Mobile Mapping updates

There's been various announcements this week on mobile mapping. Google have released another update to their mobile google maps client to version 2.03.

If your phone doesn't have GPS in it, you can still locate yourself roughly using cell-tower triangulation using the new "Locate Me" option in the menu.

The blue dot on the picture is using GPS... I haven't tried it without yet, but you should see a light blue circle round the blue dot when not using GPS to indicate a wider area of your approximate location ... you can see a demo here.

Gypsii and Nokia have teamed up for social-based mobile mapping with user-generated content / media upload (video , photos and audio) that is geotagged and all the other usual social networking options. You can save your favourite places, view others stored places etc... and there is a geoblogging option too.

I think we'll see more of this type of geolocation stuff move into the mainstream next year.

The download mobile client is currently only available for Windows Mobile, Symbian S60 is allegedly coming soon.

...and finally you can text your location and a message to geosms to see what the worlds texting about.


It's similar concept to twitter vision (which I note has now integrated with Facebook too).

There are various other ways of getting tweets or jaikus with geo-location up to your favourite SN / microblogging site - from your mobile - eg. twibble which has improved loads through the various updates and has the ability to put the geo-coordinates into a text message using the phone's GPS so you can send location specific updates.

I wonder who will be first to integrate alerting into mobile location via presence ? Similar to IM/Email you can see who is online, same with mobile geolocation - alert me when one of my chosen contacts is within 5 mile radius. It's all a bit scary.