It wasn’t so much the predictions as the discussion that was most interesting at last night’s annual predictions dinner, organized by the Washington Technology Industry Association. Will Twitter be acquired in 2010, and why? Who will have the dominant cloud computing platform in the next couple of years? What kind of startup are you looking to build or finance, and which areas are you staying away from?

A panel of Seattle-area tech entrepreneurs and investors gamely took the bait and had some lively exchanges over the course of an hour. OK, these guys all know each other, and we’ll take what they say with a grain of salt since it’s a public forum—but here were some of the most interesting points they made. (You can read more comprehensive recaps of the panel on Brier Dudley’s blog at the Seattle Times, and soon on TechFlash by moderator John Cook.)

The panel was split 3 to 2, with the narrow majority guessing Twitter will get bought next year. Andy Sack of seed-stage fund Founder’s Co-op predicted Twitter will make more money than Facebook in 2010 (surprising, given the current disparity in the other direction). Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, an online real estate firm, said Twitter should charge for search (as it has begun to do in partnerships with Google and Bing). Kelly Smith from Curious Office and the startup Pressplane argued that Twitter could be “absorbed by a big company,” but “it’s going to go nowhere.” By the end of the evening, Sack was predicting that Microsoft would buy Twitter next year.

There was a consensus that 2010 could be a big year for acquisitions. Bill Bryant of Draper Fisher Jurvetson boldly predicted that Amazon will buy Netflix, Blockbuster, and Hulu, while opening brick and mortar “Amazon media stores.” Greg Gottesman from Madrona Venture Group said Cisco might buy EMC (for VMware) and Seattle-based F5 Networks, while Microsoft might buy Research In Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry smartphone. Sack predicted Adobe would pick up Seattle photo-editing startup Picnik. Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.) would buy Seattle’s Cheezburger Network, and someone would buy Redfin.

Looking back on 2009 for a minute, the big deals that were questioned by the panel included Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture (Gottesman said it just didn’t make sense strategically) and …Next Page »

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Tom Huseby says he’s finally able to go home and not worry about seeing his family’s savings stuffed under his mattress. “The panic is over,” he says. “All of a sudden, things are getting a lot better. It doesn’t feel much better now, but it is.”

Huseby, a noted Seattle-based venture capitalist with SeaPoint Ventures, Oak Investment Partners, Hunt Ventures, and Voyager Capital (and the Godfather of what we’ve been calling the “Qpass mafia”), was giving his 30,000-foot view of the economic landscape and VC market at today’s Mobile Northwest 2009 conference in Seattle. He also drilled down into some of the most pressing challenges in the mobile space, as well as what the startup opportunities are. Just a few highlights here:

“Unemployment is going to slow growth across any consumer business. If you’re in mobile, I hate to tell you, but you’re in the consumer business. I do think there will be liquidity in mobile startups,” Huseby says. “Most startups are going to have to earn it the old-fashioned way, they’ll have to grow over a long time. You’re going to have to survive during a roller coaster ride. Every single company will have to go rushing to the bottom, and then do the slow, clanking ride to the top.”

In terms of startup opportunities, it helps to think in terms of what wireless carriers need. Huseby calls himself “fairly carrier-centric.” As he puts it, they are big customers that are predictable (once you understand them) and they generate huge amounts of cash. He laid out the top three challenges for carriers today—absolutely critical to understand if you’re an entrepreneur trying to get their attention with a new product.

—Bandwidth. There’s “tremendous pressure on carriers” to provide more bandwidth to support people’s exploding need for data connectivity wherever they go, Huseby says.

—Costs of bandwidth. “Oh my God, how are you going to pay for it?” he asks. With such a competitive market, Huseby thinks costs for consumers will actually go down. “I think they’re not going to get the money from us, they’re going to have to get it from advertising. Advertising revenue will absolutely help pay for the bandwidth.” (The problem is that mobile advertising revenue is still relatively small and doesn’t usually go to carriers.)

—Holding onto consumers. “If they’re going to pay for it with advertising, they need to get a much firmer grip on their customers,” Huseby says. He sees this as a crucial issue for the coming decade. “The next viral social network has to work hard to make [ad revenues] accrue to them. Carriers have to be very conscious of the demographics of their customers. They have to get their customers anchored in.”

