Archive for September, 2008
European Alliance for borderless Location Based Services
29 Sep. 2008 | Author: 
Location Based Services (LBS) as well as mobile location, will be offered cross-borders in the future. The German LBS provider Mecomo has joined with three European partners in the field of mobile local search, and formed the “Open Location Alliance” at the beginning of September 2008.
The Unterschleißheim-based (Munich) undertaking announced this in a recent press release. The founder partners, aside from Mecomo which offers local content and mobile services for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, are Mobile Commerce (for the United Kingdom), Visibilly, the Sweden-based company which also covers Norway and Finland, and Deveryware (for France).
Through this cooperation, the aim is to offer easily accessed localized applications and information in multiple European countries, from individual cell phones/mobile devices, said Mecomo. Further, the intention of the alliance is to draw up combined guidelines for cooperation, as well as business models, and develop technologies so as the expand the field of mobile localized services. Additional partners are being considered for the coalition, so as to expand to cover the widest possible geographic area possible.
Ipoki.com – social network with GPS-functionality
About two years ago in La Coruña, Spain, a GPS-based social network was founded. Its name, originally “hipoqih”, was changed later to Ipoki as it was easier to spell and pronounce.
Ipoki allows its members to share their current location in real time with other users. To do so, the actual geolocation of the users is usually fixed per GPS. Further one can view, for instance, where one’s friends are at that moment and follow their tracks on either Google Maps or Google Earth, any where on the globe. As stated by the Ipoki-makers on their portal, this service helps to find people, follow their whereabouts and to remain in contact with them, whether in La Coruña, San Francisco, Stockholm or Cape Town.
This service is achieved with the help of an Ipoki-plugin, a small application installed on a GPS-capable mobile device – cell phone, smart-phone, PDA or PocketPC. However, even without such a device, it is still possible to use this GPS Community – one can manually enter one’s location on the website. Whether or not automatic or updated manually, users have complete control as to whom may access their position data: everyone, friends or no one.
Whoever wishes can also use Ipoki to geo-locate photos for Flickr, using photos taken with GPS-enabled cell phones, and also contribute similarly coded Live Videos via Qik.
Posted in Web Communities, Localization technology, News, Practical features | 
Tags: Community, Flickr, GPS, GPS-basiert, Ipoki, Netzwerk, Qik, Standort | 
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RottenNeighbor.com – the negative side of Web2.0?
Internet-user evaluations of undertakings or service providers, such as those possible on dialo.de, kennstdueinen.de [en=doyouknowone] or Qype.com are one thing, but portals that encourage actual “cybermobbing” are something altogether different.
RottenNeighbor.com is such a site. Launched just over a year ago in the USA by Brant Walker, it sees itself as the world’s first search engine that allows users to judge their neighbors and rate them – positively or negatively. Using this site, visitors could inform themselves about the potential new neighborhood before buying a property, or to warn other users about bad neighbors.
In reality, most users actually use the site to take revenge on hated people – to discriminate, denounce or slander – whether neighbor, colleague, ex-partner or rival. In this way this online-pillory affects both private citizens as well as business people. In so doing, RottenNeighbor.com uses cartographic material provided by Google Maps. After entering an address in the search field, the location is question appears in Map View. Addresses/locations of already-rated people appear as house icons– red for bad neighbor, green for good neighbor. A click on the icon opens a window usually revealing a tasteless entry from an unidentifiable user dishing the inhabitant(s) of the marked house.
Apart from the fact that by identifying the exact location, the name of the occupant can be discovered, few users are deterred from fully naming the ‘guilty’ party, while the user remains anonymous. Photos and videos of the denounced person can also be uploaded. None of this is edited by the site’s administrators, leaving unvetted content on the web.
As of a couple of months, RottenNeighbor.com has been enjoying steadily growing interest also in Germany. The access numbers have grown so much in recent weeks that the server experienced overloads at the beginning of September, and the German portal was inaccessible for several days. As with the growing hits, so did the number of comments delivered by German citizens. Since then, there is hardly a German town on the virtual map, where one can not find some green houses and many red ones with predominantly insulting remarks.
Whomever is defamed on this website – and this can affect anyone – can basically not defend him or herself. Even when one chose to sue for defamation of character or libel, and claim damages or compensation, it is extremely difficult to discover the person who posted the defamation. Firstly, the accusations are delivered anonymously, and secondly, the portal’s administrators are located in the USA, where other data protection guidelines and views on freedom of expression take effect. One can indeed have a rating removed, but this takes time and doesn’t protect against new insults.
While other ratings platforms concentrate on objective criticism on offers, products, services or activities connected to the function of the person being rated, RottenNeighbor.com concentrates above all on private persons. This leads to the public airing of feuds and revenge-lust. The use of such a platform is even more questionable, as the accuracy of the comments is almost impossible to ascertain. The personal damage that can be inflicted by the platform is therefore immeasurably large.
