8motions has developed a geolocalised social network for SFR, one of french operator. This application can be download as a free trial by the SFR customers since september 14th.

Users can shares their favourite places with all users or only their friends. The application is available on the web for everybody and on mobile phone as a beta test opened for SFR customers.

With this app users can post places from their mobile, with photo, description, rating, privacy level, and share this with their friends or other, who can post comments and rating in turn. Users can also share their own position with friends allowed to see them.

		User generated content
UGC map	Friend finder
		External content
Search map	Flickr content

The mobile app use map data from Mappy, a french provider. This can be loaded on java mobile with a GPS, as a Nokia N95, or without GPS, as a Sony-Ericsson W910. In this case positioning is given by cell Id, through an access to the cell data base of the operator.

All this features have been developed thanks the Mobile Map Toolkit. Graphics have been integrated thanks to LWUIT library.

The same features can be find on the web with Google map as map data provider. User can enhance their content previously cough with their mobile or generate new content and share it with web or mobile users.

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

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 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

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

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

Welcome to the latest OpenCellID client, running on Windows mobile: OpenCellClient.

This project will be integrated with another project from the same team: RemoteTracker.
Enjoy and thanks for this contribution.

One of J2memap user wanted to use the application with the LWUIT framework from Sun. So, after some research, it appears that only one modification was needed: a callback to notify the host that the screen needed to be repainted.
This has been done by adding a new callback in the mapDisplayListener:
asBeenRepaint();

So here is the code of the”MapElem” that can be easily added in a LWUIT environment

class MapElement extends Component implements MapDisplayListener {

private final MapDisplay map;
private com.sun.lwuit.Image buffer;
private javax.microedition.lcdui.Graphics bufferGraphics;
private boolean painted;

public MapElement() {
this.map = new MapDisplay();
}

public MapElement(final MapDisplay map) {
this.map = map;
}

public void paint(final com.sun.lwuit.Graphics g) {
if (!painted) {
map.sizeChanged(getWidth(), getHeight());
buffer = com.sun.lwuit.Image.createImage(getWidth(), getHeight());
bufferGraphics = new ImageWrapper(buffer).getGraphics();
map.addListener(this);
}
map.paint(bufferGraphics);
g.drawImage(buffer, 0, 0);
painted = true;
}
// Pass LWUIT Component events to the map
// -------------------- Start ----------------------------//
public void pointerDragged(int x, int y) {
map.pointerDragged(x, y);
}

public void pointerPressed(int x, int y) {
map.pointerPressed(x, y);
}

public void keyPressed(final int keyCode) {
map.keyPressed(keyCode);
}

public void keyReleased(final int keyCode) {    }

public void keyRepeated(final int keyCode) {
map.keyRepeated(keyCode);
}
public boolean mapKeyPressed(MapDisplay arg0, int arg1) {
return true;
}

public void onMoveEnd(MapDisplay arg0) {    }

public boolean oneLocationSelected(MapDisplay arg0, Marker arg1) {
return true;
}

public void hasBeenRepaint(boolean completed) {
repaint();
}
}

You also need the ImageWrapper class , available here:

package com.sun.lwuit;
public class ImageWrapper {
private final Image image;

public ImageWrapper(final Image lwuitBuffer) {
this.image = lwuitBuffer;
}

public javax.microedition.lcdui.Graphics getGraphics() {
return ( javax.microedition.lcdui.Graphics) image.getGraphics().getGraphics();
}
}

Update: the lwuit getGraphics don’t return anymore an LCDUI graphics, but an Object that need to be casted to an LCDUI Graphics

New application for blackberry from Ari Volcoff, using OpenCellID: WhereAmI!

Just forgot to say this, but dale lane created a Windows mobile client to fill OpenCellID database. All the informations are available on his blog: Programmatically getting the CellID from your Windows Mobile phone. The post contains also some great informations related to CellID for Windows Mobile, informations which are not always so easy to find!

Update of the SDK, with several improvment

* Already present in the latest version, but not yet announced here:
- Architecture rework, with the ability to display the map on a different canvas (not only his own canvas)
- Marker can have their own Style (MarkerStyle) shared between several markers. Note that by default, you still can use the old mode and change the
colors and pins attribute on the Marker, because the default style use
them directly.

* Several simplification: everything related to “typeSat”, “isSat”, and so on: satelite is just treated as a map like others. So to display YahooSat just do MyMap.setMap(”YahooSat”);

* The numSat is dropped too, as the list of mapping provider is dynamic. See belo, use setMap using a name if this sat is in listOfMap or setMap(MapOverlay) .

* Ask.com has been removed from the default map (they now use Microsoft maps).

* OpenStreetMap has been added in the list of default map provider.

* The “generic layer” support new quadtree URL

These should be minor changes from the external point of view, just by removing a few vars in your creation but this should clarify the usability.

Other improvment:
- the ressampled mode is much better
- cached map reactivation. You can put map in your jar file, or in the file system. A tutorial on this later.

The samples has been updated to reflect this. As usual, you can go to the J2memap web site to dowanload it…