Despite the recent abundance of cloudy days on the east coast, it is officially summer. For many of us that means vacation. As you pack the family car and head out in search of sunnier skies don’t forget your iPhone because a few new apps are here to help the summer traveler at every step of their journey.

The aSmart HUD+Speedcams app by Atoll Ordenadores Software provides you with a visually appealing display of conventional dashboard information, such as current speed, while adding additional information like compass bearing and altitude. For those travelers who view speed limits as guidelines rather than strict rules, this app also comes with a database of speedcam locations. By comparing your location against a database of known speedcams, the app is able to alert you, visually and audibly, about the presence of a speedcam and its proximity to your vehicle.

Once you’ve arrived at your summer destination, deciding where to go next can be overwhelming. The near+now app by Sortuva Company aims to help solve that problem by finding places around your location based on whatever you feel like doing. This app learns your specific tastes better the more you use it, providing more relevant results with each additional use. To help you find something that suits your mood perfectly, near+now provides access to critic reviews and wall posts from other users alongside its recommendations.

As you’re bouncing around from place to place on your vacation you may want to keep track of your adventures to show your friends once you get home. The Travel Diary app by Roe Mobile Development lets you catalog your trip by adding time, location, and comments to your pictures. When you’re walking a friend through your trip afterwards, not only will that information be tagged with each picture, but an interactive map will also display the exact location each individual photo was taken, providing a visual way to remember each place you visited.

And finally, if you just can’t wait until you get home to share your trip with a friend, the Postman app by Freeverse will let you create a postcard with any picture you take. After personalizing it with your own greeting and message, you can share it with friends through email, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Each postcard will allow your recipients to view where you took the picture on Google Maps, keeping them informed as your adventures progress.

Skyhook recently announced partnerships with three different location-based social networking apps.  All three are available on Android.  While this again speaks to the need for better location on Android, it also indicates the growing popularity of location-aware social networking apps

One app Skyhook partnered with this week is LifeAware, winner of an Android Developer Challenge prize.  LifeAware helps to notify family members of your whereabouts by sending automatic alerts when a family member leaves or enters a customizable geographical zone.  Because the app ensures the safety of family members, LifeAware needed Skyhook to ensure that user location would be quickly and accurately found.

Skyhook also announced a partnership with Glympse, an app that allows users to “share your where.”  With Glympse, users can send out notifications of their whereabouts to friends over a selected period of time.  This can inform contacts when you are stuck in traffic, for example, without requiring you to mess with your phone.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124286030218440967.html

Finally, ZOS Communications also added Skyhook technology onto their social networking app, Zhiing.  Similar to LifeAware and Glympse, Zhiing allows you to share your location with others by sending a text message.  The app also provides maps and turn-by-turn directions so friends can find you.
http://www.intomobile.com/2009/05/26/zhiing-lets-you-send-turn-by-turn-directions-to-friends.html

Social Networking is a leader among other location-aware app types, stemming from the fact that people like to stay in touch one another and know where their friends are.  It is likely that the popularity of this category will continue to rise as developers come up with more innovative ways for us to share location with each other.

Perhaps it is the time of year, late spring/early summer, as the weather gets nicer and people become more active socially and physically that brings about in many people the need to find new activities, change their eating habits, or eat more healthy fruits and vegetables.  This week, the app store gained a few new applications that resonate with that fun and healthier drive that many get, and they all use location as their chief function.

The first is The Corona Summerbration. Corona is synonymous with nice weather, so it seems no surprise that they have released an application that locates bars serving Corona nearest to the user’s current location, in addition to displaying a new reason to get together with friends every day of the summer (or 90 days) and celebrate the season.  There is also a function to send out an email to any contact letting them know the location of where to meet up.  It is a great vehicle for Corona to promote their products and it seems likely that other beer distributors might follow their lead in the future.

FarmFresh NYC is the guide to finding locally harvested fruits, vegetables, fish and shellfish.  The application notifies the user of what is in season and the best place within the five boroughs of New York City to find them, if that store is open, and maps the location making it easy for the user to find.  FarmFresh is currently only available in NYC, but they will soon be releasing applications based in Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans and San Francisco.