After his talk, I had a chance to ask Huseby about some other areas of interest, like mobile search. He says he’s generally staying out of that space, but is looking at location-based services from the perspective of retail stores and local advertising.

We’ll have more from the conference soon, so watch this space.

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Say you’d like to look up an old friend from high school. You have no idea what happened to him after college, and you can’t find him on Facebook. But you do remember the address of his house down the street from your childhood home. What if there was a Web-based map where you could log on, locate your friend’s old house, and leave a virtual note for him to find?

That’s the scenario that Mark Sherman hopes millions of people will explore at ZoomAtlas, a new social mapping service going public today at O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Expo in New York. Using the site’s tools, you can publicly annotate any location that has some personal meaning to you. That might mean leaving a note for someone, or it might mean reminiscing about the house where you grew up, or a school you attended, or even a restaurant where you had a good meal.

But Sherman, the president, CEO, and main funder of the Cambridge, MA-based startup, thinks finding long-lost acquaintances will be the most compelling use for the site. “There’s nothing on Facebook I’ve seen that allows you to reconnect on the micro level,” he says. “The closest thing you have is groups for school alumni—but that’s not the only place that people want to reconnect from.”

You can think of ZoomAtlas as a cross between Google Maps, Facebook, and Wikipedia, with user-generated missives and memories as the key ingredients that—in theory, at least—will make it more than just another mapping site.

Speaking of Wikipedia, Sherman says Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the first wiki, is a close friend and an advisor to the company. In a short essay posted on the site, Cunningham says ZoomAtlas is “a perfect example” of the collaborative philosophy behind wikis. “We can make an atlas of our world that shows what we know and love, not just what a satellite can see,” Cunningham writes. “We can weave our memories and impressions together using the computer’s ever improving graphics to make a collaborative picture from our eyes and minds and hearts in equal proportion.”

The first thing to try when you visit ZoomAtlas is typing in a specific street address—say, the house where you grew up. You’ll see a satellite image of the neighborhood, with small icons representing the location of each house. Each house icon can be edited in a number of ways: you can move it in case it’s not in the right location on the property, you can give it a different look to correspond to your memory of the place, you can write an article about that address (this is the most Wikipedia-like part), and you can attach short notes for others to find. Right now the maps are 2-D, but in the future, according to Sherman, you’ll be able to go inside houses and annotate individual rooms. “Users are empowered to help detail to the map to the point that every location on Earth, no matter how small, can be defined and have attributes assigned to it,” says Sherman.

But ZoomAtlas is more than just a map-based bulletin board where people can leave notes for long-lost friends, Sherman says. He hopes it will evolve into the locus for any online conversation linked to a place. “It’s a framework on which to allow discussion of locations, whether big or small,” he says. “If there were another Fort Hood incident, God forbid, you could …Next Page »

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Boston-based Skyhook Wireless is expected to announce next week that it’s releasing an application for Nokia smartphones that will give owners a far faster and more accurate fix on their locations. Skyhook’s $2.99 Maps Booster works on any Symbian S60 handset and will be available starting next week through Nokia’s Ovi app store; it replaces the Symbian operating system’s built-in location-finding platform with Skyhook’s software, which then feeds location data directly to other location-aware apps such as Google Maps. The company says it created the program because Nokia phones are notorious for their slow performance in GPS mode. “With such high price tags, we think all features of Nokia smartphones should work perfectly,” Kate Imbach, Skyhook’s director of marketing and developer programs, said in a statement. “Maps Booster, finally, will make the location on any Nokia S60 device work just as well as location on the iPhone.”

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Boston-based uLocate, maker of the “Where” platform for location-based applications on mobile devices, today announced the launch of a new iPhone application called Traffic.com. Using maps and data from Navteq’s website of the same name, the application detects the user’s location and shows which local roads and highways are congested. The app, which appeared in Apple’s iTunes App Store last week and is already the store’s top traffic application, also allows users to get accident reports and other traffic data create for a customized set of frequently traveled routes.

