Webware

After I heard that Skyhook Wireless was announcing a deal that would put its geolocation technology into a line of Dell Netbooks, I talked with the company's CEO, Ted Morgan. I'd last talked to Morgan three years ago when he pitched me on the merits of Wi-Fi over traditional satellite GPS location-finding technologies. Ironically, the Dell deal puts Skyhook technology only in those Netbooks ordered with the optional GPS hardware in them, even though all Netbooks have Wi-Fi. But as Morgan described it to me, the best real-world solution for geolocation today is a combination of GPS and Wi-Fi.

Below, more observations on location technologies from the CEO of Skyhook.

With more devices getting GPS satellite radios, isn't Skyhook's Wi-Fi-based business in danger? When I asked Morgan about this, he said, in fact, that it's the opposite. Wi-Fi, he says, is the critical geolocaton technology for devices like the iPhone. Two-thirds to three-quarters of the time, he says, when the iPhone locates itself, it's doing so using the Skyhook Wi-Fi geolocation software built in to the phone, and not GPS.

There are several challenges with GPS, according to Morgan. As most everyone knows, it doesn't work indoors. It's also slow, even when it does work. "Time to fix" for a device that's been powered off is 30 seconds at best, and for instant-on, quick-grab apps like you have on a smartphone or Netbook, that's just too slow. Furthermore, the bigger the screen of a device, the worse the GPS reception gets. Morgan says, "The bigger screens drown out the GPS signals." Although when I pressed him as to why, and he claimed to not be technical enough to fully understand it. Dedicated GPS devices, like dash-top navigators, also have antenna devoted to GPS, but phones in particular give priority to telephone communications and short-change their GPS antenna designs.

Of course, when you're out of Wi-Fi range or moving fast (driving), or have a device that is continuously powered-up, GPS works well. That's what it was designed for. But in many other use cases, you can't get a good fix with GPS technology.

How do you maintain a geo-database of Wi-Fi hot spots, especially when more and more of them are now behind security passwords? As before, Morgan says, Skyhook employees and contractors "wardrive" down millions of miles of roads to correlate location (from GPS) with the signatures of Wi-Fi access points. Morgan said that Wi-Fi beacons are unique even when security is turned on, so that's not a factor.

Another way that Skyhook keeps its data current is by using the information it gleans from Skyhook users. That's right: When your iPhone geolocates itself it also sends Wi-Fi beacon data back to Skyhook, which helps keep the system's location database current.

Dell Netbooks with Skyhook software will tell what's going on around you (but so will any geo-aware browser, like Firefox 3.5).

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

So Wi-Fi and GPS are complementary? Yes, Morgan says. A lot of the current geolocation systems are "hybrid." He says Skyhook has "tons of patents" based on blending data from Wi-Fi, GPS, and cell tower signals to determine location. For example, he says that Skyhook can use data from only two GPS satellites (traditional GPS-only systems need contact with four) to geolocate, if the device is also able to correlate with nearby Wi-Fi signals.

Why so expensive? I repeated my complaint to Morgan about the ridiculous $9.99 a month price that AT&T was charging for turn-by-turn directions on the iPhone now, and he agreed that it was too high. "The thing to watch is what TomTom prices at," he said, when it comes out with its turn-by-turn iPhone software. Morgan agreed that GPS services are priced too high right now, but he says it's because the mapping companies are charging developers and manufacturers too much for their data. TomTom, he says, could break the price barrier if it releases a fairly priced iPhone navigation app.

Regarding Firefox, which uses Google's geolocation technology, not Skyhook's. Mozilla built Skyhook technology into earlier builds of Firefox 3.5, but it eventually shifted to Google's location-finding technology. Morgan says, "It was a bummer for us, but it's really too bad for Firefox users since it's not as good." He sees Firefox as being strongly attached to Google, so it wasn't a surprising move. And, he says, at least the browsers are all zeroing in on the same standard for communicating location data, even if their underlying geolocating technologies may vary.

When are we going to get geolocation as a standard feature in cameras? Skyhook put Wi-Fi geolocation in an EyeFi card, but the technology hasn't made it into more than a few experimental camera models yet. "The camera guys have the longest product cycles," Morgan says." They're like the old automakers." Also, he says the power drain of Wi-Fi and the time-to-fix issues make it hard to get accurate location data and attach it to photos. He speculates that maybe in 2010 we'll see more location-award digital cameras.

