When I was in fifth grade, I wanted to be an architect. (I also wanted to be a geneticist, a meteorologist, and an astronaut. I guess I wound up doing the next best thing to all of those sci/tech careers—writing about them.) I loved my junior builder kit, a collection of little plastic columns and I-beams and snap-on windows that was perfect for constructing models of International-style skyscrapers like the Sears Tower in Chicago. The only problem with the kit was that once you’d finished your perfect modernist creation, you had to tear it all down before you could build something else.

Now there’s an easy way to build as many model buildings as you want—and put them on display for millions of people to see. It’s Google’s Building Maker tool, released last month. The Web-based software lets you easily create beautifully textured 3-D models of real buildings by matching up simple digital shapes with information from Google’s aerial photographs of major cities. You can store your finished models in Google’s 3-D Warehouse and submit them to Google for “publication.” If a model is well-constructed and no one else has built a better version, Google will insert it into Google Earth itself.

Google made Building Maker available for about 50 world cities when it introduced the tool on October 13. This Tuesday, it added eight new cities to the list: Boston; Brussels, Belgium; Cologne and Dortmund in Germany; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; Rotterdam in the Netherlands; and San Jose, CA. Once I heard Boston had been added to the list, I couldn’t resist diving in and playing around with the tool, starting with a model of my own apartment building in Boston’s South End.

After a couple of days of experimenting, I can tell that Building Maker is going to provide some addictive fun for a lot of mapping and modeling freaks like me. But just as important, I think it will provide a rewarding way for people who aren’t professional architects or cartographers to contribute to the “geoweb.” Today, we can explore this expanding digital replica of the real world through 2-D interfaces like Google Maps, Google Earth, and Microsoft Virtual Earth. But as it gains fidelity, the geoweb could eventually blossom into the immersive, geographically accurate 3-D online world that futurists have called the Metaverse.

If the Metaverse does come into being someday, it will be in large part thanks to Google, which is on a mission to “create a three-dimensional model of every built structure on Earth,” according to an October blog past by Google product manager Mark Limber. But even a company as wealthy as Google doesn’t have the resources to model all the world’s buildings on its own. So in classic Tom Sawyer fashion, it came up with Building Maker, which makes the work so enjoyable that thousands of Google users will be glad to pitch in.

From talking with Limber himself yesterday, I’m convinced that this strategy is only one part shrewdness and about three parts sheer enthusiasm. “The world is really big, and there are an awful lot of buildings, so I do think everybody will have to get involved” to fill out the 3-D world, Limber says. “But on a personal level, it’s really fun to be able to drop a couple of blocks, move them around a bit, add a texture, and voila! There is a little bit of magic there that we hope will draw people into this whole word of 3-D, and be a little more informed about it because they participated in it.”

Like all good pastimes, Building Maker starts out simple, but goes very deep. What makes the tool possible in the first place is the fact that …Next Page »

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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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Being journalists, we here at Xconomy try to refrain from bald political statements or endorsements. We’d never ask you to “vote early and often” for any candidate for office. But this week we can cheerfully recommend that you subvert the democratic process by going to www.google.com/trike and voting as many times as you can for Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace as the next U.S. pedestrian mall to be photographed by Google’s tricycle-borne Street View crew.

Street View, as most Google users know, is the Google Maps feature that gives you a panoramic visual preview of places you may plan to visit in person. Using a fleet of camera-equipped cars, Google has collected 360-degree, street-level views for hundreds of cities in all 50 U.S. states and quite a few countries around the world. But until recently, those views haven’t extended into pedestrian malls, parks, hiking trails, and other areas where cars are off limits.

That’s changing thanks to the Street View Trike, a contraption dreamed up a couple of years ago by Google senior mechanical engineer Dan Ratner. The trikes are essentially pedicabs that Google has converted to carry the standard Street View camera and computer equipment. Ratner and his crew have already used the trikes to create Street View images of places like California’s Legoland (just north of San Diego), and in an October post on the official Google blog, Ratner invited users to say where they’d like to see the trikes go next.

