It’s an exciting time to be an application developer. Many projects are cropping up that allow end-users to share their location with an application. A recent initiative called Mozilla Geocode was announced and looks very promising. It appears to be using Skyhook’s Wifi positioning technology.

Relating to M2M applications I can think of all sorts of interesting uses for the Geode technology. If you think about most location based M2M applications, there’s generally a mobile asset that is being tracked or monitored. For example, a dispatcher may be interested in sending the nearest cab to a customer. Using Geode a customer could access the cab company’s website and find the cab closest to their current location. There are several industries where optimizing the dispatching process, and putting it the hands of the customer, could prove extremely valuable.

Geode is available as a Firefox plugin, which you can get here. It also uses the implementation of the Geolocation API Specification, which is in its early stages. My first experience with Geode was very positive and had my location within 50m of accuracy. Given that it uses Skyhook’s technology this doesn’t surprise me at all since my previous experience with Loki was very positive. Here’s a sample screen of Geode’s lookup service, which happened almost instantaneously:

At Ublip, our philosophy is to enable application developers to create M2M applications through the use of our Foundation architecture. Foundation makes it easy to get data from remote assets while Geode makes it easy to get an end-user’s location. The combination of the two will lead to some very interesting applications.