Do we need location clearinghouses, like Yahoo Fire Eagle and Google Latitude? Morgan thinks it's too early, and that the search companies are not the right ones to push these services. "There has to be multiple places you want to send your data before you need a gateway, and these guys built the gateways first." And he said he'd look rather to Apple, Nokia, and RIM to make these services work. "If you own the device," Morgan says, "you own the user."

Firefox 3.5 brings the world's second-most popular browser up to speed with current browsing technology and trends, and perhaps nudges it just a bit ahead of the competition. However, it is by no means the leap ahead that its predecessor Firefox 3 was, and it's clear that the competition isn't going away anytime soon.

Available for Windows, Windows Portable, Mac, or Linux, Firefox 3.5 nevertheless represents the best Firefox we've yet seen from Mozilla. This comes as no surprise, and with a testing process that involved four beta builds, three release candidates, and a version change to reflect what Mozilla described as the originally-unintended breadth of the improvements being made, most of the new features are no surprise, either.

Private Browsing, known to IE users as InPrivate, Chrome users as Incognito, and Safari users as, well, Private Browsing, finally comes to a public version of Firefox. It's been available to the 800,000 or so beta testers since December 2008. If you're not familiar with it, users can toggle on or off the browser's history, cookies, and other browsing traces at will via the Tools menu or CTRL+SHFT+P. A new window will open. Among its other uses that serve as fodder for second-rate comedians, it's an excellent tool for avoiding leaving tracks on publicly-used computers and its about time that Firefox finally got it. In fact, Firefox has had it in various stages of development for four years.

I'm not sure how connected Firefox's development of Private Browsing is to this next feature, but I can see far more users gaining traction from having the fine, granular control of browsing tracks that's now available in v3.5. The Clear Private Data window has been replaced by a Clear Recent History option, using the same hot key combo and in the same place in the Tools menu.

Firefox 3.5 slideshow

Under the Clear Recent History window, you can delete your entire recent browsing history over the past hour, two hours, four hours, today, or all content in your history. From its Details drop-down menu, you can tailor the data purge to Browsing and Download history, Form and Search history, Cookies, Cache, Active Logins, Site Preferences, and Saved Sessions. From within the History window, you can also right-click on a site to Forget this Site, which will remove all instances of that site from your history records. Because your Most Recent Sites folder pulls from your history, you gain this level of control there, too.

Another excellent improvement in v3.5 that pushes Firefox ahead of its competitors is aggressive developer support. This may not sound impressive to most users, and if you're not a developer, I can see why its hard to get worked up about support for CSS media tags, HTML5 local storage, downloadable fonts, Web worker thread, and native JSON support, or SVG transforms--it all sounds a bit too much like alphabet soup.

Firefox 3.5 comes with geo-locating turned on, so it always knows where you are (with your permission.)

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

However, embedded ICC profiles, and support for Ogg Vorbis and Theora video and audio means that image colors will look better and closer to how they were intended, and no plug-in will be required for properly-encoded multimedia. Since Vorbis is open-source, this will lend those formats a huge boost while rendering those pages more stable. Here's an example video from Firefox that offers a tour of the new browser, or you can check out this sample from Daily Motion. Non-Firefox users will either see the Flash version (as on Daily Motion), or be directed to download the OGV file.

The "awesome bar" that debuted in Firefox 3 has become one of my favorite features. I've personalized my browser to eliminate the search bar, and now I use the location bar for all my searching. In v3.5, Mozilla has improved the search functionality so that you can show only bookmarks, by using an asterisk after a query such as "cnet *", or show only tags by using a plus "cnet +".

You can also tear off tabs as you can in the Webkit-based browsers Chrome, Safari, and IE, although unlike those browsers, Firefox's tabs are not sandboxed. This means that, if the browser crashes, you're still hosed, although Mozilla says this feature--known in development as Electrolysis--is being worked on.

In the meantime, Mozilla has imported better session control that users could only get before from add-ons like Session Manager. Now, if Firefox crashes, you get the option to choose which tabs to revive. If a Flash-based or heavy JavaScript site was the cause of that crash, you don't need to bring back that particular tab and risk getting caught in a crash-and-restart cycle of frustration.