3^rd Whale Mobile’s mission is to mobilize the green revolution by providing a database of 25,000+ businesses in six different categories (food, retail, eco-travel, healing & wellness, transportation and services) that run completely or partially green.  All business are also located within walking, biking, or mass transit distance to the user’s location to continue to help improve the environment even further.

Skyhook released a report today detailing some very startling distinctions between the Blackberry App World store, Apple App Store and Android Marketplace.  The most astounding fact was that Blackberry LBS apps are a full four times more expensive than similar apps on iPhone and Android.  While the average price for an LBS app on Blackberry is $13.60, average prices on iPhone and Android are $3.60 and $0.84, respectively.  We found 17 different types of apps that use location. The most popular location aware apps are Travel, Navigation, and Social Networking, but new types of apps, like Music, Finance, and Games, are also integrating location in new ways.

The Skyhook report also detailed the growing popularity of location apps by showing the surge in Skyhook location lookups per device, 5.4 per day in October and 6.1 per day in April.  This proves location is a core functionality and a integral part of a user’s everyday device use.

We expect to see a growing variety of location applications in all stores in the future, and it will be interesting to see if Blackberry will alter their prices to be more in line with its competitors.  Apple seems to be setting the standard as the most popular and successful app store to date and it may be difficult for future app stores to defy Apple’s model and achieve success.

For the Location Aware App Report, Skyhook will systematically research location‐aware applications in Apple’s App Store, Google’s Android Marketplace and Blackberry’s AppWorld, and will publish the results of this research monthly. This report will include data on location‐aware apps from new stores as they are released (e.g. Nokia’s Ovi Store, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile Marketplace).

The full report can be accessed at here: http://www.locationrevolution.com/stats/skyhookaprilreport.pdf

LocationRevolution.com is a new site that serves as a go-to guide for location-aware app information.  It includes featured LBS apps, comparative videos, stats and charts, developer info and much more.

This week was all about city guides and tours using the location services developed by Skyhook Wireless.  We have previously see the “At A Glance” city guides from BeeLoop SL, but there was quite a surge this past week from the developer as there are now over 20 cities in Europe and the United States that can be discovered with this application. While the “At a Glance” guides focus primarily on points of interest throughout the city, the city guides from Dubbele.com are street level maps that let you find important places such as ATM machines, parking, restrooms, etc. and include high interest points such as museums and historic places.  There are over 100 of these apps developed for cities all over the world such as Los Angeles, Melbourne and Warsaw.

Another interesting trend this week was the introduction of applications that service information regarding the recent Swine Flu Pandemic.  There were plenty of games designed around the scare or applications describing preventative actions, but both Swine Flu Tracker and Swine Flu Tracker Map use current location to show where the reported cases are in relation to the user.

Finally, the ultimate wedding application has been designed for those getting married and trying to organize the event without the help of a wedding planner.  WeddingWire uses geo-location to research and locate 20 different categories, from everything from the cake to the band to the venue, to help a bride design the wedding of her dreams.  The app features comparisons of local wedding professionals, read reviews of past clients, and call vendors directly from your iphone.

The world of purposeful, clever and entertaining applications using Skyhook’s patented location based technology continue to grow every week, and once again, there are several great new apps to mention.  The first is Best Buy Weekly Deals.   Best Buy is just the latest major corporation to realize the importance of including location into applications they introduce in the app store.  Best Buy Weekly Deals shows the best deals of the week and includes the nearest store, eliminating the extra step of looking up stores by zip code that a user of a device without location awareness would have to take.

Call Nearest is simple: type a business name into the application and it will find the nearest match and automatically dial that company.  This works, for example, if you have just left the doctor and need the closest pharmacy to fill a prescription, or if you are out running errands and need to get an oil change.   If you are on the way to a friend’s house and need a last minute gift, you could look up a florist, liquor, store, etc.  The search works for both name specific locations, such as Blockbuster, or generic like video rental.

Tweet Globe brings Twitter to the next level.  Instead of following someone on Twitter, you can actually follow their location as well.  The application offers a geographical representation of everyone you follow on Twitter.  The application features also include posting tweets, replying to tweets, and viewing websites.

