Should they or shouldn’t they be liable?  That is the question the FCC thinks they have an answer to when it comes to the proposed 911 fines against mobile carriers for failure to meet coverage requirements.

Basically what’s going on is this:  ” The FCC levied the fines against Sprint Nextel, Alltel, and U.S. Cellular for failing to meet a Dec. 31, 2005, deadline for having 95 percent of their networks capable of using enhanced 911, an emergency dialing service that gives dispatchers the location of the call.”   Clearly this is a service that very much needs to be addressed, very much needs to be added, and absolutely increases the chances that people in or around an emergency situation will be able to be found, tended to, and hopefully rescued/saved.  The question remains, is it the mobile carriers fault this hasn’t been met as of yet?

If the fines are passed, “Sprint Nextel would pay a fine of just over $1.3 million under the FCC’s proposal, which the carriers can appeal. Alltel’s fine would be $1 million, and U.S. Cellular’s would be $500,000.”   Chump change for them, but hopefully a good slap on the wrist to let them know to get their acts together.  I Guess we’ll see.

What do you think?  Should they be fined?  Should the magic number be 95% coverage or 100%?  Sound off, and then have an amazing weekend…use some WHERE Widgets to find yourself almost anything you need finding!

Our developer program got a story in the Boston Globe. Excerpt from Carolyn Johnson’s story on the WHERE developer contest below, also can be found on the front page of the print version’s business section.

uLocate Communications Inc., which raised $11 million earlier this year, yesterday launched a contest for developers who use uLocate’s Where platform — offering cash prizes and meetings with three venture capital firms to the people who create the most innovative mash-ups of location and mobile content.

Normally, designing programs for the cellphone that leverage information like a user’s location can be next to impossible for a lone entrepreneur. Small start-ups would need to strike their own deals with carriers and learn the ins and outs of pro gramming for dozens of different phones on a handful of different networks. The Where platform helps solve those problems, automatically porting programs onto GPS-capable handsets and publishing them on networks that can reach millions of users.

Boston Globe story

This weeks WHERE Widget of the Week is a tribute to my sister and her husband.  Both of them are wine aficionados, both of them love taking wine tours, and heck, they’ve both even been to Italy to hit some real deal wineries making some of the best vino in all the world.  That said…

This weeks WHERE Widget of the Week is none other than the Winery Finder widget.  What it does, is quite simple…fire it up and just like the WHERE page says:  “Wine country is all around you! Find wineries near you, get directions, and go tasting. And please, don’t drink and drive.”  See, just what I said, it finds wineries near your exact geographical location and points you to them.  No more wandering around aimlessly on those cute little bikes with the basket on the front, no more pointing, wondering, and re-checking the map.

What’s YOUR favorite WHERE Widget?  Why?  What do you think needs to be a WHERE widget?  Any grand ideas that we’re missing out on?  Let us know!

Say goodbye to my little frien’.  You know how it goes, some big company launches some exclusive product for millions and millions, and within a few months, some curly haired kid in someone’s parents basement arms themselves with a soldering gun and some weird software and bam, all of a sudden that product isn’t so exclusive anymore.

That’s the case with the altogether too often mentioned iPhone.  That curly haired kid is George Hotz, and he did just that.  He took the iPhone, unlocked it and is now using it with T-Mobile, NOT AT&T.  Wow.  The good news is, if you’re not a phone of AT&T’s service (or the forests they kill for bills) you can maybe try it out on a different network, see how you like it there.

Now, I think we should have some sort of race, or contest or something, although I don’t know exactly what I’d give away.  I want to see who can figure out a way to get WHERE up and running on an iPhone.  That’d be awesome, would it not?!  Not sure if it’s possible, I lack the hack skills to pull that off, but nevertheless, it would be an awesome thing.

Sound off…is it possible?

It must be Friday, because Wednesday or Monday Tyler would never be that mean with his title. Use an iPhone, Kill a Forest…man, harsh. At any rate, that’s the word on the proverbial street lately as news is filtering around the great big blogosphere about some disgruntled AT&T customers.

Why are they, as Michael Scott would say, “gruntled?” You may ask. Simple, reports are in that some rather, busy, users are getting bills that require entire boxes of paper to itemize out every detail. Boxes of paper folks, imagine how many trees are literally weeping with every sweep across the touch screen.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is one of those aforementioned box’o'bills on video. Check it out, then do something about it, switch to e-billing, write a senator, throw away the phone, I don’t know, something. Then come back to WHERE and realize all the beauty of WHERE takes place right on your phone, forests saved.

Watch the Video Madness.

