Published by kyle on 15 Jul 2008 at 12:11 am
An Idea
It’s probably already been covered, but my 30 seconds of Google-Fu hasn’t turned anything up so bear with me…
Take one OpenMoko phone, a geolocation service like Fire Eagle, an online celltower database such as CellDB, and some code to use those lovely d-bus bindings, and you could have a location reporting service that’s easy on the battery and mostly precise in urban areas. If your area isn’t covered by CellDB, then run around with the OpenMoko GPS reciever online for a while to report celltower locations, and you’re sorted.
Use all of the above to create services like Socialight, location based Twittering, rough geotagging for photos (courtesy of Flickr and FireEagle [both Yahoo companies]) , pre-emptive OSM tile downloads, Asterisk routing - you could even implement ex-girlfriend logic to it all, if she were to have a similar device 
Well, I’m sure someone has thought of this already, but I thought I would commit ideas to storage just in case. Once my FreeRunner arrives, I know what I’ll be working on
michael on 15 Jul 2008 at 2:56 pm #
PS Socialight has an open API - crack it open here: http://socialight.com/api
kyle on 15 Jul 2008 at 10:52 pm #
“Cellfriend” could appeal to some, but it sounds mightily cheesy. Works on a cell phone, uses cell towers, hints at the virtual container that surrounds you, includes your friends, is a friendly app for your phone… I’ll stop now cos it’s embarrasing
Ta for the pointer to the API. I’ll have a look and see what comes up