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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Call it the iPhone “2G.” Two Seattle-area startups that start with the letter “G” are rolling out new iPhone apps today. OK, this would not normally make significant news for us, because new apps appear on a daily basis, but each of these cases provides an interesting update to the company’s mobile strategy, so here we go:

—Glympse has been on a tear since May, when co-founder and CEO Bryan Trussel said the Seattle-area company first started offering its location-sharing service on mobile phones. The idea of the software is that your friends and business contacts can get an immediate “glympse” of where you are on a map, automatically, for a certain amount of time that you set. Today’s announcement that Glympse is available as a free download on the iPhone is no surprise. Last week, the startup’s service was named a showcase application in Windows Marketplace for Mobile, and the company has been working on its iPhone app for some time. It’s all part of Glympse’s strategy to build a mass-consumer audience based on a free service, before working up to paid models and location-based ads.

—Gist has also been picking up steam, in a very different market. The Seattle-based company, led by founder and CEO T.A. McCann, focuses on giving consumers and business customers information about their e-mail and social-network contacts in a quick and easy way. The goal is to help people manage their relationships more efficiently, for example, by feeding them updates from all over the Web about their contacts. Gist opened up to the public last month, and McCann told me then that the company had done some optimization for the iPhone and was more broadly improving its mobile version. The new iPhone app, which is free, makes sense for busy professionals who want to scan the latest info on whoever they’re meeting next, from blogs, articles, and social media, right before their appointment. It also fits into Gist’s strategy for bridging e-mail, search, and social media in order to help people manage all that information.

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When I set out to write “Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings” two weeks ago, I really meant to put all seven projects into one column. But I’m famous around Xconomy for my inability to say anything briefly. If 800 words are good, then 1,600 words are even better—that’s my motto.

The point being that I only got through three projects in that first column—on art, writing, and photography—before I ran out of time and space. Last week, I finished two more, on audio self-publishing and computer animation. In today’s third and last installment, I want to suggest two final projects that will give you a chance to express yourself in digital media that may be a little less familiar: maps and 3-D virtual worlds.

6. Put Yourself on the Map with Platial

Mapmaking hasn’t traditionally been seen as a craft open to amateurs, or even one where self-expression is encouraged. A map, after all, is a public resource, and is supposed to be objective and accurate, right? Well, maybe in theory. In practice, the digital revolution is transforming the meaning of maps just as drastically as it’s changing the way we think about music and news and other forms of communication.

Platial is a website where average users can try a new form of storytelling that combines maps, photos, and writing. Once you’ve signed up for an account, you can create your own themed maps for other Platial visitors to browse. Each map consists of a set of locations that you designate on an underlying Google map; for each location, you can add a title, a written description, photos, and Web links.

One way to use Platial would be as a kind of personal photo-travelogue, uploading pictures from your trips across the country or around the world. But a lot of people seem to employ Platial to document personal interests or obsessions. For example, a user named “Barnaclebarnes” has created a map of famous film locations, like the house in suburban Tujunga, CA, where Steven Spielberg filmed E.T. And I’m working on my own Platial map showing locations around San Francisco used in one specific film, Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

You can designate a map on Platial as closed—meaning it’s for your own personal doodling—or open, meaning anyone can contribute to it. One cool open map is “Where I Was When I Heard Obama Won,” where you can join the more than 15,000 people who have marked the spots where they learned of President Obama’s historic election. For people on the go, the folks at Platial have also built an iPhone app called Nearby that figures out where you are and shows you nearby Platial locations created by other users. The app also lets you create and document new locations directly from your phone.

To me, the intriguing thing about Platial is the way it melds the personal and the public—allowing users to anchor their inner visions and insights by attaching them to maps representing our shared landscape. And Platial is just one example of a worldwide explosion of Web-mediated geographical expression and exploration. The phenomenon goes by fancy names like “neogeography” and “locative media,” but it boils down to …Next Page »

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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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Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) announced today that starting next week, customers will be able to order versions of its Mini 10 netbook computer equipped with GPS hardware as well as hybrid GPS and Wi-Fi-based location-finding software from Boston’s Skyhook Wireless. It’s the first time Round Rock, TX-based Dell has licensed Skyhook’s software for its products, and the deal could provide a big boost for the venture-funded startup.

The Mini 10 is one of Dell’s main entries in the burgeoning category of netbooks, miniature portable computers that typically run Windows XP (rather than Vista) and have less processing power and memory than standard laptops, but cost under $500. Lionel Menchaca, Dell’s “chief blogger,” wrote in a post today that the options customers can choose for pre-installation on the Mini 10 will include the “Dell Wireless 700 location solution,” including a Broadcom GPS chip and Skyhook’s software, which can determine a device’s location based on satellite signals, the IDs of nearby Wi-Fi networks, or both.

