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I have to say that Steve Jobs had its Vision (with its meaning as large as a full moon) the day he entered Xerox Parc’s Place sometime back in the 80’s (79 in fact).

You know beauty when you see it.

He got a hold of that creative hippie energy floating in the air and like a grown-up Harry Potter made beauty and truth come together in pure reality. He is a visionary that as Wired published recently can push people enough to turn those visions, truth.

Jobs is capable to translate what everyone is hardly wishing (and therefore imagining) into a single piece of touchable reality. (Photo by Roman Lily).

Parc Place

What amazes me is the beauty of seeing Cocoa, OOP, MVC, Event Handling, Model/View bindings through the Observer/Observed pattern (KVC, KVO) all in a single & same place, platform.

Until now you had one or other aspect implemented in a different platform without giving you the whole picture. Ever.

A Mac running NextStep is what Jobs saw at Xerox.

He built on it and you can see that by looking at the way Cocoa Frameworks are put together.

The language is clean, clear. Get used to the NS and go ahead delving into the code.

Java brought a lot of that class, beauty to fruition. But the Mac puts the experience in a unique context.

It is all in one single, same box.

Flawless Not

BTW, not saying that the Mac is flawless.

Everyone & everything has its flaws, don’t want to sound “too rosy”.

It is just that beauty (com’on, it IS a piece of beauty - an expensive one) helps to put you in a positive, constructive, creative mood.

Even the logo, it seems…

Interface Builder

Apple released a new version of the SDK today. It includes a new version of Interface Builder, a drag & drop user interface design tool that will certainly make development simpler and faster. (Those Barbarians getting their way…).

Let’s see what Interface Builder can do with Cocoa Touch. Not everything, yet…

Check the Release Notes, full complete support for UIKit views and controls didn’t make for this rev.

But you can as a basic starting point, create Views, drag and drop controls and run the simulator.

From here

Did you check the introductory videos? Look at least the “iPhone OS Programming Guide” and the “Cocoa Fundamentals Guide”.

Finally, get used to the Smalltalk-ish implementation of the C syntax. To say the least, it is cute.

Tags: Hardware, Mac OSX, Connecting the Dots by gpsguy
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Want to send targeted location ads, alerts? Check for SquareLoop running on Sprint.

Would you take mobile ad’s?

AllPointsBlog talks about GPS-based Pizza Tracking through Papa’s John TrackMyPizza.

FindWhere buys Dutch-based Livecontacts (Navteq Global LBS Challenge finalist) customer base and platform. Available for Nokia phones, Symbian-based devices and uses GSM location.

“Livecontacts allows you to pinpoint your location and find out what’s nearby.”

GPSed: “a real-time GPS trip tracking and social networking application for GPS, digital photography, and mobile users”. For Nokia N95, 6110 Navigator, Blackberry 88×0 (Perl), 8310 (Curve) and portable Garmin, Magellans through GPX, PLT (?) and KML file formats. Plus geocoding Windows-based utility Take’n'Pin to geotag pictures to be uploaded to Flickr, Picasa and previewed on Google Maps.

Myrimis: “real-life location based social network” using Nanonavi software from Nanomatic (too many brands, confusing story).

SunsetGPSLogger from Vodaphone R&D: Requires Windows Mobile 5/6-based Smartphone/Pocket PC and any Bluetooth/built-in GPS receiver, .NET Compact Framework 2.0 runtime and above.

E911 Privacy Concerns: CNet touches the subject in a clear and precise way. It is a legal matter now.

Tags: LBS, GeoTagging, Connecting the Dots by gpsguy
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From The Island: quoting the Economist, the idea will happen by

“linking the virtual communities [..] with the real world”

In a recent issue it talks about Bluetooth tagging, if you are 20 meters or closer you are it. Meanwhile, BBC reviews Social Networks.

In U.S. TeleNav launches a mobile app for Facebook. And TeleAtlas LBS Innovators divulge its finalists: JotYou, SmartAgent and Socialight.

Finally, if you didn’t get it yet read again: users (will) make the content in the future of mapping.

Talking maps, the old brand Fugawi tries new waters with Fugawi Touratel, a Where-based Widget. Via InformationWeek.

Nokia also makes widgets available for its phones, but no LBS support yet.

And Farcast offers a free mobile blogging service which takes GPS coordinates of photos, text and videos. Via IntoMobile.

Tags: LBS, Mashups, Connecting the Dots by gpsguy
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There are at least 4, 5 different ways for you to find out where someone (or a device) is currently located:

Satellite based GPS

This is the free, radio signal based one. Satellites up our heads beeping signals in a constant frequency that can be picked up by GPS (radio) receivers.

You need a device which actually “listens” to the GPS radio signals to get it. They need to carry chipsets providing a combination of RF components and software to correlate and process the location data into latitude, longitude and altitude plus time values.

Phone Carrier based Assistance to GPS signaling

With E911 requirements, carriers were obligated to provide progressively more accurate location information in emergencies to cell phone users.

There are basically two main ways to broadcast digital signals to multiple cell phone receivers: GSM and CDMA.

CDMA radio signals as those broadcasted by the GPS satellites, have a time-stamp signature. This is the key data for trilaterating (also referred to as triangulation) three or more points for determining location of a given receiver.

Assisted GPS combines triangulation results from a cell phone obtained from the time a signal takes to reach it from the cell towers; to the GPS data of known locations.

Being a time-based network CDMA allows for more precise determination of a cell phone and its user. GSM provides a much lower precision and there are attempts to improve its resolution through methods like Enhanced GPS for example.

Cell Tower ID databases

Another approach is to create and refer to a database of cell towers id’s to obtain its corresponding location (latitude/longitude). For that customers knowingly (or unknowingly) provide the data to seed a database.
Google Maps for Mobile uses this approach with its My Location feature.

There are several open databases with id’s of GSM towers used in U.K. and Europe.

Wi-Fi MAC addresses databases

In heavily populated areas, the use of data from wireless access points associated to their corresponding location extends the Cell Tower database approach.

This technique was used by PlaceLab a lab sponsored by Intel. Navizon has been doing this for a while now and before them Wigle and its open source database.

(Static) IP address can also be used for location.

And there are also proposed standards and implementations of GPS data transport protocols which opens lots of possibilities.

What do you got?

So based on this you have GPS or more precisely Location data depending on how manufactures, developers and phone companies decide what is available for you as customer.

In cell phones some sort of E911 will be available. This can be implemented in several forms. For example, CDMA carriers use a Position Determination Entity, or PDE Server that keeps track of devices location.
Privacy concerns should abound here and in any other case where private data is kept.