A VC - Latest Comments in Latitude

Re: Latitude

Shaili — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 12:26:41 -0000

Good article on the Location-enabled Next Net:
http://www.businessweek.com...

Re: Latitude

calvin — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:42:32 -0000

I'm trying to get latitude but it keeps saying coming soon and I'm getting upset.I have a G1 and so do my friends and family and they have on there phone . I'm not understanding why it won't let me have it

Re: Latitude

bahram — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 13:08:51 -0000

where can i find more information about google latitude?

Re: Latitude

Noah David Simon — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 02:45:40 -0000

aw... weren't you just a little scared?

Re: Latitude

Jamie Lin — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:27:48 -0000

Oh yeah funny part is I received the update later that afternoon after I posted the comment! Have been playing with it. I hope they roll it out on iPhone soon cuz most of my friends are on that. Ha!

Re: Latitude

yish — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:40:51 -0000

Latitude comes standard with the newest 1.1 Android OS release which should be rolling out currently. Just received my update over the weekend.

Re: Latitude

Shaili — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 19:47:04 -0000

Pls do ... at www.mygeodiary.com. I can mail you a BB georecorder app to try out.

Appreciate any feedback,
Shaili

Re: Latitude

fredwilson — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 19:13:09 -0000

Can I try it?

Re: Latitude

Shaili — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 11:27:47 -0000

Another example of the implementation for E911 comes from PolarisWireless which uses wireless location signature. They are constantly trying to improve the time to fix location vs accuracy issues. For indoors & dense urban areas, this works better than GPS.

Agree that ultimately, location fix will be a hybrid solution and a function of cost, accuracy & privacy issues. Latitude does a good job of using hybrid location technologies but is a long way from good indoor resolutions.

Re: Latitude

Shaili — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 11:10:13 -0000

We have built a geodiary service (www.mygeodiary.com) where I have been logging my whereabouts for over 12 months now. Fascinating what patterns emerge when you look at a large corpus of personal data.
The service gives you basic "record, semantically organize & publish" mechanism for your geo data:
0. Record using a variety of positioning devices (BB, Windows, Garmin ...) with rich annotations
1. Create a group of friends (currently supports public or private), select a set of apps (flickr, blogspot e.g) or create GeoRSS feeds.
2. Publish to these entities based on how you tag your location data (post to flickr; send email notification etc.).
3. Derive analytics from users data (e.g. fitness metrics, distance travelled, search based on location etc.)
We have built this on a SaaS model with a decent API & Widgets library. Now we keeping adding apps to link the geodiary service to.

thx,

Re: Latitude

fredwilson — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 09:22:18 -0000

I don't have any a-list friends thankfully

Re: Latitude

Noah David Simon — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 21:00:45 -0000

GPS fun... not serious

Re: Latitude

Noah David Simon — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 20:26:40 -0000

a friend of mine... I think his name is Lee Harvey Oswald Jr. wants to know how many of your Alist friends you have invited to this wonderful service.

Re: Latitude

Ajans — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 18:22:58 -0000

Thanks but no thanks. I lived through this with Plazes (an earlier version of the same idea), and gave up on it when there got to be one too many socially inappropriate moments.

The worst part of any of these services is not when they work right; that is actually quite interesting. The worst part is when they work wrong, and they automatically place you somewhere you aren't, and some concerned (or nosy) person pings you to ask about it.

Re: Latitude

fredwilson — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 17:33:17 -0000

Dodgeball was simply too early in my opinion

Re: Latitude

deancollins — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 12:09:19 -0000

well wasn't that the whole concept behind Dennis Crowley's Dogeball application?

btw apparently he is coding Dodgeball 2 now.

At the moment latitude isn't updating anything in a meaningful way about 'where' you are.

it also doesn't have any data extraction api's (yet).

Re: Latitude

fredwilson — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 11:33:44 -0000

Ok, they are quickly doing it!!

Re: Latitude

fredwilson — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 08:17:06 -0000

Agreed. And I'll add another feature request. An sms alert when I am within a certain distance of a friend on latitude

Re: Latitude

afaff — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 01:39:16 -0000

Awesome service but imagine if they add a couple things:

1. Automate the pinging so that every hour it records your location. Make it smart enough that if your location does not deviate drastically from the prior hour then it does not record it. Reduces the dupes.
2. Allow an opt-in process where it logs all of your whereabouts and keeps it similar to the web search history. You can then pull up historical info of any period in your life and exactly where you were.
3. Building on top of the historical presence, allow you to match your location with someone else. Imagine you just met someone and Latitude was able to cross-reference this new associate info with your to see if you have been in close proximity anytime prior to your first meeting.
4. Triangulate your Gmail, Search History, Latitude and whatever else goog has about you into a dashboard that infers your life that day and answers where, what, who and when better then any human mind will ever be able to recall.

In any case, I think Latitude is a giant step into a world where nothing is ever forgotten.

Re: Latitude

kenberger — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 13:14:12 -0000

It's great for caravanning on a road trip and tracking where and what progress each car makes. A group of us drove up to a beach house in far Northern Calif last week, and tried using Loopt. Many folks now use Gmaps as their GPS while driving. So the problem winds up being you have to close Loopt to switch to Gmaps (at which point Loopt stops tracking). Not anymore.

Gmaps freakin' dominates. I don't think they're 'slowly' doing it, I think they took over vs Mapquest, etc long ago. With the exception of some local services for countries not well-covered by gmaps, and live.com (MS) offers some formidable bird's eye photos.

Re: Latitude

coldbrew — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 07:37:21 -0000

Right, so called A-GPS (A for assisted), but law enforcement is able to use A-GPS to find people after 911 calls more quickly than I would think a "few hundred yards" resolution would allow for . What gives? I'm not sure what level of data is available to the carriers and to what extent they offer that data to 3rd parties.

From working with ISO 18000-7 RTLS (Real-Time Location Systems) for the "enterprise", some of the companies offer ~3ft. resolution (in 3d spaces) using wifi (Pango Networks, Ekahau, Wherenet, etc.) Best example I have for very high resolution is Ubisense (found at the logical url), but they use UWB (not part of 18000-7) and is only useful within buildings. [Edited for clarity and greater context.]

Re: Latitude

fredwilson — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 05:38:08 -0000

That's a great insight!

Re: Latitude

Soe Thiha — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 03:37:06 -0000

Yes, I agree too.

Re: Latitude

Mike Williams — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 02:22:43 -0000

Yes I agree, but it is a iphone after all

Re: Latitude

daryn — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 01:54:52 -0000

Conceivably, there will be a API for latitude, making it easy to build your own personal "Lo-Jack" network for all your devices.