Super Twiddler is similar to the application Urban Spoon, but with a twist.  Rather than just locate the closest places to eat, Super Twiddler also locates the closest activities and events based on mood, location and timeframe.  Activities include rock climbing, bars, libraries, museums, etc and 15 different mood options to choose from.  The application also works in every major U.S. city and also includes Yelp reviews!

The month of May in the app store has started off with roughly 45,000 applications, and 2,400 of those are geo-location based.  As usual, there was no lack of new and unique ways for developers to figure out how to incorporate location into their applications.  Here are a few of the ones that stood out this week…

After nearly a year of new applications helping to find your closest gas station, coffee shop, bank, and practically every type of business imaginable, the developers from MobileApp Topia  have managed to introduce us to iWaffles, proving location based services can be applied to the most specific of requests.  iWaffles is an application that will locate waffles closest by.  The app provides over 5,000 locations throughout the United States and includes major waffle chains like Denny’s, IHOP and Waffle House.

SportsAttendant will display the routes of sporting events like cycling, running, and triathlons and then will use LBS-functionality to coordinate a meeting point with the athlete you are cheering on.  SportsAttendant’s features also include calculating distance to the athlete, location tracking and calculation of transit time of the athlete.

Newsflash is customized news most current to the user’s location.  The application also can display national and global news.  The application is very user friendly because in addition to displaying geo-located news, it breaks that news down into categories such as business, sports, entertainment, health, etc. allowing the user to get news specified to their preferences.

Finally, at last, the ability to tag a tweet with GPS coordinates has arrived.  TweetGPS is used to keep your Twitter friends up to date on your location.  You can choose how accurate you want your position to be, how far you have to move and how long to wait before sending an update.

Today Skyhook announced a partnership with mov Software on its imov Messenger application for Windows Mobile.  The addition of Skyhook allows chatters to share location with buddies.  This is yet another example of a Windows Mobile developer turning to Skyhook for improvement over the native platform.  Just as Android developers are frustrated with slow and inaccurate location results, Windows Mobile developers are also looking for a better way to satisfy user needs.

imov Messenger is an easy to use IM aggregator application for Windows Mobile. The application brings together GoogleTalk, AOL, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and Jabber/XMPP instant messaging applications. With the addition of location from Skyhook Wireless, imov users will now be able to share their current location within their instant messages.

Across all platforms, developers who want to bring the fastest and most accurate location to their apps require hybrid positioning from Skyhook Wireless.

As the month of April comes to an end, the App Store continues to grow steadily within a range of 100-250 new location based applications weekly. Some of the coolest apps came from the Social Networking Category this week.

Tubulous Global Social Podcasting is a social network created exclusively for iPhone and iTouch users to import all previous podcasts and sync them with Tubulous to reach a whole new audience.  The app features WPS-based channel viewing, built-in Twitter support, on-the-go audio entries, comments, private messaging, friend lists and favorite channels.

Knektr is a social networking application that combines geo-location with Facebook.  This application shows the location of all the user’s Facebook friends and shows the latest profile pictures and status.  It also updates location in real time so you can be found and your friends can easily be found too.  Facebook is one of the most downloaded applications in the app store, adding location to the mix of social networking without having to join another social networking site makes the potential for this application to blow up, huge.

Cocktail Compass comes to us from the Lifestyle category.  This application finds the happiest happy hours in the area along with a countdown to how long you have until happy hour is over. The app also features reviews, listings on extras such as if the bar has wifi or patio seating, and a Cabs icon to call a cab home at the end of the night. The application is only available in Portland and Seattle, but would be a welcome addition in other cities as well.

Finally, iPlanet! was released this week and it will be interesting to see if it perhaps will echo the popularity of Sonic Lighter from a few months prior as both are a social experiment using location based services.  The difference with iPlanet! is it is an application that not only lights up your location on a map for all other iPlanet! users to see, but it also serves as an environmental statement by those working to make the planet greener. In addition, other developers within the app community can benefit by using the application to make more informed decisions about the geographical distribution of iPhone and iTouch users for future efforts in local markets.