The company got 25,000 nominations, and on Monday it announced that it had picked 24 finalists in five categories. Faneuil Hall is a finalist in the pedestrian malls category. It’s pitted against Chicago’s Navy Pier and San Francisco’s Pier 39.

Now, without insulting our friends in the Windy City and the Golden Gate, I think it’s fair to say that Faneuil Hall is the only historically significant place on that list. Pier 39 is a mall-on-stilts built in the 1970s that owes most of its fame to the sea lions who have adopted it as their home, and Navy Pier was basically an abandoned eyesore until its redevelopment in the 1990s. So Boston’s historic “cradle of liberty”—the site of fiery oratory by the fathers of the revolution—should clearly be the first of these locations to get the Google Trike treatment.

Google users get to vote for the winners in each category. According to the company, you can vote as many times as you like—but you’ve only got until midnight on Monday, November 30. So stop reading this now and go vote!

To get the whole scoop on the Google Trike and how it’s changing the face of Google Street View, I talked with Dan Ratner himself on Tuesday.

Xconomy: Do you think the Google Trike helps to put a human face on Street View, which has sometimes run into public skepticism and misunderstandings?

Dan Ratner: Let me put it this way. Every time I’ve been out there on the bike—which is quite a number of times now—there’s been a lot of excitement. People are like, “Wow, this is Google Street View? I’ve seen that, but I didn’t know how you get the data!” Seeing a bicycle does seem to put a human face on it, literally, because …Next Page »

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If you’re under 25 or so, you probably don’t need much training on how to share digital photos, make a digital sketch, create an animated cartoon, make a personalized online map, or the like. I wrote the last three installments of my World Wide Wade column for everyone else: The majority of everyday computer users who are vaguely aware of all the amazing tools popping up in the digital media world, and who might even enjoy putting some of them to creative use, but who could use a few handy pointers.

But my “Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings” series appeared in three episodes over the course of two weeks, which isn’t too handy. So I thought it might be useful to list all seven projects in one place. Here we go:

1. Make a Digital Painting with Brushes. Relive your finger-painting days using the same iPhone app used by artist Jorge Colombo to create the June 1 cover of The New Yorker.

2. Start Lifestreaming with Friendfeed or Posterous. Set up a “lifestream”—2009’s replacement for the old-fashioned blog—as a locus for all your social media activities.

3. Document a Space with Photosynth. Use Microsoft’s amazing experimental software for collating hundreds of digital pictures of a single space or object into an immersive, three-dimensional environment.

4. Become an Amateur Podcaster with AudioBoo. Learn how to use this UK-born iPhone app to make mini-podcasts that all your friends can listen to.

5. Create a Short Animated Film with Xtranormal. Be the first on your block to script your own computer-animated short feature, using a nifty new “text-to-movie” technology.

6. Put Yourself on the Map with Platial. Learn the basics of photo-enhanced storytelling using digital maps.

7. Become a Virtual Architect in Second Life. Try your hand at building 3-D virtual objects inside the world’s most flexible and welcoming social virtual world.

Have fun and let us know what you created!

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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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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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Documents filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicate that Cambridge, MA-based MetaCarta, whose software plots Web news items on digital maps by extracting metadata about locations mentioned in the items, has raised $910,000 in convertible debt. Sevin Rosen Funds, FA Technology, and Hunt Ventures were listed as participants in the financing. MetaCarta raised $10 million in Series C funding in 2005, and previously received funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture wing of the U.S. intelligence community. We wrote about the company’s GeoSearch service in March 2008.

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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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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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MetaCarta, a Cambridge, MA-based MIT spinoff funded in part by the CIA’s venture wing, In-Q-Tel, said today that a new software product called the MetaCarta Geographic Search and Referencing Platform (GSRP) is ready for sale. The software takes text content that contains place names in English, French, Spanish, Russian, or Arabic and tags it so that it can be displayed on a map. GSRP appears to be essentially a commercial version of the same system that powers MetaCarta’s own GeoSearch News service, a demonstration system that we wrote about back in March.

