Wait, what the heck is geofencing ? No, it’s not some virtual sword fighting app for your phone. Geofencing, or a geofence, is exactly what its name implies – a virtually fenced-off geographic location. When this concept is applied to mobile phones, it refers to a device’s ability to receive automatic alerts or notifications when entering, leaving or moving within a specific geographic area. Location Labs , providers of location services for mobile developers, announced earlier this week the release of its library that will allow iPhone developers to build geofencing apps thanks in no small part to new features included in the new iOS 4.0. Sponsor Location Labs’ Geofence Library for iPhone As the company points out, location services on mobile devices have been hindered both by differences in location technology standards, and the significant drain on the device’s battery caused by its use. With the introduction of background applications with iOS 4.0 and increased battery performance in the new iPhone, Apple has created a fitting platform for geofencing apps, the company says. One aspect of background location capabilities in the new OS is and API that notifies apps “based on configurable accuracy and distance change filters,” which is a highly-accurate “always on” battery drainer, says Location Labs. A new service, the “significant change location service,” uses less power but the lower accuracy and frequency makes geofencing useless, delaying notifications by several hours. “With the iPhone, we employ a combination of the standard and significant change location services, intelligent interaction with the iPhone backgrounding and suspending logic as well as local awareness of proximity to the geofence boundaries,” the company said in a blog post Wednesday. “Together these allow us to offer a high quality firing latency guarantee (measured in minutes) while keeping impact on battery life to a minimum.” What This Means for Location Apps To get an idea of how geofencing technology could improve on existing location-based applications, just look at the current popular apps. Apps like Foursquare and Gowalla could implement this infrastructure to allow users to automatically check-in when entering the geofence of a particular location. I can’t even count the times I’ve been out and forgotten to check-in at various locations, robbing myself of precious Foursquare points. With geofencing, I could have been automatically checking in as I went from place-to-place, or perhaps a push notification would have reminded me after I was within the perimeter of the geofence for a certain amount of time. Additionally, geofences could allow for a feature of location apps that Robert Scoble advocated for earlier this month . As Scoble points out, it is helpful to location app users if they can tell if their friends are still at a location, and determining how long users spend in businesses can have a significant impact of location-based marketing. “For instance, I hate shopping so I’ll only spend four minutes inside the Gap, if I go at all. But there are many people who will linger there for hours,” he said. “If you are another clothing store, which customer is more valuable to you to get to come to visit your store? Me or that other customer?” Other interesting ideas for geofences include connecting mobile devices to house lights or air conditioning units to automatically activate them when users approach their homes. Friends could even be notified when they are within a certain distance of one another. The possibilities for geofencing applications are enormous with this new library from Location Labs. Photo by Flickr user KWDesigns . Discuss

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The tech industry is full of battles – epic and otherwise – between companies that position themselves (or are positioned by others, perhaps) as enemies: Apple versus Microsoft. Google versus Microsoft. Having a target like this isn’t a bad idea, as it helps you make sure you can differentiate yourself from your competition. But startups are sometimes advised to not take on these sorts of skirmishes, at least not explicitly, particularly with more established corporations. Compete for users, don’t pick a fight with Google, suggests a recent LA Times article . Sponsor But taking on your challengers directly shows a great deal of confidence and guts. And if you have the product or service to back it up, you can demonstrate vision and ambition – and attract the attention and admiration of users and investors. Posterous may be the example of the week for this. On Monday, Posterous announced that it would be posting one resource a day for the next two weeks to help users migrate their content from “dying platforms” to the microblogging service. “A lot of you have asked for help moving your old blog, photos or videos to Posterous. You grouched about dying platforms that haven’t added new features in ages, sites that have made it too complex to perform the most basic tasks and places that smother your content in ads.” Posterous’s first target: Ning , whose abandonment of the freemium pricing model back in April frustrated a lot of users. Next target: Tumblr , the site that Posterous is probably most frequently compared with. You might be hard-pressed to call either Ning or Tumblr “dying platforms.” Or if you’re Posterous, you might not be. Posterous is clearly calling out and openly taking on its competition. In a blog post earlier this week, Flightcaster co-founder Jason Freedman wrote about the three characteristics he sees in the YC companies that are successfully raising money: Leverage, Product and Ambition. YC alum Posterous is demonstrating that ambition – ” pure, unbridled ambition ” – hoping to show it has not just the guts, but the product to back that up. How its competition responds over the course of the next two weeks will be interesting to watch. Photo credit: Flickr user REL Waldman Discuss

