“Find My Friends” – The New iPhone App for Location Sharing

 

One of announcements from today’s Apple event was an interesting new app called Find My Friends.

The app lets you track the location of other users, but unlike Google’s Latitude, which is meant to be used with a wide circle of people you know, Apple’s app seems designed for use with a close circle of friends and family.

Apple’s examples of how the app can be used includes checking out if your son made it to school today.

Of course, not everyone wants to be tracked all the time, so Apple has included some privacy options, such as temporary location sharing. (For example, you can set up the app to share your location up until 7 p.m. each day.)

We can imagine a lot of parents will like the app, but a great deal of kids will probably hate it, or think of ways to circumvent this type of surveillance.

 

iPad 2 with Pilot My-Cast

 

Grab your ponchos! It’s a rainy day here at Oshkosh and we invite you to keep dry inside the Garmin Hangar (Hangar D). If you haven’t yet had a chance to come by our booth, you’ll want to make sure you do because you could be the lucky winner of an iPad 2 loaded with a one-year subscription to Pilot My-Cast. Just ask a Garmin associate for a Pilot My-Cast demo and you will receive an entry form.

Pilot My-Cast is Garmin’s premium aviation charts, navigation, weather and flight planning application for smart devices (including iPad) and is available as a 30-day free trial in the iTunes App Store and Android Market. Visitors here at Oshkosh have been wowed by the features and capabilities of the app, which include georeferenced approach plates, GPS navigation, airport diagrams, a dedicated panel page, sectionals and more. And we’re not done yet! We’re always coming up with new features and functionality for the app, so make sure you follow Pilot My-Cast on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with new releases.

Local Adwords Ads Dominate

This morning I spoke of the Google Hotel experiment that made search results into interactive local content. It is not clear if this is the new normal or a test but on this search for bed and breakfast St. Augustine and every hotel search, Adwords with Location Extensions and Adwords Express are now showing as interactive local content on hotel searches. No non local ads need apply.

By changing the dates of the visit, a hotel searcher remains on the search results page and sees a changing display display of local hotels that one presumes are available during those dates. The local ads, dominating the page, either point to the Places page with the booking tool as opposed to the hotel website or provide an instant choice to book via Google’s Hotel booking ad via on the online travel agencies.

The highest blended result is now below the fold and with it, the first link to TripAdvisor or any 3rd party review site.

Whoah dude! Must be that Google doesn’t think organic results can be as useful to searchers as ads.

(Click to view larger)

The results are similar with the 7-pack showing, although obviously more local results: