My Current Location

Update as of 17 June 2011 : I have changed my phone from Nokia E71 to iPhone 4 and I found a better way to display my location. In Nokia Symbian Phones, the Google maps app itself included a feature to auto update in the background, but the battery drain was considerably high . Also , whenever I reboot my phone, I forget to enable tracking after bootup. Now in iPhone 4 in addition to the google latitude app, you could use Apple’s implementation of mobileme.com find my iphone tracking service right from iOS. I found this really cool script sometime back called playnice (PHP script run as a cronjob). This script will manually initiate a mobileme.com “find my iphone” request which will fetch my iphone’s current location instantly and use the data to update my google latitude location. This way, the battery drain is negligible because there is no background app running on my phone tracking my location, instead … my server initiates a location update request at a frequency which I specify and this request reaches my iPhone more or less consuming data as much as a PUSH notification only . This way I am always getting tracked even if I reboot my phone and there is no need of any app to be running in the background. Also there is no location history in mobileme.com, but with playnice, my server maintains a complete geo co-ordinates history in a text file, which will help me better track my phone , in case it gets lost.

My location data is automatically fetched using Google Latitude Location API. The Google maps app on my phone broadcasts my location automatically and thus you can see my current location on this page

The iframe displayed below uses google location API to fetch the address of my current location. You should head on to this post to read a tutorial on adding this to your own blog.



The mapme.at widget here shows all the locations I have visited in the last 1 week and can pull the data from both Google latitude and Foursquare servers. Pretty cool widget if you switch between foursquare and google latitude/maps on your phone very frequently.

Incoming search terms:

  • #1 written by Michael
    about 12 years ago

    Dear Kiran,
    What you are showing here with displaying actual position is really cool!
    I was looking for a similar thing for travel purposes. You mentioned that it is possible to update location using a cell phone with special app. That, unfortunately, requires sending some data via GPRS which wile using roaming can be extremely expensive.
    Do you know if this google latitute app can receive GPS coordinates via e-mail or sms? That would not require using internet on a cell phone thus would reduce costs to the cost of sending a sms with GPS coordinates…
    Have you got any idea how to do that?

    Best regards,
    Michael

    • #2 written by admin
      about 12 years ago

      I dont think that google latitude supports email/sms updates, but you could do it through mapme.at

      Create an account at http://www.mapme.at and then goto Sources.
      1. To update your location via email, they offer a free service. This is what their website reads : “Send an email containing something like :lat=51.50326:lon=-0.11968: to this address to log your location. You should keep this email address secret and treat it like a password to make sure that noone else can change your logged location.”
      2. To update your location via SMS you could use twitter+mapme.at integration. Tweet using twitter’s SMS service and put your location in brackets , e.g. (5th Avenue, NY) Shopping in the big apple baby!
      And then mapme.at can read this location if you enable it in your sources tab.

      This way you could use mapme.at’s widget to display your location (using export.html including a time period like ‘past 10 days’) and display it in your website.

  • #3 written by pruthvi
    about 12 years ago

    man u r amzing!!!!!i joined nitk this year!!!!its great to c ur work !!!!!!!

  • #4 written by admin
    about 12 years ago

    Hi Pruthvi, Thanks, and all the best for NITK. have fun !

  • #5 written by Musaiyab Mumtaz (Admin)
    about 12 years ago

    Welcome To Fun Planet
    Play Kaun Banega Crorepati With Us

  • #6 written by Dibya singh
    about 11 years ago

    it is very good play for all

  • #7 written by Mukesh
    about 11 years ago

    ur email id is not working i want ask about sms.please send me a mail. so i need to know about complete sms.

  • #8 written by Rubal Bharti
    about 10 years ago

    hi sir you are really great and i salute you sir
    your think………

  • #9 written by VINOD
    about 10 years ago

    I LIKE KAUN BANEGA CROREPATI

  • #10 written by VINOD
    about 10 years ago

    I LOVE CROREPATI GAME

  • #11 written by caroline
    about 9 years ago

    just love the KBC game , its really addictive .

  • #12 written by Rahul
    about 7 years ago

    Please provide the link to download the source of flash-KBC. Unable to download from link provided , error need to login.
    please help.
    This is great applciation for family connect event. GodBless You.
    I am eagerly to download.

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