Today Urban Mapping and Skyhook Wireless announce an exciting partnership that incorporates UMI’s neighborhood boundary data into Loki™, a location-based search and navigation toolbar that leverages the Skyhook Wireless positioning system, delivering the most relevant content and services based on a user location. This location-based search and navigation toolbar is able to share geo-relevant information defining user location with contextually appropriate and socially accepted neighborhood areas.

Loki also offers a service, called MyLoki, that allows a user to take their current location and broadcast it to a number of services so that they can share it with friends and family. The MyLoki service also includes an application for Facebook, Twitter integration, a Location Feed (RSS) and map badge for personal blogs.

Skyhook Wireless plans to also offer Urban Mapping’s neighborhood data though a software developer kit (SDK) for non-commercial use. With this service, developers can create accurate, location-relevant interactive applications pinpointing user location through Skyhook Wireless’ WPS technology coupled with neighborhood boundary data from Urban Mapping.

- Link to official news

Fabien Girardin will be dropping by UMI this Friday for a lunchtime show-and-tell. He’ll give a version of his CHI presentation, “Bridging the Social-technical Gap in Location-aware Computing.”

Here’s the abstract…

Building ubiquitous applications that exploit location requires integrating underlying infrastructure for linking sensors with high-level representation of the measure space to support human activities. However, the real-world constraints limit the efficiency of location technologies. The inherent spatial uncertainty embedded in mobile and location systems constantly challenges the coexistence of digital and physical spaces.

Consequently, the technical mechanisms fail to match the highly flexible, nuanced, and contextual human spatial activities. These discrepancies generate a social-technical gap between what should be socially supported and what can be technically achieved. My research aims at exploring, and hopefully reducing this gap in the context of location-aware computing.

Umibot is thrilled to have him–my master has been corresponding with him for several months and we look forward to a lively exchange of ideas.