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At a press conference in the bustling lobby of Boston’s South Station this morning, Google and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (known to locals as the “T”) announced that they’ve collaborated to make route and schedule information for all T trains and buses available inside Google Maps.

It’s all information that’s already online at the MBTA’s own Trip Planner website (which includes embedded Google maps), but now it’s accessible to Google’s large number of users, who can go to the “Get Directions” tab of a Google Map, click on the new “By Public Transit” link, and see a list of transportation options, with route maps and estimated trip times for each.

For example, for my own commute from my apartment in the South End to Xconomy’s office in Kendall Square, Google Maps suggests several options: take the #1 bus down Massachusetts Avenue to MIT, then walk (38 minutes); take the Silver Line bus to the Broadway T station, then take the Red Line to Kendall Square (37 minutes); or walk to Boylston Street, then take the Green and Red Lines to Kendall Square (43 minutes).

Using the Street View feature of Google Maps, potential T riders can get a photographic look at locations like bus stops, to better prepare for their trip. The service also works on mobile versions of Google Maps, for Web-capable cell phones such as iPhones, Blackberrys, and Android phones.

“There’s no excuse now not to feel a level of comfort [riding the T] because of the navigability of this new system,” said Dan Grabauskas, general manager of the MBTA.

Between eight and 10 other cities (including San Diego and Seattle, Xconomy’s other hometowns) have already partnered with Google to put their transit systems’ information into Google Maps, according to Steve Vinter, engineering director for Google’s Boston-area headquarters in Kendall Square.

Getting a new city involved in what Google calls its “Google Transit” program involves two ingredients, Vinter told me after the press event. “There’s a technical part and a non-technical part,” he said. “The technical part is there’s a lot of data that has to be available in a certain format, and it has to be exchanged, and there has to be a system set up to make sure it’s up to date. The non-technical piece, obviously, is a commitment to share the information and to work through the obstacles to get the partnership to be successful. In this case, it’s all come together and it’s working great.”

Vinter says Google didn’t have to do much to clean up the data supplied by the MBTA. “It was in the format we’d requested, but I think it was some work on their side to get it all organized and pulled together. That’s what the big accomplishment was here.”

Of course, the transit directions that Massachusetts residents get from Google Maps is only going to be as accurate as the MBTA’s own data. And as it turns out, there are concerns about whether that data is as up-to-date as it could be. At South Station, I spoke with Jonathan Kamens, a Boston resident who said that the MBTA’s published information about where T buses stop in his neighborhood has been wrong for the last six years. “Now they’re putting that incorrect data into Google Maps, where it will be orders of magnitude more accessible,” Kamens said.

The MBTA may already have identified Kamens as a potential troublemaker. In an unfortunate example of what I saw as overbearing policing, a transit police officer interrupted our interview and threatened to remove Kamens from South Station after she saw him hand me a flyer detailing his unsuccessful attempts to get the MBTA to update the bus route information for his neighborhood. The officer said a permit is required to distribute printed information on MBTA property—even if that printed information is being handed to a journalist. The officer said Kamens was allowed to talk to me all he wanted—he just couldn’t hand me any information on paper. [Update: Kamens has blogged about the incident here.]

I asked Vinter whether putting transit system information online via Google might create an opening for a crowdsourced solution to the MBTA’s alleged data accuracy problems. In Google Maps, after all, it’s possible for any user to correct Google’s own information about the physical locations of street addresses simply by dragging a location marker to the right spot on the map.

“Google has a lot of tools for crowdsourcing,” Vinter agreed. “I think the correction process, as you might understand, is a little more complicated. Changes have to be done in a controlled way and reviewed. I think what this is going to do is make the information that’s there much more publicly visible and accessible, and it’s going to create the opportunity to get a broader review of what’s correct and what’s not, and hopefully allow us to get that feedback loop to happen.”

