The Augmented Reality (AR) is a method for showing digital information over real images, so you can get additional information of the “real world”. It is one of the classic characteristics in many of the devices described in science fiction stories since many years ago. Now the power of the new smartphones (like the  HTC Magic) with GPS and digital compass make it possible for us to start using these programs.

Layar is an augmented reality browser made in Holland by Sprxmobile. It allows displaying different “layers” of RA in the smartphone. To use it you need a phone with Android (the iPhone version is coming soon) and download from the Android Market the Layar application. They have many layers available, Ipoki is among them. If you open our layer of AR you can see the position of Ipoki public users around you. It’s a funny way to see what’s happening around you.

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In February this year Google announced a new product, Google Latitude, to share your position with others from the client of Google Maps for Mobile. It is a product that competes directly with what we are doing in Ipoki, although the approach is different.  Since then, many worried friends keep asking me about how this competence could affect us. And I keep answering (and thinking) the same I commented in Loogic: it is good for the location services market that Google gets in, and if it is good for the market, it is good for us

Google recently expanded the functionality of Latitude, allowing you to post your position by a feed RSS.  That’s why we decided to do integration with Latitude so you can use the client Google Maps for mobile to share your position in Ipoki, this way you can use Ipoki from any phone that has installed Google Maps, with GPS or without GPS. To configure this integration you must first enable the Google Public Location Badge, copy the URL of Public JSON Feed, go to your Ipoki account and access the menu for Latitude, enable the integration and paste the URL. We hope you enjoy this new integration, and please, write to us support@ipoki.com if you have any questions or problems.

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One of the most interesting things you can do using Ipoki is to geolocate Flickr photos automatically. All that you have to do is to activate the option to keep track of your routes in Ipoki in Applications –> Flickr and set in time the clock of your camera before to start. The best thing of this system is that you can use any digital camera or even more than one. You don’t need to take photos with a GPS enabled camera.The application runs reading the time mark of your photos y matching this time in your route stored in Ipoki with good accuracy. If the camera’s clock is not well synchronized you can set an amount of seconds of gap to adjust better the positions. When you press the button Search photos the application will ask you your Flickr account data, so you can use the same Ipoki account with multiple Flickr accounts (for example, to geolocated photos of friends that have been with you).He geographic coordinates are stored in the EXIF data of the photos, so you can use the Flickr option to see the photos in a map:If you don’t want to use Flickr maps, there is another way to do it. You can usethe Ipoki Life Stream to download a KML file with all the Flickr photos geolocated that you can see in Google Earth. By this way, coordinates are not stored in the photos, they are printed directly in the KML

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Thanks to Paulo Clebicar contribution, we can now see the Ipoki site in Portuguese. We hope all users in Angola, Brazil, Mozambique, Portugal and the rest of the world who speak Portuguese like it. If you find any bug please send an email to support@ipoki.com. If you want to see the Ipoki site in your language and collaborate in the translation write to us at contributors@ipoki.com 

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This is the video showing Ipoki last week in EBE event in Sevilla, Spain. You can see the video in Youtube.

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We just have released a new application at Ipoki: Ipoki Life Stream, that allows you to download a KML file with the routes you made when you are connected to Ipoki and include all the data you have produced or received during these trips. All the data stored in Ipoki is automatically geolocated and data in external sites can be geolocated because Ipoki knows where you were during your trips

This is the main page of the application with its options to download the Life Stream:

To use it, you must activate the option to store your routes, then you can choose what elements you want to include in the KML file and the dates to build the file. Best, try the application!. But, if you want to see a quick example now you can download it from hete:

http://www.ipoki.com/KML/Ipoki_Life_Stream_andres.kml

The idea is: you are on a trip, you activate the route record in Ipoki and you travel connected to Ipoki from your mobile device with GPS. When you come back home you can download the KML with all the data geolocated. You can generate this KML as many times as you want while you don’t erase your positions stored in Ipoki. If you have Google Earth installed in your computer, the KML file is open directly:

And KML files can also be viewed in Google Maps, wirte the URL of the file in the search box:

Fiirst integration we made with external data is Flickr, so you can take pictures, upload them to Flick and automatically see them geolocated in the Life Stream. I think it is very cool and is a very easy to store a digital remind of any travel. We are going to still addind new data, but if you have any suggestion or you would like we integrate data of any other service, send us an email.

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Now you can integrate your position in Ipoki with Fire Eagle, the Yahoo service, to share their location online. In order to configure this integration go to Menu –> Privacy –> Fire Eagle

The integration can be defined reading from Fire Eagle, writing in Fire Eagle or both. In the first case the user’s position is read from Fire Eagle and is updated in Ipoki, and in the second case is the reverse process.

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We have released a new application on Ipoki. Now you can integrate your Qik videos in Ipoki to live stream video from your mobile at the same time you share your location in real-time.
You can see a demonstration here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9lE_M6qvrY 

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Diego and Alberto are in California to attend the Where 2.0 Conference. They will present Ipoki new features, such as our new application for Facebook. You can see the talk description here: Ipoki: a GPS-based Social Network.

They will also be at the Google WhereCamp 2008 the weekend after Where2.0.

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We are releasing a new download page for Ipoki mobile site, to make Ipoki plugin installations even easier on your mobile device.

Just go to Ipoki.mobi with your PDA or Smartphone, click on “Download” and select the right plugin for your device.

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