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Maybe now we can see why Yahoo wanted to buy location-based check-in service Foursquare last April – it’s sinking its teeth deeper into the geolocation arena. The search engine and content aggregator announced this morning the release of Yahoo PlaceFinder , an expansion of their mapping and location capabilities that take aim in the direction of check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla and other location features like Twitter Places. While Yahoo may have been a little late to the social game, it seems determined to not fall behind in the next big thing – mobile social. Sponsor Yahoo PlaceFinder replaces the Yahoo Maps Geocoding API , which simply provided a longitude and latitude given an address. Whereas the geocoding API supported only such basic characteristics (nine in total) as you might see on the front of a letter, Yahoo PlaceFinder will add 23 new fields, including things like time zone, area code and neighborhood. In addition to these more standard fields, PlaceFinder will also support the “Where On Earth ID” that is already supported by other Yahoo APIs, such as Flickr and Weather. The most telling addition, however, might be that of reverse geocoding , wherein providing a longitude and latitude coordinate (such as might be provided using a GPS-enabled mobile device) returns the nearest physical address. Taking GPS coordinates and being able to cross-reference them with the addresses of businesses around you can be a rather handy capability for any mapping service, of course. Beyond its attempts at buying Foursquare, Yahoo did make an entry into the LBS arena with last month’s acquisition of Indonesian LBS Koprol . In all, PlaceFinder “supports building-level address recognition in over 75 countries, and points of interest, airports, cities and other place names (including administrative areas) for these countries and the rest of the world,” according to the company’s release. PlaceFinder looks to be the counterpart of another beta Yahoo API, Placemaker , which “helps developers make their applications location-aware by identifying places”. Discuss

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In the wake of the BP oil disaster, real-time mapping technologies have been recruited to improve communication and promote collaboration between people in local communities, as well as federal, state and local responders. Last week NOAA released GeoPlatform.gov to provide near-real-time mapping data to those connected to the crisis. The site lets you track everything from daily spill positions to the locations of ships responding to the crisis. State and non-governmental organizations are also collecting and mapping real-time information. In some instances the efforts include citizen-generated data from iPhone apps and photos mapped on sites like Flickr. Sponsor GeoPlatform.gov, which is designed to be a one-stop access point for location data, uses a Web-based mapping system called ERMA (Environmental Response Management Application). Its list of data layers includes spill trajectories, shoreline conditions, and the current positions of ships registered as responders. NOAA hopes to add things like wildlife impacts, field photos, and agency analysis to the site in the near future. LA Earth ( Louisiana Earth ) is a Google Earth Enterprise Server operated by the state of Louisiana that provides daily oil spill trajectories, closures, and many other maps as a Google Earth layer (kml). (Download the Google Earth Client/Plugin to use the date.) Crisis and Crowd-sourced Mapping There are several ways that that Gulf locals are mapping and reporting spill related incidents. The Oil Spill Crisis map was created buy the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and students at Tulane University. The map shows hundreds of reports sent through SMS messages, Twitter and the Internet. The map was built using open-source crisis mapping software developed by Ushahidi . The sensors built into smartphones are collecting a rich stream of spill-related data for mapping. The iPhone app Oil Spill Response ( iTunes download ) allows you to file mobile reports on wildlife, oiled shorelines and other types of spill-related damage. Oil Reporter was created by Crisis Commons and is available for both iPhones and Android smart-phones. It geotags photos, files reports, and provides information on how to contact authorities or volunteer. Beyond the information collected by the government and oil industry, people are documenting their own stories. Communities are forming on photo sharing sites like Flickr where location-tagged images can be visualized using Flickr Map . Discuss

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There are a lot of great activities happening in the startup world, and we would like to help you make sure you’re on top of these opportunities. The ReadWriteStart Calendar tracks both startup-oriented events as well as application deadlines (for competitions, grants, and incubators, for example). If you’d like to add something to the calendar, leave a comment here or email us . Sponsor Here are some of the upcoming deadlines and events that caught our eye this past week: Women 2.0 Labs Women 2.0 is sponsoring Women 2.0 Labs , a new 5-week program (July 6 – August 5, 2010) for engineers, developers, biz dev folks, and marketing mavens to develop high-growth technology ventures in San Francisco, CA. Applications due June 20. Transfer Summit UK Transfer Summit will be held June 24-25 at Keble College in Oxford, England. The event, which includes a BarCamp, is focused on on Open Source technology/collaboration/innovation as it intersects industry, research, and academia. Our attendees are an amalgam of business executives and technologists, interested in streamlining the innovation and resource discovery process, cultivating partnerships, and accelerating the process of commercializing products. Edmonton Startup Weekend Edmonton, Alberta’s Startup Weekend will take place June 25-27 . As with the other Startup Weekend events, it promises to bring together “developers, designers, marketers, inventors, and anyone else interested in ideas and startups to see what they can build in 54 hours. ” Creative Commons Catalyst Grants As we reported this week, Creative Commons is accepting applications for their Catalyst Grants through the end of the month. These grants are meant to seed activities that support the Creative Commons mission. Applications due June 30. Photo credits: Keble College photo by Flickr user Dimitry B Discuss

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