Firefox 3.5 natively supports HTML5 and embedded Ogg video content.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Mozilla abandoned development of its own geolocating technology in Firefox, but that doesn't mean that Firefox 3.5 doesn't possess the ability to know where you are. Using Google's tech, Firefox can pinpoint where you are so that in search queries, for example, you'll get the most locally relevant results first. Turning this off isn't difficult, either. Under about:config, search for "geo.enabled" and change True to False by double-clicking on it.

Performance has always been one of the keys to browser popularity, and much of Google's success with Chrome can be attributed to its fast JavaScript rendering marks. The resurgent interest in Safari also comes from its JavaScript benchmarks and Apple's claim that Safari is the fastest browser on the market with its Nitro JavaScript engine. Firefox 3.5 doesn't beat them on the JavaScript front, but it's within shooting range.

On a Lenovo T400 laptop with a Core 2 Duo T9400 processor running at 2.53 GHz, with 3 GB of RAM and Windows 7 RC 7100, I ran the SunSpider JavaScript test and Dromaeo's subset of JavaScript tests on Firefox 3.0.11, Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 2, and Safari 4. As much as I like Opera as an all-in-one browser, I left it out because Opera 9.6 hasn't stood up well to the improvements that the field has made in the past year, and Opera 10 beta isn't ready to be compared to public releases at this point. Remember that for SunSpider the lower number is better, while the opposite is true of Dromaeo.

Firefox users can now rip tabs off into new windows, or drag them back into the old one. Still no sandboxing, though.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Firefox 3.0.11 completed SunSpider in 2695.4 milliseconds, and 44.22 runs per second, while Firefox 3.5 notched 1319.6 ms on SunSpider and 91.18 runs/s. This falls in line with Mozilla's published benchmarks of 3669 ms for Firefox 3 versus 1524 ms for Firefox 3.5. In both "official" numbers and in my own tests, Firefox 3.5 comes out around twice as fast for JavaScript.

Meanwhile, Chrome 2 hit 322.1 runs/s on Dromaeo and 712.2 ms on SunSpider. Either way, Chrome is significantly faster than Firefox for JavaScript, one-third faster judging by SunSpider and twice as fast by Dromaeo. Safari 4 scored 915.6 on SunSpider and 239.02 runs/s on Dromaeo, slightly slower than the its Webkit cousin Chrome but still faster than Firefox. Internet Explorer marked 4434.6 ms in SunSpider, but crashed on Dromaeo while testing base 64 encoding and decoding.

Firefox 3.5 is around twice as fast as Firefox 3. Chrome and Safari are faster with JavaScript, though.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

It's important to note that speed is not the only criterion for judging a decent browser. Each browser only had open two tabs, the results of its Dromaeo test and the results of its Safari test. Safari consumed nearly 135 MB of RAM, IE saw 104 MB, Firefox 3.5 hit 66 MB, and Chrome logged 46.5 MB. These results will fluctuate depending on your computer and any other tasks your browser is running at the time, but they give a decent idea of how each browser is performing during these tests.

Other useful tests look at Web standards rendering, like the Acid3, and deeper analysis of the SunSpider results. Chrome and Safari both reach 100/100 on the Acid3 test, while Firefox makes it to 93/100. Official release notes for Firefox 3.5 can be read here.

Firefox 3.5 is a much-needed improvement to the world's most popular alternative browser. At the time of writing, Mozilla was about to log the 2 millionth download after only 7 1/2 hours. While some of the improvements, such as the HTML5 and other developer enhancements will continue to make the browser their first choice, many of the other changes merely keep it in-line with the competition. For now, Firefox will continue to rely on its vast base of developers and users who value their customizations over superlative claims, so long as Mozilla keeps its browser close enough to its competitors. Now that Firefox has kicked open the door against Internet Explorer, it'd be foolish to expect that they'd be the only ones to rush through it.

Updated May 1, 2009, at 8:40 a.m. PT with more specifics about how the Google Location Service works, and again at 11:40 a.m. with additional background information.

