Places Directory is an application built by a Google engineer based in Taipei who traveled frequently to Mountain View California to help in locating places in a small category. I could relate as every time I am in the United States I wish I could just quickly locate certain shops out of a mobile device instead of going through pages and pages of internet to get to where I need to. Anyways, the Google engineer and his colleagues decided to dedicate 20% of their time to build the application, “places directory”. Once they have completed the app they have uploaded …read more

Not too long ago everyone on twitter was showing their support for Iran by changing their location. There were a variety of reasons I heard of for changing your location to Tehran, but I never did. I think accurately representing your location in your twitter profile is more important than people think.

As you can see from my graphic above, people set their locations to a variety of different uses. Some people are very specific and providing city, state and zip for their location. Others just provide a city. Some people put the name of a business in their location. In …read more

I’ve really started taking more and more pictures lately. Instead of just keeping them stored locally on my personal computers I’ve started uploading them to a variety of websites. I hadn’t thought much about it but recently read the article "Beware of GPS danger in your photos" by Kim Komando.

The article talks about the potential risk of posting photos to public services when the photo information, or EXIF data may contain geographic location information of where and when the photo was taken. Some cameras can now tag these photos automatically and there are other 3rd party apps and gadgets that …read more

A discussion was raised again today about the usefulness and validity of a location based alarm system. Most alarms that we think of our based on a specific time of day. The challenge with that type of alarm is your location, or context of your day may not have been what you planned for it to have been at that time.

What would really be helpful is to be reminded of something you needed to do when you were at a specific location, regardless of what time it was. For instance, the next time I’m around the corner of 71st and …read more

For more ways technology is advancing our fight to preserve Planet Earth, check out this month’s Tech Channel Theme Day posts.

One of the most popular (and expensive, and depending on who you talk to, wasteful) newer features in new car packages is the built-in navigation system. Holding out for nav can boost your bottom line by several thousand dollars, so I thought we’d take a look at a popular new hybrid – the Toyota Prius – and see how owners felt about their built-in systems, and what aftermarket products were recommended.