“San Francisco (ots/PRNewswire) – GoCar, der im April 2004 in San Francisco gegründete Anbieter origineller, GPS-geführter Stadtrundfahrten, hat den grossen Sprung vom US-amerikanischen Markt nach Europa geschafft und Niederlassungen in Barcelona und Lissabon eröffnet. Mit den neuen Niederlassungen in der EU verfügt GoCar neben San Francisco, San Diego und Miami nun über insgesamt 5 Standorte weltweit.”

http://www.presseportal.de/pm/72016/1227152/gocar_tours (2008-07-11)

“Location aware technologies such as widespread mobile computers and varying location sensors open up a massive range of possibilities for extending game playing into streets, buildings and even the rural landscape. New and extended forms of location-aware games including mobile or pervasive phone games, smart toys, role-playing games as well as Mixed Reality (MR) games all demonstrate promising new forms of game play. Substantial work has also gone into new game concepts, sophisticated technology and viable business models. However, research on the methodological issues of studying mobile player experiences, pervasive game activity and ubiquitous interaction has become necessary.

Furthermore, there is also a need to explore the methodological issues in the evaluation of the intertwined, mutually dependent dimensions related to the usability and playability of location-based games.

This workshop will bring together researchers, practitioners, and students with the objective of sharing knowledge, experience and ideas so that the many user experience issues of location aware games can be more thoroughly addressed.”

Source: Locative Digest, Vol 24, Issue 2 http://locative.x-i.net

„Wir haben uns alle mit Literatur, Websites und Geotags beschäftigt und wollten das verschmelzen“, erklärt Tatjana Brode, die neben Jens Krisinger und Mathias Ott zu den Initiatoren des Projektes gehört. Kartenbasiertes Erzählen bedeute bislang meist, zweckorientierte oder historische Informationen zu verorten, so Brode weiter. „Uns war es wichtig, die Eindrücke der Stadt um eine fiktionale Komponente zu erweitern und ihnen eine literarische Bedeutung zu geben. Deshalb haben wir auf den Spaziergängen versucht, den Autoren ihre Geschichten zu entlocken und die Stadt als Buch zu öffnen.“

Quelle: http://www.n-tv.de/995043.html

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/06/09iphone.html

Pictures: Apple

About

Ushahidi.com is a tool for people who witness acts of violence in Kenya in these post-election times. You can report the incident that you have seen, and it will appear on a map-based view for others to see. We are working with local Kenyan NGO’s to get information and to verify each incident.

What you can do is get the word out about Ushahidi so that it’s utilized to it’s full potential. This especially extends to talking to the people that you know who have seen things in Kenya and getting them to the site as well. You can also help by using the contact form to volunteer to help with the tracking and verifying of each incident.”

http://www.ushahidi.com/about.asp

Erik Hersman presented the project at Where 2.0

http://www.slideshare.net/dkman/emerging-opportunities-on-the-geoweb/

About us

“Using location-based technologies, Loopt lets you know where your friends are by automatically updating maps on your mobile handset. Loopt even lets you send messages to nearby friends or receive automatic alerts when they’re nearby so that you never miss an opportunity to meet. Loopt also lets you journal your life so that your friends can see what you’re up to. With Loopt, mobile subscribers put themselves on the map.”

More: Where 2.0 News Coverage

“‘What’s happening in my neighborhood?’

For a long time, that’s been a tough question to answer. In dense, bustling cities like Chicago, New York and San Francisco, the number of daily media reports, government proceedings and local Internet conversations is staggering. Every day, a wealth of local information is created — officials inspect restaurants, journalists cover fires and Web users post photographs — but who has time to sort through all of that?

Our mission at EveryBlock is to solve that problem. We aim to collect all of the news and civic goings-on that have happened recently in your city, and make it simple for you to keep track of news in particular areas. We’re a geographic filter — a “news feed” for your neighborhood, or, yes, even your block.

At this time, we cover three American cities: Chicago, New York and San Francisco. On each site, you can type in any address to read local news and public information near you. You’ll find three main types of news:

• Civic information — building permits, crimes, restaurant inspections and more. In many cases, this information is already on the Web but is buried in hard-to-find government databases. In other cases, this information has never been posted online, and we’ve forged relationships with governments to make it available.
• News articles and blog entries — major newspapers, community weeklies, TV and radio news stations, local specialty publications and local blogs. We do the work of classifying articles by geography, so you can easily find the mainstream media coverage near particular locations.
• Fun from across the Web — local photos posted to the Flickr photo-sharing site, user reviews of local businesses on Yelp, lost and found postings from Craigslist and more. We figure out the relevant places and point you to location-specific items you might not have known about.

We like to toss around the word “news” to describe all of this, and that might surprise you at first. Isn’t news what appears on the front page of the New York Times? Isn’t news something produced by professional journalists?

Well, it can be — and we include as much of that on EveryBlock as possible. But, in our minds, “news” at the neighborhood or block level means a lot more. On EveryBlock, “Somebody reviewed the new Italian restaurant down the street on Yelp” is news. “Somebody took a photo of that cool house on your block and posted it to Flickr” is news. “The NYPD posted its weekly crime report for your neighborhood” is news. If it’s in your neighborhood and it happened recently, it’s news on EveryBlock.”

http://www.everyblock.com/about/

More: Where 2.0 News Coverage