When Google Labs released its experimental browser toolbar with its My Location finder for Internet Explorer last week, we wondered why it wasn't available for Firefox. Now we know. Instead of being added on through a toolbar or extension, it was intended to be built in. So, on Thursday, Mozilla turned on a new feature for Firefox 3.5 beta 4, and for Fennec, the code name for the mobile version of Firefox: Google's geolocation service. Like the toolbar with My Location, Mozilla's opt-in engine will use your position to return more focused search results across the Web.

(Credit: Mozilla Labs)

The functionality has been available prior to this release, in the form of Geode, an experimental Mozilla Labs add-on that implemented the W3C Geolocation Specification. While the support was there for third-party add-ons to use geolocation in Firefox 3.1, 3.5 and Fennec, Mozilla hadn't offered it directly until now.

Here's how it works. When you browse to a page that requests to know your location, you accept or decline. Declining does nothing, but accepting delivers your Wi-Fi access point or IP address details to Google Location Services, using an encrypted SSL connection (https). Google can then return an approximation of your location to the browser, which returns it to the requesting page. Using the classic example, a search for "movie theaters" or the weather will bring up local listings without you having to type in your city or ZIP code.

Privacy is a key concern here. With many computer users going out of their way to erase their Internet tracks, handing them over for the sake of saving a few keystrokes may seem foolhardy. To that end, Mozilla has posted in an FAQ section that "Firefox does not track or remember your location between sessions, never sends your location to any third party, and never sends it to any of Mozilla's servers."

Would you use this new geolocation feature, or does giving away your whereabouts give you the willies? Discuss in the comments.

Google has updated its open-source Gears project so Web sites can take advantage of location services in Gears-enabled Web browsers.

The underlying technology, which used signals from cell phone towers, was initially developed so mobile-phone users could get a rough fix on their location, even without GPS technology. Now, though, Gears has been augmented with location smarts based on signals from Wi-Fi networks so that people with laptops also can figure out their location to within about 200 meters in many major cities.

That means that a Web site that might benefit from showing a person's location--most anything mapping-related, for example--can be personalized better, as long as there are wireless network signals around. Google uses Gears to try to advance the Web application state of the art, but only a small fraction of users have it installed.

Also, programmers don't need to know which underlying mechanism provides the service. "Because the Geolocation API is the same for developers in both desktop and mobile browsers, you can even use the same code on both platforms," Charles Wiles, product manager of the Google mobile team, said in the Google Code Blog post Tuesday.

Gears is an extension that augments the ability of Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari. But it's not the only way to get geographic information into a browser.

Two weeks ago, Mozilla released a Firefox plug-in called Geode that uses a similar Wi-Fi technology, from Skyhook Wireless, to give a user's location. That service is being built into Firefox 3.1, too, and will eventually be able to use other methods, including GPS or presumably Gears, to retrieve location information.

Sharing one's location information with Web sites, of course, raises privacy concerns, but as with Mozilla's Firefox extension, those sites must obtain explicit information.

"Gears will always tell a user when your site wants to access their location for the first time, and the user can either allow or deny your site permission," Wiles said.

Update 12:33 p.m. PDT: The Wi-Fi location feature also is now built into the BlackBerry version of Google Maps for Mobile, according to Google's Mobile blog.

"The premise is similar to what we do with cell tower information: information transmitted by nearby Wi-Fi access points is used to pinpoint your location," said Adel Youssef and Arunesh Mishra, programmers for Google mobile. "Since the range of a Wi-Fi access point is smaller than that of a cell phone tower, this often results in a much more accurate position."

Google announced two services Thursday that programmers can use to build services into Web sites that employ a site user's location.

The first is a tool for Web sites built with the Ajax programming method. The Ajax client location property provides Web sites with a rough estimate of a user's location based on his or Internet Protocol address, said Google engineer Steve Block on the Google Code blog. The property can be seen in action in the "news by state" feature on Google's 2008 election site API (application programming interface).

Second is an expected change to endow Google's Gears software with the ability to employ more detailed location information. This Geolocation API is only available to browsers with the Gears plug-in installed; Gears enables a variety of features such as offline browsing that make browsers a better foundation for rich Web applications.

"On mobile devices with Gears installed, the Geolocation API can use the cell-ID of nearby cell towers or on-board GPS (if either is available) to improve the position fix. In the near future, we'll be adding data from your Wi-Fi connection to improve accuracy even further, on both desktop and mobile," Block said.

