum, the OGC, or a new focus group not yet formed?

With Sprint’s help, Slippery Rock, PA police were able to help Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh locate a 10 year old boy in need of a heart transplant. John Paul May and his mother were attending a jazz concert at Slippery Rock University, when police "stopped the jazz concert that was happening and announced they were looking for May and his mother, Sue. The crowd of some 500 jumped to their feet and gave the boy a standing ovation as he left…"

-ThePittsburghChannel.com

Are Java ME downloads a thing of the past? Will Sun’s new JavaFX offering replace MIDlet mobile consumables with drag-and-drop mobile AJAX widgets? Sun’s announcement at JavaOne is a big one. It comes at time when content publishers and developers are building mobile RIAs, when carriers recognize that downloads can’t reach the niches in the long tail due to discovery and distribution challenges, and when device idle-screen real estate value is at an all-time high - set by Web user expectations accustomed to using asynchronous-fetched, always-fresh content through subscription feeds. If JavaFX couples useful Location JSRs, while offering a scripting environment for dynamic UI engineering, this is killer for mapping.

DHS wants to see isotope and biological GPS-coupled-sensors built into cell phones that monitor chemical, biological or radiological environmental conditions and report incidents should they occur. “If the intent is to have ubiquitous detection, there's nothing quite as ubiquitous as a cell phone”.

-USA Today

MoCoNews’ exclusive interview with Lonely Planet’s director of mobile innovation and strategy highlights the importance of Location and User Generated Content to the popular travel guide’s plans for mobile. The interview also identifies roaming as a billing problem for their plans, but doesn’t include thoughts on Location roaming problems they may encounter. In today’s circuit-switched world, a location-based app that runs on one network will choke when a user roams to another network, unless there are similar carrier systems in place to support the handoff. But in tomorrow’s world where every device has location-smarts built into it and all networks support IP, and where there’s less dependency on the network and more on the device, the Location roaming issue becomes less of a problem because applications can access server-based Location systems over the open Internet independent of bearer or protocol. Until this happens, I won’t expect Lonely Planet mobile to offer reviews for Katmandu hostels nearby, but I’ll definitely read my book and maybe make a few phone calls.