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[Updated 9:20 p.m. EDT 7/10/09 with responses from Google; see the sections marked "Update" below]

Yesterday Google announced that the “My Location” feature familiar to anyone who’s used Google Maps on a mobile device—the little blue button that shows you your position on a map—is now available to people accessing Google Maps from their laptop or desktop computers as well (as long as they’re using the latest versions of the Firefox or Chrome browsers). But there’s a problem: Users are reporting in large numbers today that the My Location feature is erratic, placing them in the wrong city and occasionally on the wrong continent.

Behind this phenomenon, it turns out, is a story about competing ideas on the best way to endow Web-based applications like mapping programs with an awareness of their location—and about the race between companies like Google, Microsoft, and Boston’s Skyhook Wireless to control the way location information is fed to these applications. Skyhook’s CEO, Ted Morgan, gave me his perspective on the Google Maps development in an interview this morning. (See below for our Q&A.)

You might think that all browsers would handle location-finding in the same way. And that’s the ideal—the Cambridge, MA-based World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a draft Geolocation API (application programming interface) specification that spells out how browsers should pass the details about a computer’s location from the computer itself to the Web applications running inside the browser. But as Morgan explains, the W3C standard doesn’t specify where or how the browser should get this information from the computer—which leaves room open for competing approaches, and potentially for back-room deals.

Several years ago, Skyhook developed a browser plugin called Loki that taps into a computer’s Wi-Fi chip, takes a reading of all nearby Wi-Fi access points, and uses Skyhook’s proprietary database of access point locations around the world to triangulate the device’s location. The Apple iPhone uses this Skyhook technology whenever its Safari browser or its built-in Google Maps application request location data.

But when Google rolled out the “My Location” feature for laptop and desktop computers, the company decided to use its own geolocation algorithms rather than Skyhook’s. That was possible because the Mozilla Foundation built Google’s algorithms into the latest version of its open-source browser, Firefox 3.5, which was released on June 30. (Google also built the algorithms, not surprisingly, into its own Chrome browser.)

Google’s geolocation technology is similar in principle to Skyhook’s—it also depends largely on information about nearby Wi-Fi access points—but the accuracy of the locations actually produced by the new “My Location” feature seems to vary wildly, as users have been discovering over the last day and half. Judging from posts on Twitter, the Google system is placing some people thousands of miles away from their actual locations.

An unusual number of people, for example, report that the My Location feature shows them as being in downtown Austin, TX, even if they’re half a continent away. “Google Maps’ new ‘Show My Location’ feature puts me in the middle of Austin, TX. I’m actually downtown Manhattan,’ PhoneTag.com co-founder Mark Dillon tweeted today.

While Austin may be the center of the tech world for some South by Southwest addicts, it clearly hasn’t experienced any actual jump in population since Thursday. The problem, according to Skyhook CEO Ted Morgan, lies in the way Google collects the data behind its Wi-Fi-based positioning system. For information about the locations of access points, Google relies on crowdsourcing—it quietly gathers local readings every time someone uses a Google app on an iPhone or a Blackberry, or some other mobile device.

Crowdsourcing is an inherently sloppy approach, according to Morgan. Skyhook’s own approach is to send Wi-Fi-sensing vehicles down every highway, street, and alley, methodically establishing the position and strength of every access point they pass (most are broadband routers owned by local businesses and residents). Morgan says Skyhook has also developed ways of correcting for the fact that access points sometimes move—for example, when someone relocates their home from Austin to Manhattan.

[UPDATE: Google offers a different reason for the inaccuracies. Reached by e-mail this evening, Google communications officer Elaine Filadelfo said users having issues with accuracy "are likely users who are not using Wi-Fi, for which we can generally provide a more accurate location. Without Wi-Fi, we base location on IP address, which can be inaccurate depending on your ISP and its location."]

Morgan would like to give every developer working on location-aware Web applications the opportunity to tap into Skyhook’s more accurate database through Loki. The problem is that …Next Page »

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Yash Talreja says most people don’t know that cell phones were around for 30 years before they became affordable, useful, and prevalent devices for ordinary consumers. Now he says the same thing is happening with geographic information systems, or GIS. “For 30 years, it was a very specialized area,” Talreja says. “It was used by the very few.”