Not everybody wants Google to know where they are, though, and Google says the Geolocation API takes this into account.

"The privacy of users' location information is extremely important. The first time your site calls the Geolocation API to request a user's location, that user will be shown a permissions dialog where they can choose to allow or deny your site access," Block said. "Users can change that decision at any time via the 'Gears settings' dialog in the browser menu. Google does not keep location information about users when your site uses the Geolocation API."

Fire Eagle, Yahoo's formerly experimental geolocation platform, is officially opening up to all users, and several companies are announcing products that work with it.

A refresher: Fire Eagle is a storehouse for personal location information. If you tell Fire Eagle where you are, or have applications or devices that can do so on your behalf, then other applications can grab that info (with your permission) and provide you geo-related services or social network features.

Tom Coates launches Fire Eagle at Yahoo's Brickhouse technology incubator.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

One of the most interesting parts of Fire Eagle is its variable privacy feature. Even if Fire Eagle knows precisely at what address you are, you can set it to only release more general information, like the city, to certain apps or certain groups, or you can restrict location reporting by time. There's also a "hide me" button you can press if you want to shut down location reporting for a period of time.

At the Fire Eagle launch event today, Yahoo highlighted three companies using the service:

• Pownce, the Twitter-ish nanoblog service. Having location available in this type of product really does change how users interact. See also Twinkle, a Twitter-compatible nanoblog service for the iPhone.

• Movable Type. The blog platform will get automatic location reporting for its authors and in its Action Stream service. It wasn't discussed at the launch but one assumes the new social network products will also get support.

• Outside.in, a local news and community site. It will use Fire Eagle to automatically find the info that's relevant to your location.

Other companies announcing services that work with Fire Eagle include: Brightkite, Dash, Dipity, Dopplr, ekit, Lightpole, Navizon, Loki, Outalot, Plazes, Spot, and Zkout. These companies are primarily location service providers or rudimentary social networks. I am looking forward to seeing major social nets (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed) and other data and news sites (Google Maps, Digg, CNN, Eventful), add Fire Eagle support.

The business
Asked what was in this initiative for Yahoo, there are two official answers. Yahoo co-founder David Filo told me, "We really wanted this functionality for Yahoo services. But by opening it up for the rest of the Web, consumers are more likely to adopt it."

Fire Eagle czar Tom Coates also said that there are possible direct revenues from the service, if Yahoo at some point decides to create a business version of the service for heavy users, like advertisers.

Yes, advertisers. While Fire Eagle will not be advertising-supported, marketers could create location-based programs that use the service. The Yahoo team is adamant that Fire Eagle will be permission-based, though, so users won't end up giving their location away to services without their knowledge.

Previous coverage:
You are here, sort of.
Fire Eagle geolocation service: Halfway there.
Fire Eagle's missing apps.

Skyhook Wireless announced Monday that it is integrating GPS into its geolocation service to get an even more accurate fix for location-based services.

Up until now, Skyhook's geolocation service, which is used on Apple's iPhone, among other services and devices, has used Wi-Fi hot spots to get a fix on location. The service works very well in densely populated areas where there are a lot of Wi-Fi radios transmitting signals. And it's great for locating places indoors or in cities with a lot of tall buildings, all places where satellite-based GPS, or Global Positioning System, technology has difficulty getting a location fix.

But for all of the benefits of Wi-Fi, it doesn't work in rural areas where hot spots are few and far between. This is where the GPS technology comes in.

"Our technology works great in populated areas," said Ted Morgan, co-founder and CEO of Skyhook. "But on the open road it's more difficult. Now with GPS integrated, iPhone users, for example, can get turn-by-turn navigation anywhere they go."

The way the Skyhook service originally worked is that it would triangulate and get a fix on location-based data on known Wi-Fi hot spots. The company has a database of where Wi-Fi hot spots all over the country are located. Specifically, it uses the Mac address, a unique identifier that every piece of hardware on the Internet must have, to identify the router, and it matches that identifier with the location. Using multiple signals in the same geographic location, the Skyhook technology is able to pinpoint a location.