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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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So, you’re at the corner of Harrison Street and Union Park Street in Boston. Are you in the South End, or in the trendier but less widely recognized SoWa (South of Washington) district? Both, technically—and if you’ve got a location-sensitive mobile device, it can be tricky for mobile data providers to know which neighborhood’s information to send you.

That’s the problem that San Francisco-based Urban Mapping purports to solve. The company’s neighborhood database contains the geographic boundaries of 60,000 neighborhoods in 2,700 municipalities in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Often, these boundaries overlap—and for those cases, the company knows which neighborhood is historically and culturally dominant, which can be very helpful to providers of location-based information and marketing services.

Today Boston-based Skyhook Wireless said that it’s integrating Urban Mapping’s neighborhood data into its Loki location-based search service, which tailors content based on the user’s location, and its MyLoki location-sharing service, which broadcasts a user’s geographic position to friends and family. That means Loki users will have access to “contextually appropriate and socially accepted neighborhood information,” in the words of an announcement from the two companies today.

“The Urban Mapping neighborhood data adds a richness and more context to social connections than just a city-level message or plot on a map,” said Ryan Sarver, director of consumer products for Skyhook Wireless, in the announcement. “For example, when our MyLoki service messages out that a user has changed locations, we can say that the user has ‘just checked into Back Bay in Boston’ instead of just indicating that the user is in Boston, Mass.” And if a Loki user is at Harrison and Union Park, I’m guessing the system is probably going to send them information related to the South End—the more established (if less fashionable) of the two overlapping neighborhoods.

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The folks at EveryScape in Waltham, MA, have been busy trying to live up to their company’s ambitious tag line, “The Real World Online.” At the Where 2.0 conference in Burlingame, CA, today, the startup plans to announce several useful upgrades to its online catalog of street-level views of 14 world cities, including a social annotation feature allowing users to mark up its images with personalized memos to other users. The company also has a new scheme for recruiting “Destination Ambassadors” and “Local Business Ambassadors”—photographers it will pay for their help documenting more cities and interior spaces.

If you’ve followed our previous pieces about EveryScape, you’ll recall that the company sends cars mounted with digital cameras down the streets of towns and cities, capturing several 360-degree views per block. These views are then assembled into an online database that allows Web surfers to browse any specific location, or to move from view to view, as if they were reenacting the drive.

On the whole, the service is similar to the Street View feature of Google Maps. But EveryScape, much more than Google, sees its collection of street images as the gateway to many kinds of geographically organized information, ranging from Yellow Pages-style business listings to Yelp restaurant reviews, Flickr photos, and YouTube videos. In some cities, EveryScape has even photographed the interiors of specific properties such as hotels and art studios and strung them together with convincing animated transitions, allowing users to zoom into the spaces almost as if they were part of a true 3D virtual world in the style of Second Life or Google Earth.

And today EveryScape is rolling out two major improvements to its site. One is simply a bigger, prettier view. The map formerly stuck on the right side of the screen can now be turned off, leaving more space for the photos. (That means EveryScape’s pictures are now much larger than Google’s.) The other is a new system that lets users annotate the images with their own information, from advertising and marketing messages to personal notes—say, between two people picking a place to meet for dinner.

One category of annotations, called World Tags, allow businesses to upload photos, videos, links, and other information. Say you went to EveryScape’s image for the corner of Rogers Street and Edwin Land Boulevard in Cambridge, MA, site of Xconomy’s offices. First you’d notice the big Waste Management garbage truck that happened to be parked outside my window the day the EveryScape cameras went by (see image at upper right). But we could also create a World Tag for that location, and if you clicked on it, a box would pop up containing, for example, links to stories, videos, or podcasts on Xconomy.