Nowadays, however, a confluence of forces is making GIS technology far more powerful, appealing, and pervasive—and San Diego’s resident expertise in software development and related technologies is putting the city near the center of the GIS development map. As a result, the San Diego Software Industry Council is organizing a GIS interest group to focus on various aspects of geospatial information processing, including geo-coding, location-based services, analysis, and visualization. Talreja, who is the group’s designated chair, says the combination of mapping technology, precise global positioning satellite technology, and the Internet with its search engine capabilities has made GIS one of the industry’s hottest sectors in the past two or three years.

Finding something on Google Maps is one thing, Talreja says. But the problem becomes more interesting when you get hungry while driving around, and the map interface on your phone or GPS device identifies and locates five restaurants within a six-block radius. Talreja says the spread of such location-based services means “The time will soon come when you’re gas tank indicator light comes up, and the map shows you where the nearest gas station is located.”

“There is a massive amount of data lying around that is related to a spot on the map, (environmental, traffic, health),” Bob Slapin, executive director of the software industry council, tells me by e-mail. “This data is often in different silos and in most cases making sense of it requires running around, finding it and mapping it somehow. The data is often structured and unstructured,” meaning software with a certain versatility is required to process it.

Slapin says he’s involved with EcoLayers, a San Diego GIS company developing interesting applications for watershed management. “This may sound boring but there is a realization that the control of water quality has a significant impact on the available water resources. Present management of this data is a nightmare.”

While San Diego’s software industry has about 10 active special interest groups (Slapin says, “we call them BIGS, Business Interest Groups”), there seems to be a special regional strength in geospatial systems. “We noticed …Next Page »

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Most eyes in the mobile industry are on San Francisco today, where Apple unveiled the latest version of its smart phone platform, the $199 iPhone 3GS, at its Worldwide Developer Conference. But that hasn’t diminished the buzz around Palm’s newest phone, the $200 Palm Pre, which hit stores on Saturday and has already sold at least 100,000 units. One of the leading apps for the Pre, a collection of location-driven software widgets called Where, comes from Boston’s own uLocate.

Like the iPhone, Symbian, and Blackberry versions of Where, the version that uLocate developed for the Pre’s webOS operating system taps into the device’s built-in GPS capability to provide location-specific data such as weather forecasts, news, restaurant reviews, movie showtimes, and nearby Starbucks locations. It’s currently the 5th most popular app in the Palm Pre’s App Catalog, according to Lacy Garcia, uLocate’s director of marketing and communications. (At this early stage in the Pre’s life, though, there are fewer than two dozen apps in the catalog altogether.)

But one unique feature of Where on the Palm Pre—thanks to a webOS communications feature called Palm Synergy—is the ability to weave localized content into the device’s personal-organizer apps. For example, users can insert showtimes for local movies directly into their calendars.

“Palm has done a great job with webOS, and has allowed us to integrate the features that our consumers love about WHERE with the functions of the device such as calendar and contacts,” Walt Doyle, CEO of uLocate, said in a statement. “This integration has helped us deliver a very rich user experience.”

Preparing the Where package of applications for the Pre was “a breeze,” thanks to webOS, according to Dan Gilmartin, uLocate’s vice president of marketing. “As the leader in the mobile application space, we think it is important to make the Where application available to users on all platforms,” Gilmartin says. “With their long history in mobile, we believe that Palm will continue to create great devices, and the Pre is no exception…We think that users will be very happy with Where on the Pre and this latest release will build upon our leadership in the mobile local arena. ”

The Palm Pre, which is available for the Sprint network in the United States, has both a touch screen and a pull-out keyboard. It’s widely considered to be the make-or-break device for the Sunnyvale, CA, device maker, which transformed the smart phone industry with the Treo in 2002 but has found itself overshadowed in recent years by competitors such as Apple. In other Palm Pre news, our Seattle team reported today on new entertainment apps from Microsoft spinoff Zumobi.

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Ryan Sarver, the former director of consumer products and company evangelist at Boston’s Skyhook Wireless, has been hired by San Francisco-based Twitter, according to a piece yesterday in Silicon Alley Insider. Skyhook sells a software and database system that allows Wi-Fi and hybrid Wi-Fi/GPS devices to determine their locations; Sarver’s move is seen as a possible sign that Twitter is moving to add location-based elements to its messaging service.

