Google announced a Public Alerts page on Jan 25. The idea is to keep you informed of emergency alerts for floods, tornadoes, winter storms, and other dangers that may be headed your way. But, it's completely query driven, not location-based in this first attempt. Google is seeking feedback. Mano Marks noted on Twitter he'd worked on this project in the past.
- Google Blog
MapQuest launched an HTML5 client.
- press release
Adam Sadilek of the University of Rochester has developed a tool to predict one's location based on friend's locations known through Twitter. How well? It can locate you to within 100 meters with up to 85% accuracy.
"You can actually infer a lot of things about people, even though they are pretty careful about how they manage their online behaviour," he reports.
- New Scientist
by Adena Schutzberg on 01/26 at 05:30 AM |
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NTT DoCoMo Inc has partnered with US social networking service Twitter Inc to jointly develop a location based alert service for smartphone users based on tweets, according to the report in the Nikkei business daily.
- E-Commerce Journal
The research, from comScore (NSDQ: SCOR), found that in the U.S. in March, 16.7 million people used check-in services on their mobile devices. But that’s not actually a very big number: it works out to only 7.1 percent of all mobile users.
- MocoNews
- press release
Samsung and SCVNGR are hosting a citywide treasure hunt in Kansas City where the winning team can take home $20,000.
- GPS Biz News
by Adena Schutzberg on 05/18 at 05:11 AM |
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New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Tuesday unveiled PLAN, the Personal Localized Alerting Network, which is expected to provide residents with timely information "alerting them to imminent safety threats in their area."
Mobile phone users will receive "geographically targeted, text-like messages," according to a written statement from the Federal Communications Commission.
DC gets it by year's end, then it rolls out to the rest of country by April 2012. A "special chip" is needed to get the alerts, but most phones already have it.
- CNN
- FEMA FAQ
- FEMA PR
by Adena Schutzberg on 05/11 at 03:00 AM |
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