That means the Mini 10 will be able to function much like a personal navigation device—perhaps helping netbooks to impinge on the market for standalone GPS devices sold by TomTom and other manufacturers. In fact, Menchaca said the “Wireless 700″ package will include navigation software called CoPilot that offers 2D and 3D map views as well as turn-by-turn directions to drivers.

The package also includes Skyhook’s Loki software, which integrates with browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer to help users retrieve Web-based information based on their location. (Dell has already set up a “Loki dashboard” for Mini 10 users at dell.loki.com.)

Ted Morgan, Skyhook’s CEO, says the Dell deal is a major one for his company—perhaps the biggest one since Apple announced in January 2008 that Skyhook’s Wi-Fi positioning system would serve as one of the location-finding technologies on the iPhone. “Dell is a pretty big name across a bunch of different categories—and is rumored to be entering some new ones,” says Morgan, perhaps referring to talk that Dell is developing an Android-based device that could be a smartphone, a media player, or an Internet device. “It’s a big win for us to have both Dell and Apple aggressively out there” promoting Skyhook’s technology, Morgan says.

It’s also strategically important for Skyhook to have a foothold in the netbook market, Morgan says. “If you look at what Dell and Acer and Asus are doing, they’re inventing a whole new category that’s huge for students and mobile professionals,” he says. “We like the idea of working with new manufacturers and new devices that are ripe targets for location-based software.”

Dell’s Menchaca said the Wireless 700 option will eventually be available for Windows Vista and Windows 7 computers, and for other Dell systems beyond the Mini 10.

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The conventional wisdom used to be that technology startups should be located as close to their venture investors’ main offices as possible. That way, it’s easier to call on your venture partners’ experience and networks, get them to attend your board meetings, and so forth.

But the conventional wisdom may be dead wrong. Private equity industry news site PE Hub is calling attention today to a new study showing that startups located far away from their venture investors’ offices actually perform better than those headquartered closer to the mother ship. That finding may come as solace to entrepreneurs in cities such as San Diego and Seattle that are slightly off the beaten venture path, or that are losing homegrown firms.

The study, by a group of researchers from Harvard Business School, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, focused on venture firms in the nations’ three largest clusters of venture activity—Boston, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area—and asked which of their portfolio companies outperformed the firms’ averages. “Surprisingly, much of the VC outperformance in these venture centers arises from their non-local investments,” the authors report. (PE Hub has put the full paper online here.)

The reason for this counterintuitive finding, the researchers speculate, is that there’s a higher “monitoring cost” to investing in a far-away company—because of the expense of traveling to those locations, among other things—and that venture firms therefore have a higher bar for making those investments. In other words, they only bet on companies that they expect to have a higher rate of return, and to the extent that they bet right, they get that higher rate.

This “hurdle rate” effect is so strong, in fact, that the researchers found that outperformance rates actually go down if a venture firm opens a branch office in the same city with once-distant portfolio companies. Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner told PE Hub’s Dan Primack that the results ought to cause venture firms to rethink their assumptions about geography. Focusing on local investments because they’re less costly might be a “mental trap,” Lerner said, if it leads investors to relax their standards.

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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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There’s a saying in sports that if you don’t notice the referees, they’re doing a great job. The same goes for offensive linemen in football, tech support in big companies…and Kent, WA-based Naverus when you’re flying in an airplane. Sure, we in the media notice companies like Naverus when they raise $4 million in venture funding in a tough climate for follow-on financing (announced last Friday). But, truth be told, we’ve had our eye on this interesting aircraft-navigation tech company for a while now.

Naverus was founded in 2003 by a pair of Alaska Airlines pilots, Steve Fulton and Hal Andersen, and former Coinstar CEO Dan Gerrity. The idea was to commercialize an emerging technique known as “required navigation performance” (RNP), which harnesses advanced avionics and GPS technology to guide airplanes’ flight paths on approaches and departures in such a precise way as to do away with ground-based navigation—and what’s more, make flight paths faster and more fuel-efficient, and reduce carbon emissions to boot. The technique was originally developed to help planes take off and land at Juneau International Airport and other remote locations where pilots have to deal with dangerous weather conditions and mountains.

It’s all part of a broader shift in aviation practices called Performance-based Navigation, which uses cutting-edge sensors, communications equipment, and sophisticated flight computers, to work out airplanes’ flight paths—an area that Naverus contributes to across the board. The company has been part of a “fundamental transformation of how air navigation takes place,” says Dottie Hall, chief marketing officer at Naverus. Hall would know; she was a founding vice president of Eclipse Aviation in Albuquerque, NM, and has owned and managed touring operations of vintage airplanes, including her own 1950s-era Lockheed Constellation. And yes, she has her pilot’s license. (Hall was also a very early employee at Microsoft in the late 1970s, but that’s another story.)

