Planet maemo: category "feed:533f5ff8469293460a7e02916e93a7ae"

I'm currently in aKademy, the KDE conference, talking about adding the geographical context into the Linux desktop. GeoClue, our solution to this problem is built to be desktop-agnostic service, and therefore the same talk has been held in both GUADEC and aKademy.

Looks like 2008 is forming up to be a quite busy conference year, at least looking at my Dopplr page. Here are the events I'm speaking (or performing as is the case with Haedong Kumdo) in this fall:

• Aug 2nd: Haedong Kumdo Seminar in Mayo, Ireland: part of the Finnish team
• Aug 9th - 10th: aKademy in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium: Location-aware applications with GeoClue (Aug 10th at 10:45 in Room 1)
• Aug 23rd - 24th: FrOSCon in Sankt Augustin, Germany: Location-aware applications with GeoClue (Aug 24th at 16:30 in HS5)
• Sep 23rd: Haedong Kumdo Performance in Busan, South Korea: part of the Finnish team
• Oct 7th - 9th: MindTrek in Tampere, Finland: Attention profiling
• Oct 24th - 26th: FSCONS in Gothenburg, Sweden: Midgard 2 and a Midgard workshop

In addition I might be going to LatinoWare, but that is still open.

GUADEC is held in Istanbul this year, and as has been the custom in 2006 and 2007, I again came there to discuss making the Linux desktop location aware.

maemo.org has been having user profile pages for a while, and now it was time to overhaul their visual design. Here is the new design:

In addition to new visuals, the profile page also now displays automatically collected data like user's latest blogs and favourited news items, and allows entering of new data like IRC nickname and multiple email addresses.

The new profile page is now only available on the maemo.org internal testing server, but should be rolled out later today. In the meanwhile, I made a quick screencast of how it works. Shame favoriting doesn't work on the test server due to missing SSL setup, so the screencast ends in an error message ;-)

On Planet GNOME I can see lots of people have already arrived to Istanbul for next week's GUADEC conference. I'm also flying there on Tuesday. On Wednesday Jussi Kukkonen, Iain Holmes and I will be talking about location-aware applications with GeoClue and Gypsy at 3:30pm in X-Large.

In preparation for the talk, be sure to check out my GeoClue slides from FISL and the GeoClue project page. iPhone, Symbian and Google are all pushing for more geographically aware applications and web, and free software will need tools like GeoClue to keep up.

Another interesting thing in the conference will be that the location of next year's GUADEC and aKademy will be announced. I'm keeping my thumbs up for Tampere, Finland. You should too!

But whatever happens with the 2009 conferences, I will be happy to be in Istanbul. If you're there, contact me and let us have a beer in the shady corners of Beyoğlu...

A more interesting piece of news today was that Nokia has acquired Plazes, the WiFi positioning company. I've been a Plazes user for quite a while and am using it as a position source for my website in addition to Fireeagle.

I hope the acquisition will increase Plazes' resources to develop and expand the service to new areas of mobile positioning. The Rails port of Plazes a year ago seemed to hurt their usage numbers quite badly, but the new directions they've been recently following have been promising.

Maybe a good time to start preparing a new release of MaemoPlazer, our Plazes client for Nokia's Linux platform?

GUADEC and aKademy will possibly be arranged together in 2009. As the events are looking for a venue, we at COSS (Centre for Open Source Solutions Finland) decided to apply to have the events in Tampere, Finland.

Tampere is an old industrial city situated between two lakes. It has quite good flight connections (including Ryanair) to Europe, and fast rail link to nearby Helsinki which is the big hub for Finnair. COSS is a seasoned conference organizer with good connections to local and country-level instances, and as venue we can have the University of Tampere campus.

See the proposal PDF.

GPS manufacturer Garmin has recently released the modified sources of their nüvi 880 and 5000 in-car navigators. Looking at the packages reveals that these devices are powered by GNOME Mobile and GeoClue, the toolkit for making mobile Linux applications location-aware:

On downloading and Inspecting the large (and nicely organized) 8xx source tarball (list of files here) its very apparent the device built upon a GNOME Mobile based stack (with X, Matchbox and GTK+ etc). Also interestingly it also contains GeoClue, PulseAudio and seemingly both Ogg Vorbis and Flac support.

Great to see GeoClue finally hitting devices!

Via ButterFeet and Jussi Kukkonen.

Lifehacker has an interesting story on how location-aware iPhone will change things:

There's a lot of speculation as to what we can expect from next week's iPhone announcements, but there's one thing you can be sure of: The iPhone's location-aware features will change your life. Whether that means pinpointing your location on a Google Map (which iPhones already do), tracking your friends when you go out, or giving you a heads-up on the best place to eat within a three-block radius, the location-aware future is bright.

The scenarios described in the story are very similar to what we've been discussing regarding GeoClue, the framework for making mobile Linux devices location-aware.

With iPhone pushing innovation it is very important that mobile Linux environments like GNOME Mobile, maemo and QTopia pick up the ball and start making location-aware solutions powered by more than just GPS. GeoClue can help there.

Technorati Tags: geoclue, iphone, maemo, qtopia

I'm currently in Porto Alegre, Brazil attending the 9th International Free Software Forum (FISL) - a huge conference with some seven thousand participants. My talk in the event will be about GeoClue, the geo-information framework designed for Linux-based mobile devices.

For those unable to be there or missing the 9am talk because of the parties tonight, the slides are now available online:

GeoClue is now nearing release, and so we will probably be present also in the GUADEC and Akademy conferences this summer.

Technorati Tags: geoclue, fisl