Location Blogging with Wavemarket

Emeryville based start-up Wavemarket launched an application for location-based community blogging on mobile hansets.

SeSam, a Multi-Agent Simulation Environment in Java

SeSAm (Shell for Simulated Agent Systems) provides a generic environment for modelling and experimenting with agent-based simulation.

Device Positioning Using Radio Beacons

Device Positioning Using Radio Beacons in the Wild by the people at Place Lab gives an excellent overview of the current world of device positionning for location-enhanced applications.

Topiary for Designign Location-Enhanced Applications

Topiary, developed by the Group of User Interface Research at UC Berkeley is a tool for prototyping location-enhanced applications. A Topiary prototype can be run on one mobile device while the designer monitors the user’s interactions from a second mobile device. In this mode, the user’s current location is determined Wizard-of-Oz-style by havning the designer click the user’s current location on a map.

Social Network to Map the Research

FAS.research of Vienna touts its graphs as a high tech solution to the problem of funding science and, by implication, art. Social network analysis offers an ingenious answer. When it comes to scientific research, the most important gauges of success are peer review and citation. Who is citing whom, and how often? Mapping these relationships and distilling them into a single eyeful reveals which projects have the most impact. They also offer a nice overview of the field in the paper: The Science of Measuring, Visualizing and Simulating Social Relationships. I particularly like the part about the Rapid Vienna football game analysis. Where are the weak points of Rapid’s play? Which players do I have to “shut down” to achieve maximum distruption of the flow of Rapid’s play.

Social Map of Bitterly Competitive Overachievers

Via Bruce Sterling, theyrule makes social maps that gives a portrait of the American corporate elite and its interlocking boards of directors.

Place Lab 2.0

Place Lab version 2.0 was released today. It adds Series 60 phone support, new documentation, a smaller jar file with streamlined packages, more API’s like JSR-000179 (Location API for J2ME) and virtual GPS, and much more.

It now runs perfectly on the iPAQ 5550. Like for the previous version, a driver update of the Wireless LAN Mini-PCI Card is needed for the Tablet PC TC1000. It fails to give good RSSID values on the Dell Inspiron Intel(R) PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3A Mini PCI card. Place Lab won’t run on the Nokia3560 since it does not support MIDP 2.0 (there are UI issues). However it support Series 60 2.0 phones.

Mapping the Blogosphere and the Creative Class

Via Pasta and Vinigar, a correlation between Richard Florida’s list of centers of the creative class and blogs.

In fact, the top 10 cities with the most bloggers included the top 8 from Florida’s list of centers of the creative class.
My theory: cities with the richest local online culture (measured in number of blogs, and use of a select group of other geographically-bound websites) will reflect those cities with the highest numbers of creative class people. In short, the cities with the most blogs will be the most economically successful in the future.

MapTribe Project Page

Mauro Cherubini has made public the MapTribe project page, his system for collaborative annotation of maps at a city level.

October Rush

Bill (140 users), Biomol (71 users) and Matheval (900 users) are now smoothly running.