GPS Adventures, a family-friendly introduction to geocaching opens this Saturday at the Maryland Science Center. The exhibit features an educational look at the history of navigation from the compass rose to GPS Technology, a 4,500 square foot maze populated with hidden caches, and a geocaching adventure in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor using real GPS devices.Very cool stuff!! For those interested, the official website for GPS Adventures is http://www.gpsmaze.com/ and the Maryland Science Center can be found on the web at http://www.marylandsciencecenter.com.
Archives for February 17, 2010
Developers Scraping Social Location Updates – Clever or Sleazy?? You Decide
More on the topic of social-location and privacy… thanks to a loyal Twitter contact of mine for sharing details of this with me! Indeed many of us die-hard mobile, social-location users are re-thinking our commitment to sharing our location (I’ve discussed this at length recently). But if sharing your location with your personal contacts (think checking in via foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla, Loopt, Schmap etc…) isn’t enough cause for alarm it seems we now have a savvy (or dumb-ass) developer who’s taken this to the next level by twisting things around and populating a sleezy mashup that’s called, of all things, “Please Rob Me” http://pleaserobme.com/
Obviously, if mobile users are checking in from place A that it follows that they aren’t physically located at place B. The mashup enables users to search by location, for example, show me people in Denver, Colorado. The app then returns a list of twitter users who recently check-in to locales using foursquare – hence, the people obviously aren’t at home i guess! Obviously, this is essentially running a local search on tweets that contain information like “4sq” etc… not really rocket science although you can see how with very little effort, one can easily obtain information that can be used for ones personal gain (or harm).
The mashup is a bit clever (I guess), however, the idea and branding is, perhaps sleazy at first glance, although, in defense of the developers, they are trying to make a point with this app and are attempting to raise awareness about location and privacy/safety issues. If anything this is yet another reminder that with so much public information and social location information readily available, the possibilities for security and privacy breaches and mis-uses are endless. I may not be home right now, however, my teen-age son is and he’s packing a Minus 3 baseball bat so proceed with caution!!
Cheer at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics with your CowBell
Now you can have your cowbell while at the Vancouver Winter Olympics with this free app from Bell Canada
Bell customers can simply text COWBELL to 2010 to get the app. Non bell customers can get the app via bell.ca/cowbell – For more details including instructions see http://vancouver.bell.ca/en/mobile/cowbell/
Early Registration Extended for O’Reilly Where 2.0
From O’reilly Media… In these tough economic times we realize passing on savings to you, our audience, is something worth consideration and importance. We are extending our early registration pricing until March 1, 2010, which saves you $300 off standard registration. We would also like to include a 25% discount code in addition to the early registration savings. Use discount code, whr10ln and register today.
https://en.oreilly.com/where2010/public/register
Where 2.0, happening March 30-April 1, 2010 at the San Jose Marriott in San Jose, California, encompasses the latest innovations in Mobile, Mapping and Local Opps and Models. see the full schedule
OSM Meetup, Denver – Feb 17
Here’s details of the next OpenStreetMap meetup scheduled for tomorrow (Wed, 17) in Denver (via @pmbatty) – have a great time!
OpenStreetMap Denver Feburary meetup
Host: OpenStreetMap Denver, Colorado
Type: Meetings – Informational Meeting
Network: Global
Date: Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Time: 5:30pm – 9:30pm
Location: Wynkoop Brewery
Street: 1634 18th Street
details: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=298908063498&ref=mf