by Joey deVilla on November 3, 2008
The folks from PlanetEye — the travel-planning site whose motto is “Discover destinations. Plan trips. Share experiences” — are hosting a GeoSocial this Thursday, November 6th at 6:30 p.m. at the Charlotte Room (19 Charlotte Street, Toronto, not far from the corner of King and Spadina).
GeoSocial?
Organized by PlanetEye’s Mark Evans and Juan Gonzalez, a GeoSocial is “a group for people interested in exploring the uses of geodata to enhance the relevancy of information on the web and create new means of social interaction.”
Juan explained more in a recent post on the PlanetEye blog:
We firmly believe the GeoWeb has succeeded in providing an easily understood framework for gathering, analysing and displaying information. The challenges that remain ahead are now about leveraging this framework to create better ways for people to explore and discover their world.
GeoSocial wants to provide an open forum for all people developing ideas, technology and products that leverage the GeoWeb to create advanced social applications that can deliver personalized, geographically relevant content. We also want to invite people from other areas (bloggers?) to participate and discover how these technologies can fundamentally impact their own products.
If you’re building (or just thinking of building) location-based mobile applications, mashups, maps, producing or consuming geodata, writing about your city or neighbourhood or just have an interest in what’s being called “Where 2.0″, come out to this event and meet some like-minded people!
(I’ll be attending this event, by the way.)
Links
Tagged as:
GeoSocial,
location-based,
mobile,
Where 2.0
by Joey deVilla on October 2, 2008
Image from Wikimedia Commons.
On the off-chance you hadn’t yet heard, Apple has finally dropped its much-reviled NDA for iPhone developers for released software. It was so restrictive that developers were forbidden from discussing or writing documentation on iPhone development, even with or for other iPhone developers.
In the announcement on Apple Developer Connection, they explain why they put developers under the excessively-restrictive NDA:
We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.
This sort of behaviour harkens back to the 1990s, when Apple behaved as if all third-party developers who weren’t Adobe existed on a spectrum ranging from “unwanted houseguest” to “the enemy”. Speaking as a guy with a strong technical evangelist background (note to employers: hint, hint!), this is not the way you foster developer love nor build a developer community.
Expect iPhone development tutorials and tips to start popping up all over the web and for the Pragmatic Programmers’ book iPhone SDK Development to finally see the light of day.
Tagged as:
Apple,
iPhone,
mobile,
NDA
by Joey deVilla on August 27, 2008
by Joey deVilla on June 6, 2008
by Joey deVilla on April 29, 2008
by Joey deVilla on April 16, 2008
Palestinian Girls, Dating and the Mobile Phone: danah boyd points to a paper titled Playing With Fire: On the domestication of the mobile phone among Palestinian teenage girls in Israel [PDF, 92K]. It looks at how mobile phone alters social dynamics, relationships, and the construction of gender in Palestine, where “boys give their girlfriends phones for the express purpose of being able to communicate with them in a semi-private manner without the physical proximity that would be frowned on.” An interesting look at how technology plays a role in people’s lives in unexpected ways.
Tagged as:
dating,
Israel,
mobile,
mobile phones,
Palestine,
taboos
