OpenCellID reach major milestone
A little bit more thant one year after the launch, OpenCellID now reached more than 300 000 cells discovered an near 40 millions of measures!
A good time to celebrate it and to announce it to the world through a nice PR, that is enclosed here. The PDF version is vailable too.
For immediate release
OpenCellID, the biggest open source database of CellID announces a major milestone.
Bordeaux, France
7 April 2009
8Motions, the company behind the OpenCellID effort announced today that the OpenCellID database reached last month a major milestone with 300 000 (three hundred thousand discovered) cells in April. CellID is an alternative technology to GPS for mass market phones and provides location information to users based on GSM cell towers. OpenCellId.org ( http://www.opencellid.org ) offers APIs and tools to use this database in mobile applications.
This database is created using a crowdsourced approach, thanks to support of hundreds of
enthusiast developers and companies supporting the project. One of these companies is Birkett Entreprise finalist of 2008 Navteq developer challenge with his “phone locator” product . Alex Birkett declares: “OpenCellID is a fantastic resource for people wishing to make location aware applications using open, non-proprietary technology. Birkett Enterprise is delighted to have been able to contribute data to the project.” Other developers have created clients for Blackberry, J2ME, Windows Mobile, Symbian and OpenMoko devices demonstrating the industry interest for this approach.
Aurelien REGNAULT,co- founder of 8Motions declares: “OpenCellID is the first viable alternative to
commercial CellID approach and enable smaller companies to provide compelling mass market LBS enabled application. We initially created it for our internal needs, but we are amazed by the success of this effort”
About 8Motions:
8Motions provides service and technologies for mobile mapping applications, including the “Mobile Map Toolkit”, an easy to use component to embed maps into a mobile application available in J2ME and soon iPhone.
8Motions is located in Bordeaux, France and has been created in 2006 and has been nominated as one of the finalist of the Navteq LBS Challenge in 2007.
Contact: infos@8motions.com
Corporate WebSite : http://corp.8motions.com
About Birkett Enterprise:
Birkett Enterprise Ltd was established in 2007 to provide high quality mobile software. The directors are Alex and John Birkett. Alex has been developing software using Symbian OS, Series 60 and UIQ. since 2001. He has worked for Opera Software, Sendo, Bullant Software (now UI Ative) and IBM.
Birkett Enterprise is developing phonelocator, a software application and web service to locate GPS enabled Series 60 handsets.
Contact: http://www.birkett-entreprise.com
MobileWordCongress & 8Motions
Next week will “the” yearly mobile event, the MobileWordCongress. As usual, I’ll be there and would be happy to meet some of you if you will be there. So feel free to drop me an email if you want to chat about localisation, mapping, CellID, widgets or other cool technologies!
WhereRYou: OpenCellID Blackberry client
WhereRYou is an OpenCellID Blackberry client, created by Aris Volcoff. This application works in the background and use the OpenCellID Backend, so not really graphical, but here is a small snapshot:
Here is is
OpenCellID client for SonyEricsson phones with sources
Pär Bertilsson have created a nice client that can be used on SonyEricsson phone that use an external bluetooth receiver to fill the OpenCellID database! Again, thanks to SonyEricsson to be the first one to implement an easy way to access to CellID from the phone, and thanks to Pär for creating this nice client and giving access to the J2ME source code.
The full description of the program: OpenCellID for Sony Ericsson JP-7.3+/JP-8
Experimental feature: Twitter update and Flickr posting
Two new interesting features:
First one, twitter update: if you take a picture from your mobile using 8Motions, this could generate a “twit” with the link to the photo and place that has been uploaded,like this:
http://www.8motions.com/p/11463
To enable this, go to your 8Motions account (my account on the top left of the page) and put your twitter username/password
Second news, Flickr updload is back.This feature was in 8Motions client since the beginning, but itwas quite hard to configure. Now, its easy: log on your 8Motions account on the web, go to your setting, and click on “link to flickr” and you will be redirected to the flickr page asking for your authorisation.
You can see the stream of public posting here
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