Posts Tagged ‘location’
New Tracking System Can Pin Any Internet User’s Location to Within a Few Hundred Meters
Yong Wang, a computer scientist at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu, developed a three-stage system to narrow the radius of geolocation without requiring the user's permission. The first stage is the one that's currently used: A packet is sent to the target, and the time it takes to to bounce back is converted into a (very vague) distance. But Wang took it further by realizing that many large organizations, like businesses and schools, usually have their servers in-house, meaning the IP addresses can be tied to a physical location that's easily found. If an IP address is linked to a university, you can just look that university up on Google Maps and have a pretty good idea that the user of the IP address is somewhere nearby.
Wang catalogued about 76,000 such "landmarks" on Google Maps, which leads to the first new stage developed. The new system pings all of the landmarks in that initial 200-km radius, and by analyzing the time that bounce takes, the possible location radius can shrink even further. In this stage, the software might find that ten out of twenty landmarks return similar ping times to the target, and shrink the possible location radius to reflect that result.
After that step, they continue the method until they figure out which landmark is closest to the target. In areas with many targets, like cities, that can lead to unsettlingly accurate tracking--all without the target's permission. The only recourse somebody might have to this method would be to , which would effectively confuse the software into returning a null result.
Who would be interested in this? Well, advertisers might not actually care to get this granular with their targeting, although super-local advertisers might be able to target individual neighborhoods. What's more worrying is the possible invasion of privacy from, well, just about anyone, from individuals to small groups to governmental organizations. Is everyone going to have to use a proxy just to avoid any stranger being able to zero in on their laptops? And do the benefits of this kind of tracking outweigh the costs?
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Foursquare launches new Android app earlier than expected
Foursquare may have just , but the company isn’t done with the upgrades just yet. Cofounder and chief executive Dennis Crowley just that the Android version of the new app is now available, complete with the new comments and photos features.
Though the company noted the Android version wouldn’t be out till sometime “later next week,” Android users are getting an early Christmas present. The reason may be a crowdsourced approach to testing the app, according to another from Crowley.
The comments feature is meant to give users some added value around meeting up with friends and exploring around town and the photos feature will allow for users to attach photos to a friend’s comment or the venue itself. On Monday afternoon, .
The New York City-based company, founded in 2009, has raised more than $21 million in funding. It currently has more than 40 employees in its hometown and a new engineering office it’s opening in San Francisco.
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Google Latitude iPhone app will help you stalk your friends
After last week, Google’s official Latitude iPhone app is , the this morning.
Google as a way to easily keep track of your friends’ locations in real-time. Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian users have been able to take advantage of the service for some time with background updating, which automatically updates their Latitude location. Now with an official app, combined with , iPhone users, too, will be able to take advantage of all Latitude has to offer.
Apple blocked Google’s first attempt at releasing a Latitude app last year (Google said Apple was worried users would confuse it with the Maps app), so that let users manually update their locations. Being a web app, it couldn’t offer the convenient background updating feature found on other platforms.
Latitude is the second rejected Google service to get an official iPhone app in the past month. Apple , after . Google after Apple’s rejection, but just like Latitude, it was no replacement for a native app. Apple’s change of heart can be traced back to .
I’ve only had a short while to dig into the Latitude app, but it seems pretty straightforward. You can view a map of all of your friends’ locations, change privacy settings and invite more friends to Latitude. The background location updating seems to work just fine, and it can also be turned off easily. Now that Latitude is fully functional on the iPhone, I’ll definitely be inviting more friends (who don’t mind being stalked) to use the service.
Google says that there are over 9 million Latitude users on other mobile platforms. I expect that number to explode now that iPhone users can take full advantage of it.
The Latitude app requires iPhone OS 4 and is compatible with the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad and the 3rd/4th generation iPod Touch. You can view a video demonstration of the app below:
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With new programming tools, Foursquare hopes more developers will check in
Location-based check-in service just announced that is has officially released the second version of its application programming interface, or API, in beta. The first version of its API, used by third-party developers to build software that connects to Foursquare’s services, will still be functional, but will probably phase out in a few months, according to the company.
Rumors of the new API surfaced several weeks ago when Foursquare cofounder Naveen Selvadurai , a question and answer site, about where they could get place data for a check-in application. At the time the new API was in an early testing phase, but it appears the company was looking for applications to test it.
