The discovery of two existing continuous location services, wizi and especially instamapper, made me ask myself "why IceCondor?". so i'm writing some notes about what they do and don't do.

wizi.com has some great use-case videos that show the phone pushing location data and monitoring a single user. iPhone and windows mobile support. the site has a beta client for android but it does not load on the latest android SDK - im guessing it was built with an (much) earlier SDK and feels like the project was abandoned.

instamapper.com. instamapper has a very nice web interface. for instance there is one URL for each user that show the last reported location. the demo of the continuous tracking is a great visualization with a dot for each fixed report and a line for the estimated track that follows the dots. what instamapper is not, is location information from the cell phone itself. the cell phone app is very simple, as seen in the v1.1 iPhone preview on their site. Its not useful for getting any location information out of the system, only to put it in. Since the iPhone wont multitask, the phone is basically useless for its higher functions unless you want to watch your lat/long/alt/speed. iPhone and blackberry support. no mention of android.

OpenSource - creating private services seems to be recreating the wheel each time. this recreation will free others from having to do it themselves. communities can setup dedicated servers. code can be contributed to the project.

Android platform - android has been ignored, or existing continuous location projects are being stealthy. i suppose to most android devs, the IceCondor android client is also stealthy because it hasn't been mentioned on any android blogs. the closest app i've read about is commandro. its hard to say where the level of development activity is for this application. its got the idea of a social network integrated with it, which the icecondor client will do as well.