WeNear, Location Based Services Framework

weNearWeNear is a new framework for location based services, which aims to help connect users with their interests.

With the widespread use of mobile phones and other mobile devices in the Arab world, weNear comes to enrich the mobile experience even more, beyond just making phone calls and sending sms messages, by providing a platform for location based social and business services.

As an example of one of the social uses, based on a user’s location, the service will be able to identify other weNear users that were marked as friends, and locate them on the map; making it a lot easier to find and reach them. Of course, a privacy option is built in to hide a user’s location whenever they want.

Through weNear, users will also be able to socially interact and communicate with other nearby users, announcing interest-based information and sending tagged messages which will be received by those whose interests match these tags.

When it comes to business uses, weNear users can receive immediate notifications with information about interesting nearby services, events or products; creating new chances for advertisers to connect with potential clients based on their location and their interests.

Another example Implementation is “Almotawef”, which is an application for Muslim pilgrims, that helps them find their relatives and groups during Hajj, walks them through the Hajj rituals and points them to the places they have to go to.

weNear was developed by Egyptian company eSpace.

# WeNear

weNear Launch Location Based Applications Competition

weNearweNear, a mobile platform for location-based services and applications, developed by Egyptian company eSpace, just launched a location based applications competition today, which is open to students of The Computer Science Department at Alexandria University, Egypt.

The competition consists in building interesting location based applications using the weNear API. It starts today, July 1st, and the final submission date is August 31st.

Those interested in being part of the competition can go to the weNear competition announcement page to find details about the weNear architecture, documentation, and some initial client/server communication code in several programming languages to help them get started.

Contestants can then submit their applications at the weNear competition sub-site.

Should be interesting to see how this works out, and what different applications come out of it.

# weNear competition