From The Travelling Salesman
Editorial note: This is a guest post by Kristoffer Lawson, the Travelling Salesman. He's on a 10 000 kilometre drive to meet Nordic startups. ArcticStartup is supporting the project, by covering his travels and findings.
Well, the previous week started off even more interesting than the last for the Travelling Salesman tour.
After my capers with the Russian embassy I had quite a pleasant day in Oslo, meeting several people with a Trolltech background. Trolltech was the developer behind the now famous Qt GUI library and toolkit, which Nokia bought and which is currently being made into the next thing for Nokia phone development (whether it is on Symbian or Meego). As someone who has spent a while inside Nokia, it was interesting to see the level of independency that the Qt office in Oslo has. For instance, several of the people there were running Macs. I actually think this is extremely important to keep the identity of the teams intact, and motivated to continue with innovation.
Locago Offers An Open Mobile Map API
Locago is a mobile map service provided by Swedish Idevio. Locago is a free mobile map browser with an open interface for third party content. Locago shows different content sources and points of interest on top of map data. The service is based on a downloadable J2ME application and is free for consumers.
What makes Locago interesting is its open API, which allows for creation of mobile map mash-ups. One can use Locago to build an own custom map service based on XML input, using own geographical data. These mash-up services are caller layers in Locago. The currently available Locago layers include Wikipedia articles, Flickr and Panoramio photos, WCities travel guides, Yahoo! and Eniro business listings, and Foreca weather forecasts, to name a few. It is also possible to keep track of friends and their status using a Yahoo Fire Eagle layer.
