1February2008
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Business.
I haven’t posted much yet about LocationAware — but since we have spent some more time on it recently I thought now is as good a time as any. Especially since Doug Turner, Brad Lassey and I were able to make some headway this week. We have updated the Working Draft on the wiki. If you are interested in the geoweb, please check it out and provide any and all feedback via our mailing list.
LocationAware.org is a “working group” formed around the common goal of standardizing the way that geolocation information gets exposed through a browser. Currently we are focusing on DOM APIs to allow that to happen, but really the goal is location-aware browsing, so other methods in other environments may work as well.
Initially we are trying to work with various browser vendors to have them act as a broker of location information — such as GPS, Wi-Fi Positioning and IP Geolocation — from the device they reside on. By making this information available to web developers and content owners more compelling and relevant experience will hopefully arise.
31January2008
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Events; Personal; Skyhook Wireless.
Part of my New Years goals (not resolutions) has been to start blogging again. Its funny that when you actually have some interesting things to say and report, you rarely have time to write about them. So they may be shorter, but there will be more.
2008 looks to be a fun year for me personally and professionally. I have a number of speaking engagements lined up in the coming months. at or helping organize:
SXSW
Web2.0 Expo
WhereCamp2008
MobileCampBoston
So needless to say I should be pretty tired of hearing myself talk.
I was also flattered to be invited to this weekends SGFooCamp in Sebastopol, CA. It looks to be a great lineup and I look forward to meeting everyone there.
31January2008
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Skyhook Wireless.
It’s hard to believe that it has taken me two weeks to blog about the biggest day of my professional career. A few weeks ago Steve Jobs, himself, announced that Apple was licensing Skyhook’s positioning system to power the “locate me” feature on the iPhone and the iPod touch.
There aren’t many times in anyone’s career where something as large and surreal as that happens — but it did. We are just as pleased to be working with Apple as they have been great partners and great shepherds in introducing the general public to Wi-Fi positioning.
Following the announcement there has been a tremendous amount of press and feedback. I can’t link to every article, but here are a few of the great ones:
USA Today
Silicon Alley
Boston Globe
7January2008
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Programming; Technology.
Its always interesting to see what happens when smart people have too much time on their hands — also known as academics.
Johnny Lee, a Ph.D graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, has developed a series of studies around IR tracking using off the shelf Wii hardware. Its incredible to see what he has come up with using some basic hardware and custom code he has written to receive information from the Wiimote. It’s great to see a company like Nintendo make such advanced hardware available to the general market for really low prices as it helps make projects like this a reality.
Watch the videos — be sure to check out the VR display: http://www.cs.water filtercmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/
29November2007
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Loki; Skyhook Wireless.
Its been a while, ok a long time, since I have posted on here. But I wanted to just make a quick post to update everyone on something we have been working on with Loki.
Today we are privately launching a new service to go along with Loki called MyLoki. MyLoki allows a Loki user to selectively share their current location with their friends and family through a number of means such as Facebook, RSS feeds and badges for your blog or email like you see in the column to the right. The current public version of the Loki toolbar doesn’t support automatic updates. We are rolling out a new version on a few platforms to start testing the system. So if you use Firefox on Windows XP you can upgrade to the beta version and automatically publish your location to the server.
We have lots of plans for the future of MyLoki. If you’re interested in getting an invite and helping us shape it with your feedback go over to http://my.loki.com/requestInvite and use “SARVER” as the referral code.
19July2007
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Business.
There has been a lot of press lately (joystiq, gizmodo, dsfanboy) about area/code’s recent announcement of Plundr on the Nintendo DS.
18July2007
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Events; Personal; Skyhook Wireless.
If you’re in the New York area, I will be speaking at the NYC Wireless event on July 25th at the Bway.net office. The event starts at 7:00 and the event details are below. If you want to meet up for a drink or chat, feel free to email me and we can set something up: firstname . lastname @gmail
Bway.net
568 Broadway at Prince St, NE corner
Suite 404
New York, NY 10012
Details:
http://global.freifunk.net/item/july_meeting_wed_7_25_7pm
17July2007
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Music; Technology.
On the recommendation of Keith, I recently downloaded Simplify so that I could access all my music at home while I am at the office while using iTunes.
Its such a simple idea — and there are some freeware versions like it out there — but this one just seems to work well. For some reason I couldn’t get Hamachi to create a network for me, but Simplify works.
Check it out: Simplify Media
3June2007
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Culture; Programming.
Day 1 of WhereCamp was a huge success and was even better than we could have imagined going into it. We had an amazing group of people show up, somewhere over 170, which led to no only great session, but the discussion between sessions and during lunch were even more valuable. I will do a full recap when I get back to Boston and get settled, but I thought it would be worthwhile to post a few links and point out the new addition to my blog.
In the sidebar you will now see a map that shows the city I am currently in. Its using Fire Eagle as the back end to it. Fire Eagle is a project from the guys at Y!RB that was just released this weekend at WhereCamp. It is essentially a web service or directory that allows users to submit their location via a number of devices and then expose that information to application on a per-application basis. Each application has to register with the system and can be granted different levels of granularity. Very cool.
Fire Eagle: http://fireeagle.research.yahoo.com/
WhereCamp Photos: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=wherecamp&w=all
WhereCamp Links: http://del.icio.us/search/?fr=del_icio_us&p=wherecamp&type=all
26May2007
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Culture; Personal; Programming.
“Without geography you’re nowhere” -Jimmy Buffet
Next weekend after Where2.0 Anselm and I will be hosting the first WhereCamp being held at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale campus.
After organizing the first BarCampBoston I thought it made sense to apply the same concept to the Geo-hackers world. Shortly after Anselm joined on and Yahoo! (thanks to Leonard Lin) jumped in to host and sponsor the event things have started to come together.
So mark June 2nd and 3rd in your calendars and join us over at the Yahoo! Sunnyvale campus for a weekend of geo-debauchery. If you are thinking of attending, head over to the WhereCamp wiki (or Upcoming) and add your name so we can get an idea for numbers. Saturday night, the guys from uLocate / WHERE are hosting a kick-ass beer-b-q, so be sure not to miss it.
A special thanks to all of our gracious sponsors who are making this event happen: Yahoo!, WHERE, Platial and Meadan.
