The weekly LBSzone social location news round-up – now billed as "The Social Location Report" was released today… enjoy
A couple of interesting announcements to share this week including some unofficial reports that NAVTEQ has acquired crowd-sourcing service Trapster – recall, Trapster is an application for getting enforcement points and road hazards alerts on your Blackberry, iPhone, Nokia, Android, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, Garmin, or TomTom device. This should be interesting to watch unfold, particularly since NAVTEQ is owned by Nokia… I suspect the Trapster updates will make a fine addition to Nokia’s Ovi Maps service. Another announcement that got my attention came from social location provider Brightkite. It seems the company is re-focusing on their group texting services and pulling the plug on social check-in. Brightkite was actually the first service I used (with Nokia N95) to tweet my location check-ins and in my mind was way ahead of the curve, likely a little too early. Too bad, however, I’m sure some great things will come from Brightkite as they focus on group texting and related social communication technologies
In the GIS / Geo Tech news arena a number of companies making interesting headlines including: Trimble Acquires Tata AutoComp Mobility Telematics from Tata AutoComp Systems in India – The acquisition is expected to expand Trimble’s MRM solutions portfolio and allow the company to better address markets in India; pcMapper Lite – Map Editing and Data Collection app – Now available on the Android Market – An ideal mobile solution for GIS map data collection or any spatially related tasks such as: planning, field inventory and asset management; Make iPad Pixels Pop & Protection More Vibrant with Colorful Cases from OtterBox – an excellent product to protect your iPad (new iPhone 4 cases also). Details on these items are found below.
From the blog (blog.gisuser.com) some interesting tech tips to share including: An interesting, open initiative from Alberta, Canada. This PDC provides a means of increasing public access to data managed by The City – open data from Calgary AB; 10 Favorite Tweets from the Geo Twitter-sphere as I share some great tips; Friday Fun – Keep It Simple – focus on the main tasks, keep it simple and logical, and design the app with the user and device in mind. Have a great week to all and enjoy the holiday season ramp up!
This newsletter is archived online HERE