Location Awareness – BBC Radio Lincolnshire
Last Monday I had another Radio session over at BBC Radio Lincolnshire on their tech slot. It’s starting to become a regular thing which is great, so a HUGE thanks to them for having me on! 
This week we were talking about location awareness and how it is becoming more and more prevalent. Listen to the chat below!
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Personally, I’m a massive fan of this technology and looking forward to when it matures. At present there are a few competing services, such as
And also Google’s Latitude
If Google bring out an iPhone application for Latitude, it will undoubtedly take off in a big way. At the moment it is limited to using it via the web on your computer or on some phones:
Google Latitude is a feature of Google Maps for mobile on these phones:
- Android-powered devices, such as the T-Mobile G1
- iPhone and iPod touch devices (coming soon)
- most color BlackBerry devices
- most Windows Mobile 5.0+ devices
- most Symbian S60 devices (Nokia smartphones)
Personally, I’m using Brightkite every now and then and used to tinker with fire eagle, but not at the moment. Is anyone using these services regularly and what for? Having spoken with @nofont, he had some great ideas about situation awareness which I talk about on the radio clip – your phone knowing whether you are at home, or out and about, in front of the computer, or in the car. This could start to be VERY useful.
What also really intrigues me is the marketing aspect of this technology. The next level of permission marketing will be location orientated – so services, brands and companies can alert you to things that might interest you. Yes, nig brother really is here. We just need to make sure he has permission to be.
Testing Issuu Plugin
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Very impressed with Issuu – the Wordpress Plugin works brilliantly. Just click on the PDF to go full screen! (The document is from the excellent Peter Kim).
iPhone 3.0 Software coming
Just breaking, is the news, that there will be an Apple Event on March 17th!
We just got the announcement, iPhone OS 3.0 is coming. Set your clocks, mark your calendars. It’s going down March 17th. Apparently, we’ll get a sneak peak at the new OS, as well as a look at a brand new version of the SDK. Exciting stuff indeed, and we’ll be there live at 10am PST (1pm EST) with the liveblog. Apple’s calling this an “advance preview of what we’re building,” so we’re not expecting anything ready to go as of the 17th, but hopefully this will allow developers to start building toward future functionality (hey, how about some push notifications?), and presumably users won’t have too many months to wait after that for the real deal.
Interesting… I wonder whether there will be any BIG UI changes? I’m guessing not, and hoping that they will be adding MMS and copy and paste at the very least. Launch of a Google Latitude App would also be nice.
What would you like to see?!
Tinkering time
Evening all – I’m going to be playing around with a super duper new theme this evening, so pleased don’t be surprised if the blog looks a tad funny. Bear with me! It may be switching from one theme to another depending on how successful I am
Rory Cellan Jones’ twitter account Hacked
Be careful out there people! twitter hacking seems to be all the rage right now, and the BBC tech correpsondent, Rory Cellan Jones has just had his account hacked: see censored picture below.
Not good at all. The picture was taken down almost immediately thank goodness. You can see his reaction,the same reaction that anyone would have. Shock and horror at what had just occurred.
This is going to highlight password security once again, and because of Rory being part of the BBC, and very well know in the twitterverse, will receive a lot of attention. I think it is high time that we ll check out passwords and perhaps for twitter / twitpic to bring in a compulsory password change after a period of time. Perhaps this would help.
Taking control of email and using it for your business
Email. Love it or hate it, despair of it, or just manage it, it’s here to stay!
What is also certain is that it can be a right royal nightmare staying on top of it and making sure that you are in control of it, and not the other way round. Personally, I live for email, or rather, I need email for my living. Whether that is theappleofmyi, Hull Digital, or personal email, it all arrives through one conduit, Gmail.
Gmail helps enormously, allowing me to search quickly, archive everything I want, colour code specific topics, set up filters and tag everything for easy reference later. Last week, I was invited onto the Radio Lincolnshire Drivetime Tech slot on Monday evening once again, with William Wright, and we talked about email and the problems it can lead to. We also covered using it correctly for small businesses, something I cover over here on a free mini course I’ve set up for people.
So, here is the radio session we did, so listen and enjoy!
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