Only businesses can create World Tags at the moment, and they have to work with EveryScape to do so. But there’s another category of annotations, called Scape Memos, than anyone can create and share. Attaching a Scape Memo to an EveryScape image is easy: you just click on the “Create New Memo” link, position the pointer over the right spot in the image, and type in a header and some content. You then get a unique URL that you can share with others via e-mail or instant message or publish in your blog. Anyone who clicks on the URL will be taken to a version of that image with your Scape Memo superimposed. You can even create a series of linked Scape Memos with “previous” and “next” buttons that will take you from one location to another.

My bet is that EveryScape users will find some imaginative uses for Scape Memos. For example, I’m a huge fan of the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo. It’d be fairly easy to create a series of Scape Memos showing the places in San Francisco where Hitchcock did on-location shoots. The next step, of course, would be to …Next Page »

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“Geotagging”—a geeks-only term as recently as a year ago—is moving quickly into the mainstream. And Boston’s Skyhook Wireless is doing as much as any company to make that happen.

Back in February I wrote about a collaboration between Skyhook and Locr, a German photo-sharing community designed especially for pictures that have been geotagged—that is, assigned a latitude and longitude, either automatically at the moment they were taken, or manually, by the photographer. Geotagging, one of the latest features sweeping the world of digital photography, makes it easy to organize and browse pictures through map-based interfaces, which are now a built-in part of Locr, Flickr, and many other photo-sharing sites. Skyhook was working with Locr to put its positioning system—which determines longitude and latitude by scanning for the IDs of nearby Wi-Fi networks—into Locr’s geotagging software for Wi-Fi-capable mobile phones.

That was cool, as far as it went. But while billions of pictures are taken every year with camera phones, the Locr system is no good for regular digital cameras, which take much better pictures than phones, and only a handful of which come with built-in Wi-Fi networking.

Now, for years, I’ve been saying to anyone who will listen that what the consumer digital photography market really needs is a camera with built-in Global Positioning System capability for automatic geotagging. And a few such cameras have appeared, including the Ricoh 500SE, but they’re generally very expensive and are aimed at professionals in the geographic information systems (GIS) business rather than consumers. It turns out that cameras and GPS aren’t a great combination. The signals from GPS satellites are so weak that they don’t reach inside buildings (where many pictures are taken, obviously). And if you’ve ever used a GPS unit, you know that you can’t just turn it on and get your location instantly: it can take several minutes to acquire the signals from three or four satellites needed to fix a position. On top of all that, GPS is a battery hog.

But Skyhook is again coming to the rescue, partnering this time with a Mountain View, CA, startup called Eye-Fi. Eye-Fi’s SD memory cards for digital cameras contain tiny Wi-Fi radios. By sending your pictures from your camera to your home Windows PC or Mac wirelessly, the Eye-Fi cards save you from having to drag out the usual cradles or USB cables. What’s more, Eye-Fi’s software automatically uploads your pictures to the photo-sharing site of your choice.

At the Where 2.0 conference in Burlingame, CA, today, Skyhook and Eye-Fi plan to announce that Skyhook’s Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) software will be incorporated into a new, 2-gigabyte Eye-Fi card called the Eye-Fi Explore. The result: automatic geotagging.

The actual method behind the Eye-Fi/Skyhook geotagging process is quite clever. At the moment each picture is saved to the card, the Skyhook software …Next Page »

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The Global Positioning System helps millions find their way around the surface of the planet every day. But if you’ve ever walked around with a handheld GPS unit, you know that the radio signals transmitted by GPS satellites are so weak that they’re hard to pick up under tree cover, let alone in dense urban canyons or inside buildings.

Charles River Ventures of Waltham, MA, is following up on a previous investment in a Mountain View, CA, company called Rosum that has a technology that makes up for GPS’s shortcomings by tapping into a more down-to-earth technology: television broadcasts. Rosum announced today that it has zeroed in on an additional $15 million in venture funding in a financing round involving CRV and fellow existing investors Allegis Capital, Steamboat Ventures, and KTB Ventures. The round also included a new backer, TruePosition, Inc., a subsidiary of Liberty Media.