Online-pillory or valuable information platform – what do you think of RottenNeighbor.com?
GelbeSeiten way ahead
“GelbeSeiten.de achieved again the highest visitor count of all German online-directories, with more than seven million visits and over 44 million page impressions in August 2008.” This was reported by GelbeSeiten Marketing GmbH in a press release.
Already this June, the portal led the online-directories, with over seven million visitors, and managed to maintain this lead in August, said the operators. The source of these figures come from the current statistics for online media usage, published by the ” Informationsgemeinschaft zur Feststellung der Verbreitung von Werbeträgern e.V. (aka IVW) in Berlin.
The IVW is an independent organization, funded by the Media, the Advertising industry and ad- and media-agencies. The body monitors and reports the expansion of advertising media, delivering data of interest to users, advertisers and competitors. Among the data published for the online-media, are the number of page views/impressions (number of users of accessed pages) as well as the sum of the single hits/visits.
Looking closer at the results published by IVW, one sees that GelbeSeiten.de in July 2008 achieved 7,060,898 visits – the most since records were started in August 2004. In August 2008, the figure dropped slightly. However, the high of 66,958,342 page views in March 2006 was far higher than the present figures.
Competitors listed by IVW can only battle to keep up. Klicktel.de in August clocked up 4,8 million visits and approximately 30 million page views. In the same period GoYellow.de managed just on 3 million visits and about 16 million page views, with Web2.0 branch-directory Qype.com showed 3,5 million hits, and almost 12,5 page views.
Sharper images for Google Maps
As of the start of September, our globe has been under a further scrutinous eye – that of the GeoEye-1 Satellite, an undertaking of the USA company GeoEye. Google in the future will be one of the customers using the current satellite images delivered by this company.
In a press release, GeoEye explains how the new spacecraft, which orbits at 681km (XXX miles), is fitted with the highest resolution camera available in the non-governmental sphere. Black and white photos are delivered in a resolution of 0,41 meter, and color photos at 1,65 meter. That means objects on the surface are recognizable at sizes from 41cm and 165cm respectively.
According to A report on CNet details a contract between Google and GeoEye, giving the search engine giant the exclusive use of the images, in the sphere of online-map services. Google will use these for its online applications Google Maps and Google Earth. However, Google will be unable to offer the best resolution images to its clients, as US regulations limit GeoEye to offer photos to the commercial sector with a resolution of 0,5m or worse.
Posted in Local Search per PC, Local Search, News, Local Search Engines |
Tags: GeoEye, Google, google maps, local, Maps, Satellit, Suchdienst, Suchmaschine, Suchmaschinenprimus, Suchmaschinenriese, Suchmaschinenriesen |
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Dialo.de: New look and revised navigation
Dialo.de, the local search and ratings service, had a relaunch in August 2008, beautifying the internet presence and optimizing its navigation.
Users are thus enabled with a faster overview of the site, says the service provider Dialo GmbH & Co. Kg in a press release. The site overhaul has placed the map search in a higher position on the start page, thereby relegating the City Guides to a stronger position in the center of the portal. The City Guides link is now not only in the right hand navigation bar, but also in the middle of the page in a tab, adjacent to the Branch-directory search. The City Guides provide users with city general information, photos and a selection of local top offerings.
The search option “Name zu Nummer” (reverse search) is no longer available; this previously returned the name and address of entered telephone numbers. Another lost feature is the ‘Person Search’ tab, which appears, however, only once a search has been started, within the results list.
The noted website however also introduces a new Web 2.0 service: according to Dialo GmbH, firms, craftspeople and service providers are now able to place advertisements on this ratings platform, via wallpaper and banners.
OpenStreetMap notches up four years
The collaborative world map OpenStreetMap (OSM) is enjoying steadily growing popularity. At the present time, a few weeks after its fourth birthday, the OSM-community encompasses approximately 60,000 members.
According to the community’s statistics, the numbers have almost doubled since April 2008. This is almost certainly to do with the massive growth in popular interest during 2007. There has scarcely been a week since early 2008, when there hasn’t been some media coverage, at least in Germany, of the project. Above all, this has to do with the Web 2.0 concept of this project.
Brought to life in summer 2004 by the Brit Steve Coast, its goal has been to build a collaborative, freely accessible geo-database. Since then, anyone can access and involve themselves with up-to-date global surveys, and contribute their GPS-generated data (on hikes, bicycle tours, vacations) and submit the gathered data (streets, rivers, forests, footpaths or buildings etc.) to the OSM project. Users can add all and any data that may be of cartographic interest, known as “Mapping”. Users without GPS-capable devices are also welcome, being able to contribute by checking, updating/completing, approving and labeling photo material or working on the software interface.