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Tired of hearing your airline seatmates blab on their cellphones just to tell people “I’m on the plane,” or “I’ve just landed”? Sick of texting “Where are you?” when you’re trying to meet up with friends, or when a family member is stuck in traffic? Then Bryan Trussel, an ex-Microsoft veteran turned entrepreneur, has a service for you.

It’s called Glympse, and it debuts today as a downloadable application on T-Mobile G1 phones with the Google Android operating system—with iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile versions to come soon. The mobile software lets you share your location automatically with whoever you want (as long as they have Internet access on their phone or laptop), for however long you want. You click on an e-mail or phone number in your contact list, and that person can then click on a URL to open up a dynamic map that traces your location in real-time and gives your speed and estimated arrival time, if you specify a destination. The person on the receiving end does not need to sign up for Glympse (though the service is enhanced if they do), and can view the map on their phone, laptop, or desktop.

Trussel, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, says Glympse is meant to help business associates and acquaintances meet up, as well as friends and families—so it has a potentially huge user base. Not surprisingly, the location-based services field is pretty crowded, with competition from big players like Google Latitude and overlap with location-aware startups like Seattle-based Pelago (maker of Whrrl), Silicon Valley-based Loopt and Brightkite, and Boston-based uLocate. But Janis Machala of UW Tech Transfer, who watches the mobile space, says Glympse is “much more user-friendly” than its closest competitors.

I’ve talked with Trussel at length a couple of times in the past few months, while his Redmond, WA-based startup has been in stealth mode. Trussel previously spent 16 years at Microsoft, working on everything from the Windows operating system to interactive TV to casual games. He was most recently the manager of Xbox Live Arcade, Microsoft’s game distribution network that is popular among gamers and developers alike. He left in March 2008 and decided to start a company with two other Microsoft friends, Steve Miller and Jeremy Mercer.

“We wanted to take advantage of something we saw as an integration point of a lot of new things: smarter cellphones, GPS technology, and flat-rate data plans,” Trussel told me. What this seemed to open up was “location sharing between cellphones—something we see being ubiquitous,” he said.

At first, people laughed at their goal. Their primary competition was text messaging and phone calls, after all, and who’s going to stop texting or calling? Also, the Glympse team didn’t have much direct experience in the mobile space. (Perhaps to make up for this, Trussel says he owns six different phones.) “People were saying you can’t do a consumer mobile app without deep carrier relationships,” Trussel says. “It used to be that carriers were the only distribution channel.” But now there are ways around …Next Page »

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Seattle has become a major global health hub over the last decade, thanks in no small part to having the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world leaders in funding for global health research, in our own backyard. Now, an emerging and related discipline is also finding an increasing number of connections here—global technology. Researchers around Seattle (and elsewhere) are thinking outside the box to come up with innovative, inexpensive technologies that can be easily implemented in developing countries to improve quality of life there.

“Technology is naturally mixing with global health as there is much low-hanging fruit where a little tech can make a big difference,” Gaetano Borriello, a University of Washington computer science professor, said in an e-mail. “Seattle is a hub for both, so it is a natural place for this new development to be happening.”

This past weekend, the third annual IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development took place at Carnegie Mellon University’s Qatar campus in Doha. Seattle-area researchers, specifically from the UW, made quite a showing at the meeting. Several Microsoft projects were presented too, and Bill Gates showed up to give the keynote talk.

Here are some global technology projects underway at the UW and presented at the meeting:

—*bus (or Starbus), a transportation tracking system developed by Borriello and UW technical communication professor Beth Kolko. *bus relies on only GPS and SMS technologies to track any vehicle by cell phone, as long as that vehicle has been equipped with a simple tracking device (*box). The researchers tested the system in Seattle this year and plan to start tests in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, soon. In areas with limited transportation and no means of communicating their schedules, a system like this would allow residents of those areas to get the most use possible out of buses and trains.