Now Skyhook has integrated GPS into its technology, which it is putting in chipsets that go into mobile phones and other devices that also have GPS recievers. GPS will allow Skyhook to cover more ground with its geolocation technology. The Wi-Fi/GPS technology should also help services that used GPS only to get information about location more quickly. Because GPS uses three or four low-orbiting satellites to pinpoint a location, it can take a few seconds before it's able to calculate a location. Skyhook's Wi-Fi technology can get location information much faster.

So where might we see this new technology? The original Wi-Fi-based Skyhook technology is already on the iPhone. Morgan couldn't say for sure that the new "hybrid" Wi-Fi/GPS technology will be used on the iPhone 3G that comes out next week. But one of the upgrades in the new iPhone 3G is the addition of a GPS chip, so it would make sense that the Skyhook technology would be used on it. Morgan did say that Apple has access to all of its technology.

Faceroller is the latest Web app from the folks at PopMinds who have done such Web marvels as the Web 2.0 stripe, tartan, and reflection generators. It's a delightfully simple microblogging service that combines Webcam photography, text, and geolocation. Users can use their Webcams or the cameras on their mobile phones to take a picture, add a short message, and send it out to the world. What sets it apart is that it automatically figures out where you're posting from and adds it to your message.

Besides the Web and mobile front ends, you can simply send photos to a special e-mail that posts them (sans location). You can link it up with both Flickr and Facebook to cross post your photos into albums. The photos are transferred instantly, which I found to be a really marvelous way to turn your Flickr photo stream into an unabashed photo booth. The Facebook integration is a little smarter, simply putting your photos into a separate album and making note of it on your news feed every time you upload a new shot.

Like Twitter, there's an exploratory social component. There's a public feed with everyone's shots. You can also create your own list of Faceroller friends to follow, who can follow you as well. Missing, however, is a way to skin your personal page, or change the orange and blue color scheme.

There are several other microblogging services that incorporate photos, but few employ the geotagging. Zannel, Poodz, and Twitxr let you take and post pictures with small bits of text. Of the three, Twitxr is the only one with location guessing using cell tower and Wi-Fi positioning.

Faceroller lets you snap pictures with your Webcam or mobile phone and post them complete with location. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Seero officially launched its new livestreaming (and recording) video service at the New Tech Meetup on Wednesday. Like UStream, it lets you broadcast live from a Webcam or record shows for later playback. But it also records location and syncs it to video. That opens up some new capabilities for video producers and for advertisers.

For live online news videos, this is a killer feature, especially if the viewer has the options of selecting from several cameras. And imagine it for sports--bicycle racing, golf, or sailing. (Remember Quokka? They could have used this.) Seero doesn't just display location: it pulls up relevant location-based data and links in a separate window. The service also works well for travel videos, with links to nearby attractions showing up in the related information box as the video plays. (Potential partner: TurnHere.)

This travel TV show works great on Seero.

The Seero founders, all three of whom shared the stage during the New Tech pitch, say they've designed the service for event-based video, not for lifecasting. That's good, since watching someone through a hat cam is weird enough; knowing exactly where they are at all times would be just creepy, and dangerous for the presenter.

The revenue model for Seero is under development, but location-based advertising is obviously the main opportunity for the service.

Seero CTO Dan Rommel, and his geo-video recording rig.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

Seero works best when the recording service is run on a PC that has a connection to a GPS device. We saw at the demo a small rig based on an OQO ultramobile PC, a Webcam, and a Bluetooth GPS receiver. That's an expensive rig, unfortunately, so at the moment only the most devoted broadcasters are likely to create Seero videos and shows. Support for GPS-equipped mobile phones is forthcoming; look out Qik.

The technology desperately needs to be exportable to publishers' own sites. There are limited branding and skinning capabilities in this first release; a full API is needed, so content producers can use the technology without having to shunt viewers to the Seero site itself.

Unfortunately, I don't see Seero as a strong consumer play. Notwithstanding the leading-edge geocoding technology and the inviting site, the livestreaming market is crowded. And once geocoding hardware becomes pervasive, I bet that every livestreaming service will begin to record and display geo data. Seero may be able to sell a suite of geolocation and video technologies to professional video production sites, though. It's not as sexy a play as a consumer video destination site, but the pro market might actually have some paying customers in it.