location

Find My Friends is a handy app for families who want to keep tabs on each other. Of course it has a downside for couples who aren't always honest with each other, but that's to be expected.

Previously, I had shown you how to set up alerts for your Find My Friends contacts. Once set up, you'd receive an alert on your iOS device when they either arrived or left a location. But I neglected to show you how to send alerts to a Find My Friends contact, or to anyone else, regardless of if they have … Read more

It's a common affliction: you're using your smartphone to navigate in a city with a bunch of big buildings and your phone misplaces your location.

Often the problem often is that the GPS location system just doesn't work well where the satellite radio signals can be blocked or reflected. A company called Locata says it's got an answer.

Locata does what the GPS system does, but it replaces satellites in orbit with radio transmitters on the ground. The result is location services with high precision, better reliability, and indoor coverage, said Paul Benshoof, global business development … Read more

When you're carrying around a laptop looking for a network connection, most of the networks you encounter are basically plug-and-play: they use DHCP to issue an IP address and dynamically manage what clients are on the network, and when a connection is established, OS X will automatically configure it.

This works well in most settings, but sometimes a network will have specific configuration requirements such as manual IP address assignment, multicasting setups that isolate logical networks over the same hardware, or authentication schemes that have special hardware requirements.

In these instances, while you can continually access your network settings … Read more

Cell Phone Locator is a novelty app that supposedly allows you to type a phone number into it and then it displays the location of the associated phone on a map. It is a free app that installs easily.

When you launch Cell Phone Locator it displays a text box for you to enter a telephone number. Then you select the type of map you want, click the Track button, and the location of the phone number shows up on the map. What the app really does is display the location of your phone, on the assumption the person you … Read more

I was going through the app listings the other day and came across LocalScope, a unique local search tool that helps you find things near your current location. Obviously, many people already use Google Maps (no current version for iOS) for this purpose, and the Yelp-powered Apple Maps gets better every day, but after looking at LocalScope (reviewed below), I went on a search for other apps that tailor their results just for what is right around your area.

This week's collection of apps is all about searching for services around your location. The first gives you tons of listings and a surprising bonus feature for finding your destination. The second offers a slick radial interface and tons of categories to pick from. The third is LocalScope, and uses social data to find places, videos, and images from people around your location.… Read more

Find My iPhone is one of those apps you don't need until you need it. When you need it, it's priceless (even though it is free). Find My iPhone works on iOS devices and requires an iCloud account and a valid Apple ID. When turned on, Find My iPhone sends the geolocation data of your device to the servers at regular intervals, allowing you to find your phone from any other device you can log into (including Web browsers). Find My iPhone is installed by default with iOS 5 and 6, but must be turned on to be … Read more

The Obama administration will tell federal judges in New Orleans today that warrantless tracking of the location of Americans' mobile devices is perfectly legal.

Federal prosecutors are planning to argue that they should be able to obtain stored records revealing the minute-by-minute movements of mobile users over a 60-day period -- in this case, T-Mobile and MetroPCS customers -- without having to ask a judge to approve a warrant first.

The case highlights how valuable location data is for police, especially when it's tied to devices that millions of people carry with them almost all the time. Records kept … Read more

Nokia and Oracle are expected to announce a deal tomorrow that will give Oracle customers access to Nokia's growing stable of data and location services.

The deal, which is due to be announced at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, is expected to expand the reach of the Finnish handset maker's Navteq mapping services, The Wall Street Journal reported. Financial details of the arrangement were not revealed.

Nokia reportedly confirmed the deal, but CNET has has contacted Nokia and Oracle for comment and will update this report when we learn more.

Nokia has been looking to ramp up … Read more

Find My Friends, an iOS app aimed at helping friends and family members keep tabs on one another, was updated with the release of iOS 6. Other than some simple user interface changes, there wasn't a whole lot added to the app, with one exception -- notifications.

You can now set notifications to get alerted when a contact in your Find My Friends app arrives at or leaves a location you set.

To set up a notification for a friend, view their current location. In the upper-left corner of your screen, you'll see a button titled "Notify … Read more