As you may, or may not know, summer here in the Northern Hemisphere is rapidly coming to a close.  Children, students, and heck, even teachers around the country are most likely weeping with the realization that summer, and with it, road trip season, are coming to an end for the year.  That said, there IS time left my friends, to get out there and take that one last road trip of the summer.

That fact brings me to this week’s WHERE Widget of the Week…seems only appropriate that this weeks popular widget would be none other than the World’s Largest Widget.   According to the official description, the World’s Largest Widget offers you this:

“Bet you didn’t know where the World’s Largest Ball of Twine was. Or the biggest cow. Or the chicken. Neither did we until that is we made the World’s Largest USA widget. Now you can also be made aware thanks to the mighty brain power of our intern into the inner workings of the World’s Largest USA roadside attractions. Or somesuch. “

Why would you want to know where these things are?  Simple friends, it’s Americana at it’s finest.  It’s cool, it’s obscure ,and it’s the stuff roadtrip dreams are made of.  Good enough of a reason for you?  I hope so, now get out there and enjoy the last gasps of summer!

Great news this morning from uLocate. Our newest carrier partner, Alltel, announced the launch of WHERE on their network. This launch is a significant one for us as we continue to build our business in partnership with mobile carriers. Not only are we now available to the 12+ million Alltel subscribers, but we also deliver on a promise we have made to our many developers. Now a developer can write their application once and it is automatically ported and available on J2ME and BREW mobile phones. Prior to WHERE, if a developer wanted to market a GPS mobile application, they would have to develop in J2ME and BREW. Today they can write an app in Ruby on Rails, PHP, .Net, etc and deliver their content to market.

We are also pleased to extend the reach of our many content partners to a growing network of mobiles consumers. Burger King, Eventful, ShopLocal, Twitter, ZipCar, EveryTrail, Inrix will now be available to Alltel as well as Sprint customers. We have more exciting new in the offing so please register for our newsletter to keep tabs on our progress.

Lazy, my good friends, is about to necessitate a brand new entry in good ol’ Websters. That’s right, we’re going to have to redefine just how convenient lazy our society has gotten.  Apparently, over in Great Britain, Domino’s Pizza has just made it possible to order pizzas with a simple text message.  That’s right, no dialing in, no talking to an actual person, just type and eat.

Wow.  You know what this makes me wonder, how soon it will be until people are no longer necessary at all except to actually deliver the pie to your door.  Pretty soon we’ll be able to text message a Domino’s Pizza, the text will be decoded and read by a computer, which will then drop all the necessary ingredients onto a robot rolled dough, slid into an oven via conveyor belt, cooked, boxed, wrapped and placed in a delivery car.  Scary thing is, we might be closer than we think to that reality.

Think of this as a test of sorts, if it works for GB’s Domino’s, we could see this stateside, and we could see this with a whole slew of other restaurants.  Is it me, or do you also see a great tie in for a GPS WHERE Widget?  Imagine not even having to type in your address, as the GPS on your phone could tell the pizza EXACTLY where to find you, no longer having to deliver it to a house, but anywhere you might be.  Wow, the door is wide open!

We’re talking about a revolution, well you know…you know how it goes, and if this company is able to do what it says it’s able to do, a revolution might very well be on our hands.  How about free wireless roaming in over 90 countries all around the world with a simple switch of a SIM card?  Free folks, free.

The thing is, free is, as usual, up for interpretation and I’m sure there is plenty of fine print to be scrutinized, but nevertheless, this might be something worth investigating for all you Mobile Warrior/Globe-Trotting folks.  The key is that your GSM wireless phone has to be unlocked before trying this out; after that, you should be ready to rock.

As I said, free around the globe is pretty darn cool.  Here at WHERE we love companies that are at the cutting edge of new, hip, stylish and functional.  WHERE Widgets, not to toot our own horns (ok, to totally toot them) just so happen to be all of the above.  Check out letsroam and then check out WHERE.  You’ll do great things together.

Talk about a match made in Heaven, er, or Hell!  I just found a pretty interesting article about how bars in L.A., Chicago and New York are taking technology to the next level by using Bluetooth technology inside the bars to automatically send information, coupons, advertisements and who knows what else to anyones Bluetooth enabled phone inside the bar.

So, combine this technology with say, the Pubwalk-Nightlife Widget from WHERE and not only will you be able to find the nearest bar with GPS technology, you’ll be able to be bombarded by advertisements and hey, maybe even free drink offers from the bar you’re stalking.  Not bad my friends not bad at all.

This does raise the question, however, as to where is the line drawn?  When is it “too much” when it comes to ad’s, commercials, or spam?  That’s up to you to decide I suppose, whatever the case may be if you are in either of the Big 3 cities, head to one of the bars and try it out!