“Nous avons toujours innové au bénéfice du client. Je peux d’ailleurs vous annoncer que nous ouvrirons dès l’an prochain la VoIP sur le mobile.“

GeoAPI services include a reverse geocoder; deep data about 16 million businesses and tens of thousands of points of interest; a writable layer for developers to annotate the world and do complex geo-queries; and location-enabled media layers (e.g., Twitter and Flickr). We've also recently added an iPhone SDK to speed up mobile development.

It's also possible to create some APIs that would tell a website how much bandwidth is available to it, so the developer could adjust its features accordingly. This idea is being tossed around between web companies and operators, but I don't know how much is actually being done about it.

C’est ce que propose notamment Oopost, une jeune société basée en région grenobloise : envoyer de vraies cartes postales personnalisées via le web, qui arriveront au format imprimé par voie postale. L’interface est claire et bien conçue, et moyennant un prix maximum de 2,49 euros (dégressif en fonction des quantités), votre carte est conçue, imprimée et acheminée chez le destinataire.

Mais l’intérêt du service repose surtout sur sa version mobile : Oopost a lancé récemment son application iPhone gratuite qui permet d’envoyer de la même façon des cartes postales « réelles » à partir de son mobile Apple.

BlockChalk is the voice of your neighborhood. Use your mobile phone to leave messages on your block, your street, at the coffee shop, or anywhere you happen to be. Respond privately or publicly to messages from people in your neighborhood. It's easy: you don't even have to sign up.

ICTs and the global city are not substitutes but complementary, and often modify each other in qualitative new ways.

Minidetector is a Django reusable app that allows you to know if a request is being viewed on a mobile device. It provides a middleware and a view decorator that sets a request.mobile variable to True if the request is coming from a mobile device. It's method of figuring out if a device is mobile is simple; It first checks for a special Opera Mini header, then for WAP support, then finally checks the User Agent against a list of known mobile strings.

People also want to know when their friends were nearby, but it's not always convenient to keep checking Latitude to see if a friend has recently shown up near you. After working on this for a while, we realized it wasn't as straightforward as sending a notification every time Latitude friends were near each other. Imagine that you're Latitude friends with your roommate or co-workers. It would get pretty annoying to get a text message every single time you walked in the door at home or pulled into work. To avoid this, we decided to make Location Alerts smarter by requiring that you also enable Location History. Using your past location history, Location Alerts can recognize your regular, routine locations and not create alerts when you're at places like home or work. Alerts will only be sent to you and any nearby friends when you're either at an unusual place or at a routine place at an unusual time. Keep in mind that it may take up to a week to learn your "unusual" locations and start sending alerts.