Checkmates: Mobile Social Mapping
Today at O’reilly Emerging Technology Conference we are quietly releasing Checkmates. It’s a mobile + social + mapping app that I’ve been tooling around with at Yahoo! with my friends. The idea was to be able to find your friends and tell your friends where you are by using a map. I always think about the Las Vegas trips where my friends split up to go to different clubs and I’m left alone at the roulette table. This happens because I’m a compulsive gambler, and when I run out of money I always have to try to track everyone down. If I could just bring up a map, I could see where everyone has migrated to.
The first thing we hacked together was maps on the phone. After we got this bit working, we kept going and added the ability to drill down into arbitrary venues. Venue maps could be anything from a camera phone picture to a detailed map In the current version, you can drill into the relevant floors of the Manchester Grand Hyatt, where the ETech conference is happening and mark your current location and status.
Behind the social portion of the app is your Flickr social network. When you update your location, your current location tile gets uploaded to Flickr and is geotagged so your friends and family can see where you are. This is also who you are connected to inside the app.
Another cool thing is that it pulls in ATOM Geo feeds and will overlay data onto maps. This can be any type of geocoded data and we bring up little smart windows to tell you what’s there.
If you have a Java enabled phone that’s recent, I encourage you to check it out (. I know that it works on recent Nokia phones, both Symbian powered and the standard Nokia phones. Also, Sony Ericcsson phones should be fine as well as blackberries. I am running it right now on my Motorola SLVR so recent Moto phones should be ok. The app is built for MIDP 2.0/CLDC1.1 phones and we’ve signed it as well, so if you have a Motorola phone it won’t prompt you for every network call. We did that last part just cause we like you 
Check out Chad’s post for more info on the creation process
Posted: March 7th, 2006 under Yahoo.
Comments: 11
Comments
Pingback from Elatable | Bradley Horowitz » Zoom into the Room
Time: March 7, 2006, 11:27 am
[...] And Edward gives yet more detail. [...]
Pingback from Checkmates: a mobile friend finder prototype for eTech — Chad Dickerson’s blog
Time: March 7, 2006, 12:22 pm
[...] Update: Ed writes more about the inspiration for this. [...]
Comment from Mohan
Time: March 8, 2006, 8:58 pm
Ed, are you hooking up to any presence/location applications from the mobile operators to do this? (which can give you the lat / long (and some even altitude) of the mobile user by triangulating their position from base stations)
Some operators in APAC are already doing similar things (but not with the maps and cool gui.
e.g. in the Philippines, one application provides the location of your kids at any time (due to high cases of kidnappings). In Korea, you can check that your husband is not in a KTV lounge with full mapping capabilities on your CDMA handset. These have been available for over a year already
Comment from edward
Time: March 9, 2006, 7:58 pm
No, Checkmates doesn’t use any location sensing right now. Support in the U.S. for those kinds of location based services is still lacking. There are some projects that do use GSM cell towers for locating you. Zonetags is an example of that which will automatically tag your camera phone pictures with your location. That was just released as a research demo from our Berkeley labs.
Comment from Techbee
Time: March 10, 2006, 3:36 pm
Congratulation! Felicitation à vous tous.
Comment from edward
Time: March 11, 2006, 2:34 pm
Merci Beaucoup
Trackback from chrisblunt.com
Time: March 17, 2006, 4:34 pm
Checkmates…
Checkmates is a mobile + social + mapping app that maps where your friends are geographically. As you move around, your phone plots your position against a streetmap image tile. This image tile is then uploaded to Flickr and geotagged, so your friends …
Comment from Nabeel Hyatt
Time: March 23, 2006, 11:45 am
It says something about open APIs that you guys integrated with a Flickr account to get my list of friends, versus the more obvious connection to Yahoo IM to get my list of possible friends.
One thing obviously missing in the Flickr integration is actually being able to take a cameraphone photo and upload the photo properly geotagged, but I’m sure that’s coming.
Another thought was that when you choose “I am here” there should probably be a quick option to allow that to expire. I could imagine clicking on a location and then one of the radial navs comes up saying “How long will you be here? 5 Mins, 30 mins, 2 hours, Indefinetely”
Since one the issues about most location-based applications is staleness.
It’s a sweet application, I hope it gets the green light to keep moving forward.
Comment from edward
Time: March 23, 2006, 4:23 pm
Nabeel: The expiration is a really good idea for dealing with staleness, thanks.
As for uploading geotagged photos from the phone, you can download Zonetags from our friends at Yahoo Research Berkeley (http://zonetag.research.yahoo.com/zonetag/) . That app is a bit fancier and will detect your location from your GSM cell id. The restriction is that you will need a Symbian powered phone.
Comment from Mikel
Time: April 15, 2006, 7:07 am
“pulls in ATOM Geo feeds and will overlay data onto maps”
That sounds pretty neat, can you expand on that? Does checkmates map GeoRSS feeds on the go?
Comment from edward
Time: April 15, 2006, 10:10 am
Hi Mikel,
Checkmates will overlay point of interest data from an ATOM feed. This can be seen in the app right now when the user is in the San Diego area. It does do this dynamically but we have not yet exposed the ability to point it at an arbitrary url.
The format of the ATOM GeoRss feed that we use is from http://www.worldkit.org/doc/rss.php
I’ve just noticed that this is your project! Great work!
-edward
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