About the Open Landmark Project
Open Landmark is about geotagging the world; more specifically, your world, and sharing it. A landmark can be any physical location on earth. Once a landmark has been identified, others can add information to it or update it. Our vision is to created the largest repository of landmarks and make it available to everyone.
Who's Behind Open Landmark?
Open Landmark is brought to you by Mo'Blast.
Who is Mo'Blast?
Mo'Blast is a startup, headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA. We like to think of ourselves as innovators in the location based services space. We have spent the last few years researching, developing our very own location-based platform and a set of APIs one can use to build new, interesting applications centered around location, presence, proximity, and mobility.
Where is Mo'Blast?
Open Landmark is a global effort. Our team is likewise global. We work from Sunnyvale, CA., Berkeley, CA., Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia and soon Paris, France.
What Can You Do with a Landmark Repository?
Take it with you, share it, build new applications on top of it.
What's Coming?
Fon11TM , our location-aware, presence phonebook.
Integrated with Open Landmark, you can see your friend's presence, availability, mood,
and location. GPS optional.
Open Landmark Facebook widget, a utility for Facebook users to share a collection of places that holds
a special meaning.
Geekspeak and Shameless Self-Promotion
How is it Made?
The Open Landmark Web tier is buzz compliant. It's built using standard Web technologies, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, and various libraries such as JQuery, Prototype and DWR. Our core is Enterprise Java. To achieve rapid development using JSPs/Servlets, we have developed our own Java MVC web framework, based on naming convention. To support multimedia, we have created a media utility to manage, photo, audio, and video (not used in Open Landmark) upload, transcode, download, and streaming to the Web and mobile devices.
The Open Landmark persistence tier is EJB 3.0, using Hibernate and TopLink with PostgreSQL database.
Our backend, the location-based platform, is designed for high availability and scalability. We implemented a divide and conquer strategy; running many small applications (applications deployed on Apache, Tomcat, JBoss, and GlassFish instances) on arrays of commodity servers. We aggressively cache and index with Apache ehcache and Lucene index. Our production servers are heavy duty, Quad-Core machines build by us. We backup in real-time using RAID 5 technology.
Mo'Blast developers code in Windows, Mac, and Linux machines. We use NetBeans and Eclipse IDEs. Our production servers run RedHat Fedora. We use XEN virtualization in our sand boxes.
Why So Complicated?
Mo'Blast is just preparing for the future. We believe the future is mobile Web and the rampant growth of multimedia content delivered to mobile devices. To support these type of applications, we need a robust and scalable system. We can't wait for the release of iPhone SDK and to play with Google Android. Mo'Blast is a versatile company. We are knowledgeable with various geospatial and location technologies.