Mobile devices based on Rosum’s chips can determine their locations by combining the signals from GPS satellites with the synchronization codes embedded in television broadcasts. These codes help Rosum’s system determine the range between the mobile unit and various nearby TV towers, information that can be used to triangulate a device’s position to within a meter or two. Because over-the-air TV signals are designed to be strong enough to reach indoors, the system works even when GPS signals aren’t available.

CRV’s portfolio includes several other companies in the wireless infrastructure and services area, including Jitterbug, M2Z Networks, Staccato Communications, Vanu, and July Systems, iSkoot, and GoTV. Meanwhile, Rosum’s TV-based positioning technology faces competition from another location-finding system based on terrestrial radio signals—the Wi-Fi Positioning System from Boston-based Skyhook Wireless.

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Mix one cup of Wikipedia with one cup of Google Maps, add a generous dollop of MIT-bred geekdom, and bake for about 14 months. Serves 600,000.

The confection in question is Povo.com, a user-editable online community directory that debuted in Boston last week. A project of Boston-based Arts Alliance Labs, a combination venture capital firm and technology platform company led by MIT Media Lab alum Mex Metral, Povo is essentially a giant, geographically organized blank slate: a template beckoning Boston residents to upload information, reviews, photos, and other content, block by city block.

It’s far from the first user-driven directory of geographically organized local information; other examples include Outside.in, Platial, and Wikimapia. Wikipedia itself has extensive user-generated and user-edited listings on places of interest (including a thorough article on Boston), and there are several services that make it easier to browse Wikipedia’s content by location, including Placeopedia and a new iPhone application called GeoPedia.

But Povo (the name is Portuguese for “people” or “folk”) is more stylish and inviting than a typical Wikipedia-style wiki. People who add information to Povo are recognized for their contributions on their profile pages, which could help encourage Bostonians to pitch in the free labor required to build the directory. (As with most user-generated sites, users aren’t paid for their material.) The site also has some unique features that may appeal to power users, including strangely beautiful “heat maps” that show the greatest concentrations of local resources such as brunch places or clubs with live music, and a simple Ruby-like scripting language that allows users to modify the functionality of the pages they create. And all of the site’s content is available under a Creative Commons license—meaning that heat maps and anything else you or others create on Povo can be embedded in outside blogs or other non-commercial sites.

Metral says the idea for Povo was born when his colleague at Arts Alliance Labs, Hasty Granbery, was walking down a street in San Francisco looking for a dry cleaner that could clean a suit in an hour. “That’s not something you can find in a typical local search,” says Metral. “You might find a dry cleaner in the same zip code, but not something two blocks away. And the search results won’t have details about whether they can do it in an hour.” But that’s exactly the type of detail residents are likely to possess—and if Metral and Granbery can get them to feed it into Povo, it could eventually become much richer than a typical local search site such as Yahoo Local. “The big differentiator over time is going to be the user-generated content and functionality” Metral says.

Metral has a bit of experience with the wisdom of crowds: in 1996, with Media Lab professor (and Xconomist) Pattie Maes, he co-founded Firefly Network, a pioneer in the area of collaborative filtering algorithms that matched people with others with similar tastes and directed them to music content they might like. In a $40 million deal just two years later, Firefly became part of Microsoft, where the technology evolved into Microsoft Passport. Metral went on to become CTO at PeoplePC, which bundled brand-name PCs with dialup Internet service for a $24.95 monthly payment; Earthlink bought PeoplePC in 2002 for about $10 million.

Arts Alliance, Metral’s current gig, funds an electric range of interactive media startups. It was an investor in Spinner (now part of AOL) and Atom Entertainment (now part of Viacom), and its current portfolio includes viral TV clip service BlinkBox, European DVD rental service LOVEFiLM, and mobile games and video distributor Player X. Povo is the first platform the company has decided to develop on its own.

Metral and Granbery have seeded the site with information from sources such as Boston city park directories and Starbucks’ online store finder. But in the end, Metral says, the site will only become useful if …Next Page »

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