Geekblok

As some of you know, I’ve been messing with Fire Eagle for some time now already (I was lucky enough to get an invitation) and yesterday I noticed the site went public. That means you, yeah you, can sign up now too.

But what is and does Fire Eagle? Not a whole lot to be frank. It’s basically a broker for your geo-data. It can share your position on earth with a number of other services, like wikinear (see previous post).

I do applaud the initiative of Fire Eagle though. It’s a Yahoo! application and for a change, they didn’t simply buy a company. Nope, they’ve created this themselves! I’m happy to see this and hope the other big players will do the same: be creative, invent new stuff (knol is not innovative at all, to me).

Since the launch of Fire Eagle, quite a few websites have joined the effort and use the API provided. That includes Pownce. The application gallery is growing and I’m really interested to see what other websites will join and be created, inspired by this functionality.

The NOS (Dutch public broadcasting system) recently launched a mobile application for their website. This includes their TV news show, Internet news feeds as well as weather forecasts, traffic information and an interface to Teletext.

Of course I had to give it a go on my Nokia N95 8GB and I must say I’m quite impressed! The application works well. The interface is slick and the videos of the news are streaming without many problems. The NOS claims they will also stream the Olympic Games and see no reason why the great uitzendinggemist.nl couldn’t be streamed through the application as well. Wow!

So far, I’m quite happy to watch the morning news in the train, see the traffic jams I skip (by using the train) and browse Teletext.

Some screenshots:

NOS, well done!

I’ve mentioned FireEagle on this blog before and after I’m glad to see the first useful applications come up!

Recently I’ve visited Switzerland and Germany and used FireEagle and in both places, I’ve used the awesome new website called wikinear. First, find yourself an open WiFi network and update your location. I use twibble and FireBot. The latter is a twitter bot and the twibble application makes it really easy to post your GPS coordinates to that bot.

After you’ve updated your location, go to wikinear.com and click a few times to get logged in. After that, wikinear will show you a little map (Google Maps) with some pointers of “interesting things” around you. The information is taken from Wikipedia (hence the name wikinear). This is of course very useful and fun!

Great, simple website!

For too long, I have ran around with cellphones that weren’t considered hip or cool. Only once before did I have a camera on my phone, but without an USB cable or bluetooth, transferring the horrible quality pictures were a no-go area. Time to change that! And so I did. I got a nice Nokia N95 8GB and am loving it every day (note: I have no experience with cool phones, so anything would probably be awesome to me).

The thing I like best is the WiFi adapter in there. Followed by the equally aweome GPS receiver. A new world opened, for there are so many nice things online that mobile users could use. In the few days I have been the owner of this device, I found the following great apps:

• ZoneTag
• FireEagle
• Fring
• Yahoo! Go.

ZoneTag let’s you upload your photos to Flickr, while geo-tagging them staight away. Woohoo!

FireEagle can record and share your physical location (which can be set by the previously mentioned ZoneTag). It’s fairly new and open by invitation only (if I am not mistaken). Since it’s so new, there’s not a whole lot to see yet, but imagine the possibilities for a programmer. No doubt this will expand fast and really cool applications will be build around it.

Fring is a nice messenger. If you’re online, why not have the ability to chat (and/or update your twitter account)?

Yahoo! Go, again a Yahoo! product, is as they say “everything you need, all that you love”. You can browse Flickr, send emails etc. etc.

Of course I’m biased and appreciate Yahoo! applications, but seriously, what companies beside Yahoo! really focus on the mobile market?

What other mobile applications are there? While waiting for comments, I’ll go play Monkey Island again, for ScummVM also works on the Nokia N95