To give some idea of the benefits of Naverus’s technology, Hall points out that Southwest Airlines, a flagship customer, saves on the order of one minute per flight using RNP—and that translates into about 155,000 tons of carbon dioxide saved per year. Fuel savings are in the ballpark of …Next Page »

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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-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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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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Back in January, Boston’s Skyhook Wireless scored a huge win by getting its Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS)—which helps cellphones and laptops determine their locations by listening for nearby wireless hotspots—into the Apple iPhone. And every few weeks since then I’ve gotten another note from Skyhook, saying that WPS or its hybrid GPS/Wi-Fi/cellular-based cousin, XPS, has been incorporated into yet another system, whether it be camera phones, memory cards for cameras, Mac desktop applications, or browsers.

And now Skyhook has pulled off its biggest coup since the Apple deal, getting WPS added to Symbian—the operating system used on hundreds of mobile phones made by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and other manufacturers.

In an announcement today, Skyhook said that Symbian phones running WPS were being demonstrated at this week’s Symbian Smartphone Show in London. The demonstration proves that WPS can be successfully integrated with the location-based services already built into Symbian OS 9.5, the latest version of the operating system, the company said. These features allow owners of Symbian phones to do things like exchanging Wi-Fi-derived “location tags” which can be shared with GPS-based mapping programs, helping phone owners to navigate to one another’s positions.

While many Symbian phones can already determine their locations using GPS, the main selling point for WPS has always been that GPS signals are often weak or unavailable indoors and in dense urban areas. Mike Whittingham, vice president of ecosystem development for Symbian Limited, said in a statement that Skyhook’s WPS is “an innovative solution that will enable the future revenue opportunities of location-based services.”

Mike Shean, vice president of business development, called the Symbian deal “an important milestone” for the company, given that Symbian is the world’s leading provider of smartphone operating systems. “This demonstration shows how Wi-Fi-based positioning can be used by Symbian OS-based devices to enable many innovative and location aware applications,” Shean said.

There was no word in the company’s announcement about when the first Symbian-based smartphones with WPS will be available to consumers.

I fully expect the parade of Skyhook-enabled phones and applications to continue; it won’t be long, I predict, before WPS or XPS show up in a Google Android phone, given the large percentage of Android applications that draw on location information.

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When you open the Google Maps application on the Apple iPhone and click the “target” button, the device pulls up a local map and shows your current position as a blue dot. You could easily do the same thing on your laptop—if, that is, your Web browser could communicate with a location-sensing device in your computer, such as its Wi-Fi chip.

And soon it will. Mozilla, the Mountain View, CA-based organization behind the Firefox browser, revealed yesterday that future versions of Firefox will be location-aware—meaning they’ll have built-in software that taps into a computer’s Wi-Fi chip or other wireless sensors, figures out the machine’s current latitude and longitude, and feeds that information (with the user’s consent) to any website that requests it. And to test the idea, Mozilla released an experimental Firefox plugin called Geode that does exactly that, using the Loki location-finding system developed by Boston’s Skyhook Wireless. Skyhook says the Mozilla deal could foreshadow a time when Loki is built into all browsers.

Loki, which determines a machine’s location by comparing the IDs of nearby Wi-Fi access points to Skyhook’s national database of Wi-Fi networks, was already available as a free download for Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. For Geode, according to Skyhook co-founder and vice president of business development Mike Shean, the company made some minor tweaks to comply with the World Wide Web Consortium’s draft geolocation specification and to add privacy-protection features requested by Mozilla. Loki also comes with a toolbar and a logo, whereas Geode, once installed, runs invisibly. But “under the covers it’s the same system,” Shean says.

Shean said talks between Skyhook and Mozilla began shortly after last January’s announcement of the deal between Skyhook and Apple that put Skyhook’s proprietary Wi-Fi Positioning System on the iPhone. “Since the launch of the iPhone and the ability that Apple has given to developers to leverage location, the market around location-based services has been on a pretty aggressive upswing, and that has also manifested itself in the browser world,” Shean says. “The browser folks and the laptop folks are looking at ways to incorporate location into what they do, and that’s the reason that Mozilla approached us—because we obviously are the only ones really offering Wi-Fi-based location in the Web world for laptops and other Wi-Fi devices.”

In its blog, Mozilla Labs, the organization’s R&D wing, said yesterday that Geode is intended to give Web developers an opportunity to experiment with “location-aware experiences” ahead of the official implementation of geolocation capabilities in Firefox 3.1, which is expected to be released in beta form later this year. So far, there are only three examples of websites that grab location information from Geode: a “Food Finder” page, developed by Mozilla Labs’ head of user experience Aza Raskin, that plots a user’s location on a Google map and shows nearby eateries; Fire Eagle, a Yahoo service that acts as a central registry for users’ locations; and the Pownce file-sharing/social-networking service, which can show members’ locations on their profiles by checking in with Geode or Fire Eagle.

