What is special about Geospatial?

Apple introduced the Software Development Kit for their iPhone. Programmers can now produce third-party software for the Apple-Smartphone.

Apple has opened their iPhone for software applications of third party companies. Up to now all applications where closed and controlled by Apple. Apple CEO Steve Jops introduced Thursday the Software Developer Kit (SDK) for the iPhone. Additionally Apple wants to make the iPhone more applicable for business users. They are now in direct competition with the canadian Smartphone manifacturer Research in Motion (RIM).

With this SDK also LBS and mapping appication can be developed for the iPhone. I’m curious to see some of these appications for the iPhone. The official homepage of the SDK is currently (10.00 pm GMT+1) offline, but as soon as I can get some information I will blog about features that can enable LBS or mapping applications. Maybe there is something like in the Android SDK which manage location. The Location Manager is part of the Application Framework.

I think they are in direct competition with RIM but I’m not sure if they are also in competition with Google’s Android platform. On one side they use Google Services like Google Search or Google Maps on the other side both sites want to sell mobiles with their own platform. The future in the mobile sector is very interesting these days. All big companies want to be recognized on this market. If you think about the fact that more than 3 billons mobile phones are out there worldwide this is a big market for all business fields - there are also great challenges in the GIS and mobile mapping sector.

More and more people will get in touch with the internet the first time using a mobile device!

[apple.com]

Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.