It was quite interesting to watch a presentation at the MobileMonday in Munich of Antonio Vince Staybl, CEO of gofresh.de the creators of the mobile off-portal community itsmy.com.
They did an amazing job over the last five years in growing their mobile community and now, itsmy.com and an other German based portal called Peperonity.com are some of the bigges mobile off-portal communities in the US besides Fotochatter.com and Flirtomatic.com. Really amazing.
To make one thing clear: from a designers standpoint, it’s hard to believe that all of them are working, because it really reminds me to the times of C-64 … but they work

Google is running fast forward with the Mobile-Handset-Operating-System, called android, they are developing with the joint forces of the Open Handset Mobile Alliance. To attract the creativity of developers worldwide, they started a competition – or as Google likes to see it as the Android Developer Challenge. Google will provide 10 Million $ in awards for the best applications. So it might really be interesting for some developers out there – may be great seed capital for a new startup
Yesterday, on January 28, Google extended the deadline for the first round in the Android Developer Challenge to April 14 2008. There will be a second challenge when the first handsets ship. And those first android handsets should ship in the second half of 2008.
So, get your mobile applications on track

The people at Skyhook Wireless really did a smart job with their Wi-Fi Positioning System: They just use the highly distributed public and private Wi-Fi infrastructure of everyone as reference points for their location tracking. So basically every WiFi-enabled device can use their technology if Skyhook Wireless scanned and located the hotspots that specific area.
I did not find any competitors, yet. Sure, there are companies like innerwireless with their PanGo location management software, or Cisco with their Wireless Location Appliance, or the Finnish ekahau working in the field of Wi-Fi locating technology. But they all focus on closed business solutions where a dedicated infrastructure is used for tracking.
So the Skyhook Wireless WPS solution looks like an innovative and unique way – and an interesting way to realize navigation and location based services in metropolitan areas. Opening up their API for web developers was a brilliant idea – so let’s use it.

No need for handheld GPS devices which do not function properly in metropolitan areas

The cooperation with Apple in terms of iPhone and iPod touch also effects the Mac now: Today, Skyhook Wireless released their Loki 2.0 Firefox toolbar for Mac OS X and Windows XP. Now it’s possible to check the own location with Loki – if there are enogh WiFi-hotspots in reach known by Skyhook Wireless.
Quite amazing technology with a JavaScript-SDK for Web developers, too.

Steve Jobs presented a new feature of the iPhone – and also the iPod touch. Especially the iPod touch transforms into a new category of devices by adding location based services: By cooperating with Skyhook Wireless it is possible to get the own location by triangulating the signals from different WiFi-hotspots. The iPhone uses also the well known method by using the cell-ids to find the current location. It’s quite interesting, that it seems that Apple is not cooperating with the mobile network operators to get the location by cell ids and triangulation: They realized this feature by cooperating with Google. When I think of the hurdles to realize mobile Location Based Services (LBS) with the different operators … this is not a bad idea.
We really can be curious, whether the iPhone SDK will be the kickoff of a new era in LBS. Maybe Apple will also provide the iPhone web developers with the LBS-SDK Loki SDK for their web applications – that would really roll up the LBS-scene