As the community is itself responsible for generating/creating extensive information in this way, it also possesses copy- and other rights, and is able to negotiate for the use thereof. This means, all registered users are able to share in the use of the data at no extra cost, and are able to process and transform the data as desired, also for commercial purposes. The resulting data must however also be license-free, and credit OSM as the data source. A specific plus, is that users are not only able to use the maps, but can also access the geodata in raw format. This is in stark contract with other map services such as Google Maps. As discussed by OSM in their FAQs, Google provides its maps free of charge, but without access to the related geodata. The Google material is only useable as presented.
During the last four years, the project has grown amazingly. Of course, there are radical differences in the depth of coverage of different regions, resulting from the collaborative dependence on the users. Consequently, many large cities in Germany are covered in much greater detail than by OSM’s alternatives. One can find such information such as mailboxes, bus stops, recycling containers or cafés on OSM. On the flip side, many rural areas show large gaps in material– many streets are even missing, or end ‘nowhere’, small communities appear to be non-existent, and even in smaller town only major roads may be documented. Even less documented are enormous swathes across the globe.
In Germany and many wealthy industrialized nations, the data deluge will certainly expand exponentially, in contract to less-developed countries, where computer coverage, internet access and GPS-ownership is sorely lacking.
Posted in Web Communities, World Wide Web, Local Search per PC, Local Search, News, Virtual world |
Tags: Community, Geodaten, Geodatenbank, Kartenprojekt, Mitmach-Weltkarte, OpenStreetMap, OSM, Steve Coast, web2.0, Wiki-Kartenprojekt |
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Qype now also has events
In the last August week, the local search and ratings platform Qype has expanded their functionality by introducing an “Events” tab, where the user can, for example, find events at a particular location, rate it, comment or indicate whether or not they will be attending.
Qype-CEO Stephan Uhrenbacher announced the new feature in the company blog. He sees the new event calendar as the most important development of the portal. The need had become keen – users were already recommending block parties, rock concerts and the like.
The new feature, according to Uhrenbacher, was launched simultaneously in the German, English and French language editions of Qype. At the time of launching there were already over 150,000 events in the database – Uhrenbacher did not however mention the source of the data for these events.
Live Search Maps: Update brings improvements
Almost exactly a year ago Microsoft launched the local search service Live Search Maps, in cooperation with suchen.de (see our post). In the interim, much has happened, and recently there has been a further update.
New on the scene is the “Collections” feature – as explained by Microsoft business manager Toni Pelg in Windows Live Blog – which is a collection of interesting locations, including attractions, parks or good restaurants. These Collections are accessible either through the “Collections” link or via the menu item “Erkunden Sie die Welt” [en=discover the world] which is visible on the start page of any map view, as long as one has zoomed in sufficiently. On clicking, a results links list appears alongside the map view, gathered from various websites, and can be sorted and displayed according to distance, relevance or date. Simultaneously, these external links are localized on the maps view with icons which one can open per mouse-over.
In a press release, Microsoft details that these Collections are gathered from users the world over. This is noticeable as entries are displayed in all possible languages, which is actually not always helpful, unless one is a languages wiz! Contrary to what Microsoft says, the contents is not exclusively generated by other users (UGC) but obvious exceptions that we discovered included data from tagesschau.de. Something else we noticed is that when we clicked on “More Info” [de=Mehr Info] where the user should be taken to ‘external sources with additional information’, we frequently landed on an empty page devoid of search results – merely a further map view. And often one finds a page with multiple copies of the same link. All in all this new feature seems still half baked.
More practical are some of the other improvements on Live Search Maps. The user can now display labels in Bird’s Eye/Aerial view, including street names, building notations etc., which certainly aids navigation. And the Pedestrian-Feature [de=Fußweg] works well -using this one can calculate foot routes up to 30km. Live Search Maps takes into account many paths through parks and green zones. Also access to local companies has been improved, that is local search results lists now often include detailed information such as opening times. The user can also call the listing gratis, as well as import contact details with a few mouse clicks directly into mail programs accepting vcards [Windows = Outlook; Mac = Entourage or Mail].
Posted in Local Search per PC, Local Search, News, Local Search Engines, Practical features |
Tags: Live Search Maps, lokale Informationen, Microsoft, suchen.de, t-info |
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11880.com now with ratings from other portals
As of January this year 11880.com has been offering its users the chance to read ratings gathered from other providers or to deliver their own ratings (see our post). This Web2.0 feature has now been further expanded.
To this end, this information portal is collaborating with other portals and has combined the gathered ratings into its own web presence. A post in the company blog lists the partners in this enterprise as the information and ratings platform for drivers Autoplenum.de, the patient portal DocInsider.de, as well as gastronomy sites Hotel.de and Restaurant-Kritik.de.
Through this cooperation, the blog post states that there are at present over 80,000 ratings to be found on 11880.com. The company plans to broaden its partner base in the future.