But more examples are on the way, according to Shean. “We’re working with literally dozens of content providers and other companies that use maps,” he says. “Over the next several weeks you’ll see a whole slew of different websites rolling out with this technology.”

And in the long run, Skyhook would like to see the Loki technology built into all Web browsers, Shean says: “We’re very pleased to see Mozilla leading the way around location in the browser, but we are actually working with all of the browser providers to discuss opportunities to bundle our technology into their software.”

Update 10/8/08 2:00 pm: I just learned of another website using Geode for location-based customization: Outside.in Radar, a section of Brooklyn, NY-based hyperlocal news site Outside.in where users can see news, discussions, and alerts specific to their location.

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Marlborough, MA-based Netezza (NYSE: NZ) will today unveil a feature for which users of its data warehouse appliances have long been clamoring: location.

The firm raised more than $100 million in a July 2007 IPO, based largely on the perceived strength of its appliances, which are designed to speed up the complex queries that business managers often need to run against their historical business data. Traditional data warehouses are sundry contraptions, consisting of storage hardware from the likes of EMC or Hitachi, servers from IBM, Sun, HP, or Teradata, and database software from Oracle, IBM, or Microsoft. But Netezza combines all of these elements into one box. And using a combination of technical tricks—such as running queries in parallel against hundreds of segments of a database, and filtering and pre-analyzing data using processors placed directly on storage disks rather than moving it all to main memory first—its devices can complete many types of business-intelligence (BI) queries 10 to 100 times as fast as competitors’ systems.

But until this week, there was one type of data that Netezza’s appliances couldn’t handle at all: spatial information such as latitudes and longitudes. That was a key shortcoming, since more and more business decisions have a location-based component. Cellular providers, for example, need to know where customers have the most trouble with dropped calls before they can decide where to build new cell towers. But for the most part, solving the geospatial parts of such riddles has fallen to specialized geographic information systems (GIS), which evolved separately from most other business software and are set apart by very different ways of storing data—using formats that Netezza’s database couldn’t even read.

So Netezza was, in effect, ceding the spatial information management business—which is expected to generate $5.1 billion in IT revenues per year by 2012, according to research firm IDC—to Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and other competitors whose database programs offer support for geospatial data types. But at a user conference in Orlando, FL, today, Netezza will announce a software extension that allows its data warehouse appliances not only to handle location-based information, but to do it at the same accelerated rate that they can execute standard business queries.

It’s a feature that Netezza customers have been requesting for years, according to Jonathan Shepherd, the company’s general manager of location based solutions. “What we saw was that in insurance, financial services, telecommunications, retail, online, advertising, and government, customers were primarily using Oracle, which has the largest share of the spatial data market. And they were saying ‘If you could do in our spatial data warehouse what you’ve done in our BI warehouse, we’d be thrilled.’ So we saw an opportunity to merge the two.”

But following through on that opportunity required some help from another local startup, Boston-based Intelligent Integration Systems, Inc., or IISi. A year ago, says Shepherd, Netezza launched a program giving outside software developers the technical details they needed to write applications that would run inside the massively parallel architecture of Netezza’s appliances. IISi was one of the companies that took up this challenge, creating a geospatial toolkit that allowed Netezza’s built-in database to handle data encoded using specifications from the Open Geospatial Consortium, the leading standards body in the GIS field. “We saw IISi’s effort as being applicable across our customer base, so we acquired the technology from them,” says Shepherd.

That’s what the company is unveiling today, under the name Netezza Spatial. It’s also working with other vendors, such as PitneyBowes’ MapInfo location intelligence division and spatial data conversion specialist Safe Software, to make sure that the new technology works with existing BI and GIS software.

Already, at least one Netezza customer is using the spatial extension: New York-based Guy Carpenter, which helps insurance companies balance risks and obtain reinsurance. The company must frequently answer questions such as how many of a client’s subscribers live within a given floodplain or earthquake zone or are likely to suffer storm damage in an approaching hurricane. “Providing real-time, predictive data to our insurance customers is critical when it comes to natural disasters,” Shajy Mathai, a Guy Carpenter managing director, said in a statement. “The combined solution of Netezza, MapInfo and Safe Software provides us the critical tool we need to ensure our customers are getting the most up-to-date information.”

Shepherd couldn’t say exactly how much faster Guy Carpenter can run geospatial queries now that it’s using Netezza’s appliances. “What we’re comfortable saying is that we’re seeing the same order-of-magnitude improvement—meaning 10 to 100 times faster than our customers’ legacy systems,” he says. “We’ll have more case studies as we announce more customers. But the issue Netezza is seeing is that our 200-plus [existing] customers want to capture this data, but it has not been easy to query and derive meaningful analytics. That was really the motivation for us to acquire this technology and make it available.”

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