Slashgeo

The location capabilities for the iPhone has been discussed quite a few times here, see related stories below, but also this discussion on whether the iPhone needs GPS capabilities or not. Now Mapperz informs us a third-party GPS add-on for the iPhone and iPod Touch will start shipping in February at the price of 89$US. Great news: the software used is open source, bad news: it requires your iPhone/iPod Touch to be 'jailbroken' (maybe this will change with the upcoming SDK?). The description: "The iphone locoGPS module allows jail broken iphones to finally have GPS functionality. This module is in development and will be shipping in February. All software is open source and more applications are being written every day. The locoGPS module gives you the ability to explore all the benefits of GPS from a device that is small enough to put on a keychain." There's also Google's My Location new feature which works on the iPhone now.

In press release by SkyHook Wireless they announced that they are powering the wifi based portion of the new iPhone software location awareness. From the release:

Apple is using Skyhook's Wi-Fi positioning software for the new Wi-Fi location positioning feature in its Maps application on both iPhone and iPod touch. Using WPS, iPhone and iPod touch users can now locate themselves in the popular Maps application with the tap of one button.

This is some nice news from skyhook and lends credence to their theory that wifi is a good method for geo-location determination.

Here's a few recent Apple related geonews. First is the capacity for Mac owners to run Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D using the new VMWare Fusion: "Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D doesn’t yet run in a Mac OS X browser. Until recently, your only option was to install a copy of Windows on a different partition using Apple’s Bootcamp tool, and boot into it. [...] Sometime in the last few months, however, competitor VMWare came out with an update of their virtualization tool for Mac, Fusion, that does support VE3D." Additionally, The Map Room shares a complete guide to geotagging photos on the Mac. And finally, APB informs us Apple is encouraging iPhone users to help update the Skyhook wifi location database. On a side note, mentioning Apple products looks reasonable since they are increasingly popular even within geospatial professional, with now 14% of computer sold last February and almost a monopoly on portable music devices. Related previous stories added below, including an old one on running ArcGIS on MacOS X, but I admit omitting the numerous previous stories on geotagging photos.

Very Spatial links to the Open Landmark project. From the website: "What is Open Landmark? Open Landmark is a free, collaborative, landmark directory maintained by volunteers around the world. What's in a Landmark? Street address, latitude, longitude, distance away from where you are, photographs, name of the place, tags, description, phone number, URL, ratings, and comments." First question that came to my mind is how this community-driven project relates to other projects such the successful OpenStreetMap and if the objectives and features of OpenLandmark could simply be integrated into other existing projects. Their FAQ is informative: "The system tracks who has discovered landmarks and bookmarked photos to the landmarks. It will assign points to each discovery and credit the users for top photos and votes. In the near future, we will be putting ads on the pages. When we do so, we will announce a revenue sharing plan." See also some related stories below.

Here's the recent iPhone related stories found on the geoblogs. There's Ogle Earth discussing the state of 3D on the iPhone. Note that the new Microsoft Virtual Earth 6.2 also support the iPhone. APB provides a link to a map coming from a Wired's survey, tracking iPhone 3G speed and data. The GEB tells us iPhone's Earthscape has new features. Spatially Adjusted informs us how to develop interactive mapping on the iPhone without Silverlight, Java or Flash support, with SVG (read the comments too). Also interesting is the /. discussion about the software development kit shoot out between Android vs iPhone. See also related stories below.