The company lists several updates:
- OAuth2 is much easier to use, more secure for users, and can even be used entirely from client-side Javascript.
- By dropping XML support, we’ve been able to make the server more responsive (but not ; sorry).
- There’s extensive documentation that includes sample applications and an API explorer.
- A lot of work was put into consistency and clarity.
- And last but not least, we’ve added oft-requested new endpoints for fetching user’s badges, user’s venue histories, and venue popularity.
The new API comes on the heels of cofounder and chief executive Dennis Crowley mentioning that the company now has 5 million users, , and is seeing more than 2 million check-ins a day. The company also recently decided to to help with growth.
The New York City-based company, founded in 2009, has raised more than $21 million in funding and currently has close to 40 employees.
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Google working on search results without searching — “contextual discovery”
If you thought was fast, but it’s about to get even faster. Soon, with the company’s push into “contextual discovery”, you won’t even have to type in a search query to get useful data.
Google’s Marissa Mayer, now the head of consumer products, spelled out the company’s plans at the LeWeb ‘10 conference in Paris, France today, . With contextual discovery, Google will be able to look at a user’s browsing and location profiles to deliver relevant data without the need to search.
According to Mayer, “The idea is to push information to people.” On a mobile device, for example, you could potentially see the menu of a restaurant when you’re actually there. There may even be added social elements, like seeing which items on the menu your friends like. Google is still in the early stages with this concept. Mayer says that on a computer, it could potentially take the form of some sort of panel in your web browser.
The push towards delivering data before we even ask for it is to be expected — after all, where else can Google go after unleashing its lightning-fast Instant Search? It’s also a natural move given that location data on mobile devices is now more readily available thanks to the proliferation of GPS-equipped smartphones. The real question is how contextual discovery will play out on actual computers — I suspect it will rely more on the rich amount of browsing history we build up on desktops and laptops, rather than on location data.
Google has to play it safe when it comes to automatically recommending search results, though, lest it evoke memories of .
Find a transcript of Mayer’s talk and a video embedded below:
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Foursquare: 5 million users, 25,000 new ones a day
Foursquare cofounder and chief executive Dennis Crowley just took the stage at , an Internet conference held in Paris, France, and noted the company now has 5 million users, is , and is seeing more than 2 million check-ins a day.
The company with a full team of engineers in San Francisco, California. The hiring is taking place in part to handle the company’s monthly user growth of 30 percent. While the company noted it had more than 4.5 million users at that time, Crowley updated this number today to 5 million total users.
The New York City-based company, founded in 2009, has raised more than $21 million in funding and currently has close to 40 employees.
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Why Foursquare’s so hard to pin down
What is Foursquare? CEO and founder Dennis Crowley offered at least a half-dozen different definitions of the location-based service in an on-stage interview with AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher today.
Fundamentally, Foursquare is a service that allows users to announce their whereabouts to friends online by checking in to a location, and in the process it lets users earn forms of virtual recognition, like badges, points, and mayorships, titles earned through frequent check-ins.
“Where are you going with this?” Swisher asked Crowley at D: Dive Into Mobile, a conference the News Corp.-affiliated journalist is running in San Francisco. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “As the product matures, the paths will become clearer.”
Foursquare recently raised $20 million in a round led by the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, at a valuation of roughly $100 million. But it’s not clear — even according to Crowley — what they put their money into.
Here are a few of the definitions Crowley offered: Foursquare is a “social utility that intersects with the real world.” It’s a “crowdsourced city guide.” It’s a “stats engine.”
Using Foursquare, in perhaps Crowley’s most tenuous metaphor, is like “pulling a lever on a slot machine,” referring to the uncertainty of whether a user might earn a badge, a mayorship, or another reward from checking in.
He also suggested that Foursquare could offer coupons for local businesses in a manner similar to Groupon, or even help Groupon make its deals more interesting.
Swisher asked Crowley if Foursquare, which has attracted acquisition interest from Facebook and Yahoo, will be independent in five years. Crowley was vague in his answer, saying he and his team just wanted to build the local products they’d been thinking about: “If we’re independent, so be it.”
All that uncertainty may be part of Foursquare’s appeal to Sand Hill Road’s starry-eyed investors, though. One venture capitalist’s uncertainty is another’s potential. And as long as Crowley can keep spinning tales of Foursquare’s many possible futures, they’ll keep knocking.
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