Colin Lowenberg
Curated by Colin Lowenberg
I’ll be on the Kojo Nnamdi show on Tuesday, Aug 9, 2011 at 12:06 p.m. The show description is below. Be sure to listen in here: http://thekojonnamdishow.org/shows/2011-08-09/mobile-apps-go-hyper-local
Direct link to player: http://thekojonnamdishow.org/audio-playerSocial media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have changed the way people make friends and network online. Now, a new wave of mobile apps is taking those changes into the “real world.” Apps like FourSquare and Google+ allow you to “check in” with friends and make plans in real-time. Companies like LivingSocial and Groupon are using geolocation data to offer you deals based on where you are. Tech Tuesday explores how new mobile apps are changing the way we shop and socialize.
Guests
- Frank Gruber, CEO and Executive Editor, Tech Cocktail
- Peter Corbett, CEO, iStrategyLabs
- Pete Erickson, Founder and Director of Innovation, Disruptathon; Founder, MoDevDC
Along with a sharp new Engineering Blog and a beautifully organized new Developer Center. Enjoy!
Already upgraded to iOS 5 and can’t find your UDID? Forgot to register your iPhone with the developer portal? Don’t worry, just search for the “MobileSync” folder on your Mac or PC, and look in the Backup directory. The backup folders are named the same as your Device UDID!
Full Path: \Users\*your name*\Library\Application Support\MobileSync\Backup\
The Geosocial Universe (via @lindsaykap/lindsaykap)
Google shut down its service to scan, archive and make searchable newspapers’ pre-Internet archives.
According to the Boston Phoenix:
News Archive was generally a good deal for newspapers — especially smaller ones like ours, who couldn’t afford the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars it would have cost to digitally scan and index our archives — and a decent bet for Google.
(via soupsoup)
10 days ago I brought this up in conversation with someone from the Times. I politely suggested they might contract a tech consultant, but I personally thanked them for bringing consumer awareness to the location tracking of mobile phones like the iPhone. It’s clear they are looking at more ‘researchers’ on the subject of mobile security since Locationgate. Apple’s reaction post-print was fast, and Google has re-acted at what feels like a dial-up connection. Google’s Gingerbread is baked, but the people are waiting for their bread. Let them eat cake?
10. Everyone is upset about the iPhone, but EVERY phone is being tracked. Apple just let’s you store it locally on your device. This is exceptional! If someone steals your device and you get it back, you can track where they went. If someone sues you or you are charged with a crime, you can use your phone to prove your innocence. The government has the ability to access these records from the carriers, but now you have the power too. If someone could easily remove it, then they could clear their tracks. It’s good for the good, and bad for the bad.
9. WiFi Location Positioning! GPS does not work indoors, in urban environments, or generally any complex metal area. I am an expert in tracking assets using WiFi 3D Real Time Location Services to compliment GPS and track iPhones inside buildings, but I can’t afford to sell millions of WiFi radios with 3G and 4G connections to millions of test users. Google and Apple have this really figured out. They are creating the databases that make location services work. Love your Foursquare? Then thank Apple for keeping track of everyone’s locations. WSJ
8. “Apple is not harvesting this data from your device. This is data on the device that you as the customer purchased and unless they can show concrete evidence supporting this claim – network traffic analysis of connections to Apple servers – I rebut this claim in full. Through my research in this field and all traffic analysis I have performed, not once have I seen this data traverse a network. As rich of data as this might be, it’s actually illegal under California state law.” Levinson
7. Location Services! if you’ve got Location Services turned on, whenever you request current location data (like via an app), Apple collects info about nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi hotspots. If you happen to be using GPS, it’ll collect the GPS coordinates too. That data’s then transmitted to Apple every 12 hours over “secure” Wi-Fi networks, anonymized with a “random identification number generated every 24 hours by an iOS device,” so neither Apple nor anybody can personally identify you. Buchanan
6. Apple is protecting you! Through several avenues, Apple is attempting to protect your data on these devices. Following simple steps you can treat your phone like a digital fortress and protect the information thats on it. For example, there are simple and easy techniques that you can take to protect your data, including this location information. Levinson
5. Pete Warden made a useful app so we can see our history! Thanks Pete, but I disagree with your point of view. Also, most importantly you did not “make this public” but kudos for scaring people and getting into the headlines. Check out his cool app. Warden.
4. Apple told us nine months ago. Well, not us, but two of our esteemed Congressmen, Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas). Clarke
3. Lock your phone. Everyone After connecting your iPhone to your computer, you can set a “Backup Encryption Password” in iTunes. This does more than just encrypt your backups – it actually encrypts all data that could be retrieved from your phone physically. In the event you loose your phone, this can prevent someone from just downloading all the data off your device. Using a Lock Passcode can also stop anyone from simply viewing data on your phone who might grab it. Levinson
2. Apple isn’t trying to keep a location history at all; that’s just a side-effect of the thoroughness of this cell location caching. The data is NOT your location! There may be individual points in your consolidated.db file that happen to be the exact same as your location at the time. The phone seems to be logging locations of nodes on the wireless cell network, and their presence in the file mean that you MAY have been near them. Clarke The table uses the MCC-MNC-LAC-CI tuple as its primary key. These are the values used to uniquely identify a GSM cell, anywhere in the world. It’s the primary key: it can store only one row for any observed cell. It’s not saying you were in a couple dozen locations all at once; it’s listing off all the visible cells at a particular instant. Westacular
1. Consumer Awareness. “Our personal information has moved from our wallets and home filing cabinets, to the file cabinets of data brokers and online files of behavioral advertisers and now, directly to the Internet ‘cloud’ from our mobile devices. The new challenges and concerns that present themselves with the collection and use of location-based information are particularly disconcerting. Consumers must be made aware of this collection and they must consent to giving it up,” said U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas. Markey
Despite the advents of news aggregators and RSS feeds, finding reliable, accurate news can be a chore so arduous that your index finger might break anyday from all that scrolling you do. Enter Neighborhoodr. It’s a fancy, ambitious project that leverages the ease of Tumblr and allows community editors to keep local readers well-informed about what’s happening in their neighborhoods. Today, we were actually remarking about how handy the site was since some ambitious community editors have started city blog for the Libyan capital of Triploli. But this post isn’t about politics. It’s about how such a platform can help make the ambitions of entrepreneurs and marketers easier.
This news makes AT&T a big player.
(Source: soupsoup)