—MultiMath, a system that uses multiple numerical keyboards to allow students to share a computer in a classroom situation, led by UW computer scientist Richard Anderson and the UW Center for Information and Society’s Joyojeet Pal. The technology would allow a single computer to go farther in resource-poor settings, and allows children more interaction with each other to boot.

—AndroidRosa and JavaRosa, two open-source applications for data sharing on cell phones in the developing world, created by Borriello and his colleagues. The applications are part of the larger open-source cell phone-based data collection project OpenRosa. The idea behind Borriello’s applications is that sharing information such as medical records or tracking disease spread using paper records is slow, but establishing traditional online sharing systems is unrealistic in poor settings where computers, Internet service, and even electricity may be hard to come by. Cell phone usage is common even in poor countries, presenting an intriguing and efficient alternative to paper records.

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Manchester, NH-based Cadec Global, which makes GPS tracking, logging, and safety equipment for fleets of trucks, said today that it has raised $4 million in new capital from existing investor Thule Investments of Reykjavik, Iceland.

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Boston’s Skyhook Wireless and two forty four a.m., the startup behind the Locale location-awareness application for the Google Android mobile operating system, announced today that Locale now includes Skyhook’s XPS hybrid location-finding software. Carter Jernigan of two forty four a.m. says Locale originally tapped into the native GPS and Wi-Fi-based location finding capabilities of Android phones such as the T-Mobile G1, but Google’s database of the locations of Wi-Fi networks was not nearly as extensive as Skyhook’s—hence the switch. “Often times I’ll walk into a building and Google’s service might give me a location within a 1-mile range, but Skyhook will be within 100 feet or less,” says Jernigan. Locale, originally developed by Jernigan and fellow MIT students as part of a class project for MIT professor Hal Abelson, was the winner of the $275,000 top prize in Google’s Android Developer Challenge in September, 2008. It’s available free at the Android Market, the mobile-accessible database of Android apps.

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Seattle-based TrafficGauge, a provider of road traffic information in real time, has been acquired by Networks In Motion, a mobile navigation and search company in Aliso Viejo, CA. Financial terms were not disclosed. TrafficGauge first launched its mobile traffic map in Seattle in 2003.

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Boston-based uLocate announced today that its Where platform, a collection of “widgets” allowing access to location-based services and information on mobile devices, will be available for T-Mobile’s G1 phone, the first mass-market phone that runs the Google Android operating system. Where, which is already available for the Apple iPhone, Blackberry smartphones, and other devices, is  available free to G1 owners through the online Android Market starting today, the company said. (Video here.)

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Back in the days when you could play video games only at arcades or on home consoles, the game leader boards—showing the top scores—were, by definition, local. You had a finite group of competitors, and if you had enough time and enough quarters, you had a shot at getting on the board. But with the advent of network-based gaming, the leader board has lost much of its meaning. Your best score might rank 103,542nd out of a million players around the world—but what does that get you?

There’s a small startup in Cambridge, MA, Geocade, that wants to put the local element back in the leader board—and to do it, they’re taking advantage of the location-finding capabilities of the latest mobile platforms. By signing up for Geocade’s free location-based leader board service, game developers can give people who play their games on the Apple iPhone and other mobile devices the ability to see how they rank compared to other players from the same country, state, city, or even the same block.

Geocade launched its service yesterday, and already there are two games available in the iTunes App Store—Lemonade Stand and Soft Landing—that feature Geocade-powered local leader boards. In Soft Landing—a game that challenges you to bring the plummeting U.S. economy to a “soft landing” by tilting the phone in various directions to adjust interest rates and hand out government bailouts to homeowners and corporations—I was briefly ranked 24th among all players in Cambridge.

CEO James Caralis says the kernel of the idea for Geocade came to him a couple of years ago during a plane trip. “I was on a flight on Song [the now-defunct budget carrier run by Delta] and they had this trivia game on the plane where the passengers competed against each other. I thought that was a lot of fun. So when the iPhone came out—and especially the 3G, with its GPS capabilities—I thought, wouldn’t it be great to bring back the concept of getting the high score in the arcade and bring that into the mobile gaming era.”

