Plazes and Fon

Long time without blogging...

Today I decided to spend some time by testing the Plazes service which is actually pretty cool.

The basic idea of Plazes is that everytime when I log in to the network from my PC or Cellphone the application updates my current location to it's database.
If the place is not yet recognized, the Plazer will prompt some basic details from me about the location and registers it to the Plaze database for the future users.

I have integrated Plazes with my skype account, so everytime when I'm online, my Skype contacts can see where am I. My blog has also a module which is showing the same data.

Plazes also keeps track of places I have been and through it's Flickr interface, I can insert geodata to my images stored in the Flicker service.

I installed the Plazer in to my PC and in to my Nokia N70 mobile terminal.
The PC client still seems to be in a beta phase, but without any major bugs.
The mobile version seems to be pretty nice also, but one thing which is missing from that is the "current location" handling.
Looks like that it can't handle the information provided by the mobile network to keep track of "where am I" since the it doesn't automatically find any Plazes near me. Only way it could know where am I is the Cell ID provided the network.
The issue can be of course in the used mobile network (Telefonica) and I asked more info from the Plazes guys to help me to verify where the problem is.
The problem is pretty severe since the users don't want to tell for the client where they are and update that info all the time.

I decided to cancel all my internet contracts since the ya.com is still down due the fact that the Wanadoo is reserving my line from Telefonica.
Ya.com is still billing even I haven't use that service after the first week.
Telefonica is needed because in this third-world country ADSL can't be connected if the house doesn't have telephone contract with local operator. So basically this means that two spanish companies will loose a customer and I save 70 euros per month. I have been paying the services without service now almost five months.

I installed an Fon wifi router in to our office and joined to the Fon network as a linus member. Basically this means that if now when I'm providing the internet for free in our office region - I can use internet for free in any spot where the Fon coverage is available and lucky me, I have it in my home (actually i have two wifi networks available from my home), so bye bye Telefonica and other local operators...