Yahoo! has opened up Fire Eagle (http://fireeagle.yahoo.net),
an open platform that helps users take their location to the web while giving
them the ability to easily control how and where their location data is shared.
Fire Eagle gives users a place to store and manage information about their
location, and offers developers clear protocols for updating or accessing that
information. Because it's open, any networked service can use Fire Eagle to
respond to a user's location - to help them find their friends, annotate the
world or find nearby services or local information.
Fire Eagle makes it much easier for both users and developers to create
Internet experiences that are geo-aware:
-- For users, Fire Eagle acts as a simple interface for managing location
information and deciding how -- and with whom -- to share it. Users can
authorize Web, mobile or desktop applications to update their location
automatically, or they can do it themselves manually on the Fire Eagle Web or
mobile sites. Then they can decide how much of that information to share with
their favorite services. At any time they can hide themselves, change their
sharing preferences or delete any of their stored information.
-- For developers, Fire Eagle takes away much of the costly and complicated
heavy-lifting of developing geo-aware applications. Developers can focus on how
they can use location in their services without having to build the
infrastructure to work out where their users are. Fire Eagle -- combined with
Yahoo!'s full suite of geo technologies -- now makes it practical for any
service to become location-aware easily and inexpensively.
Fire Eagle was built at Yahoo! Brickhouse, a home for start-up like projects
inside Yahoo where small teams seize on new ideas and create products around
them. Since its private beta launch in March of this year, Fire Eagle has been
integrated into over fifty live applications, including Dopplr, Pownce, Movable
Type, and Outside.in, through the platform's well-received
"The combination of Outside.in's new Radar feature and Fire Eagle's
amazingly simple and powerful
our users can now see all the news and buzz within 1,000 feet of their current
location, updated from any number of applications and devices," said
Steven Johnson, co-founder of Outside.in.
"Fire Eagle allowed us to easily add location data to Pownce using
their simple
co-founder, Pownce. "Pownce users can now say where they are and geotag
their notes which adds a new dimension to the service."
Services built on Fire Eagle during the private beta period include:
-- Brightkite: Brightkite is a location based social network that allows
users to track their friends' locations and meet new people in their area.
-- Dash: Dash is a two-way, Internet-connected
navigation system offering an innovative solution to traffic monitoring.
-- Dipity: Dipity is the easiest way to make and share interactive stories
for the people and topics users care about.
-- Dopplr: Dopplr is a service for intelligent travelers that helps them
make the most of their trips by sharing their travel plans with the people they
trust.
-- ekit: ekit is the leading communications provider to international
travelers, offering a range of services including mobile phones, satellite
phones,
recently the ekit travel journal.
-- Lightpole: Lightpole is a mobile application service provider that
distributes location-specific information to mobile devices in real-time and
engages mobile users in interactive communities.
-- Movable Type: Movable Type is a fully integrated, scalable, proven social
publishing platform for building highly interactive websites, blogs and social
networks.
-- Navizon: Navizon provides a software-only wireless positioning system
that triangulates signals broadcasted from Wi-Fi access points and cellular
towers to help users find their location.
-- Outside.in Radar: Outside.in's Radar is personalized local news with you
at the center of the map. Radar shows you everything going on nearby, wherever
you are, from the stories on your street, to the events in your neighborhood,
to headlines in your city.
-- Pownce: Pownce is a way to keep in touch with and share messages, files,
links and events with your friends.
-- Loki: Loki adds your location into your favorite social networks so you
can share it with your friends. Loki, powered by Skyhook Wireless, automatically
informs your friend of your whereabouts, using platforms such as Facebook,
Twitter, Fire Eagle, RSS Feeds and more.
--
the world's first satellite messenger, sends users'
location and custom messages to family and friends or emergency responders over
a satellite communications network from virtually anywhere around the globe -
even the most remote places - independent of cell phone coverage.
-- ZKOUT: ZKOUT enables mobile device users to create content -- messages,
videos -- on the ZKOUT network from any location, and share it instantly with
the people near you.