The system Caralis and his three programmer-consultants have built grabs a phone’s latitude and longitude (as determined through GPS, WiFi-based positioning, or cell tower triangulation) and sends that information—along with a player’s ID and their game score—to Geocade’s servers over the wireless data network. There, the scores are ranked alongside those from other players in the selected geographical area, and the rankings are transmitted back to the device.

Tapping into the location-based leader boards involves adding only a few lines of code to an existing mobile game, Caralis says. “We’ve been actively working with game companies for the last couple of weeks, and we’ve already got Lemonade Stand [an economic simulation based on a vintage Apple II game] signed up and 10 more …Next Page »

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Seattle-based Pelago, maker of the Whrrl mobile-networking application, announced it has partnered with Norwich, VT-based Maponics to provide the location-aware service to customers in more than 50,000 neighborhoods in 2,000 cities across the U.S. and Canada. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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San Diego-based Qualcomm, which is famous for its CDMA wireless communications chips but is also a leading maker of GPS chips for cell phones and other devices, has signed a deal with Boston’s Skyhook Wireless that will move it toward hybrid location-finding technologies.

Qualcomm will incorporate Skyhook’s Wi-Fi Positioning System—a software system that determines a device’s location based on the identities of nearby Wi-Fi networks—into its gpsOne line of Assisted GPS chips, Skyhook announced today.

“Combining Skyhook’s technology with our gpsOne offering will enable users to obtain location fixes much more rapidly and provide for a more ubiquitous [location-based services] experience whether indoors, outside or in complex environments such as urban areas,” Jason Bremner, senior director of cellular products for Qualcomm, said in a statement.

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Woe to the hoodie-wearing miscreant who steals a Mac laptop equipped with MacTrak. He’s likely to find his photo plastered all over the Internet—and the police at his door.

MacTrak is a beta application for Macs introduced today by Portland, OR-based GadgetTrak. It’s similar in conception to Absolute Software’s LoJack for Laptops and to Adeona, a free open-source tracking system released this summer by computer-science researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego. But it has a couple of interesting twists that may increase your chances of getting back your stolen laptop—or that, at the very least, will cause greater embarrassment for the thief.

First, once you activate the $59.95 program by logging into your GadgetTrak account, the software uses the laptop’s built-in iSight camera to snap a photo of whoever is using the machine every 30 minutes. If the laptop is connected to the Internet, the software will automatically e-mail these photos to you and post them to your account at the Flickr photo-sharing website (see image below). You can set these images to be private or public—depending on how much help you want catching the thief.

Second, MacTrak uses Wi-Fi-based location-finding technology provided by Boston-based Skyhook Wireless to determine the laptop’s latitude and longitude, usually to within about 20 meters. This information is uploaded to Flickr along with the iSight photos. You can then get help recovering your device by forwarding the information to GadgetTrak or directly to law-enforcement authorities.

Unlike the LoJack for Laptops system, GadgetTrak’s software doesn’t rely on a monitoring center, doesn’t send location information to the company, and doesn’t have backdoor access to the laptop’s operating system—measures the company, on its website, calls “an invasion of privacy.”

The Adeona system is also designed to preserve laptop owners’ privacy, and has the added attraction of being free. But the GadgetTrak’s positioning systems gives it a leg up: Adeona can only tell you which Internet routers communicated with your stolen laptop, whereas MacTrak can tell you the device’s actual location.

The integration of Skyhook’s Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) into GadgetTrak’s product is the latest in a long line of software deals engineered by the Boston company; the most recent before this, was an arrangement to put WPS into the Symbian operating system used by millions of cell phones worldwide. “GadgetTrak is an excellent example of location-awareness enhancing the security of our valuable mobile devices,” Kate Imbach, Skyhook’s director of marketing, said in a statement.

For Windows laptops, GadgetTrak makes an application that, like Adeona, tracks stolen laptops to the nearest Internet router. The company also makes “search and destroy” software that can remotely erase sensitive data stored on missing laptops or smartphones.

Update, 12/3/08: In a related customer win for Skyhook, Awareness Technologies of Los Angeles announced today that it has added the Wi-Fi Positioning System to its Laptop Cop software for laptop recovery and remote file deletion.

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