The concept behind Aloqa's app offers a unique vision for mobile search that's quite different from how most people use their phones today. Currently, if you're looking for nearby restaurants, for example, you would first launch a mobile mapping application like Google Maps, let it locate you, and then perform a search for "restaurants." Once the results loaded, you could tap on the various pushpins to see the info about restaurants nearby, including names, phone numbers, and addresses.

In Aloqa, however, that same search would be much simpler. In fact, it wouldn't be a search at all. Instead, you would just tap on the icon for restaurants and immediately see a list of those nearby. When you see the one you want (oh look, there's sushi!), a second tap will display a window where you can choose to go to the business's web site, display the location on a map, call the business, or send the info to a friend.

This same sort of functionality can be used for anything from restaurants to retail stores to gas stations and ATMs. It can also help you find events that may spark your interest, like a nearby concert for instance.

Location-Aware Facebook Friend Finder

One of the even more interesting functions in Aloqa is its ability to find your nearby Facebook friends. Instead of building an entirely separate mobile social network like mobile social networks Loopt and Brightkite have done, Aloqa lets you invite your Facebook friends to share their location with you on the "Aloqa Buzz" channel. Then, when you and your friends are in proximity to each other, you'll be able to chat with each other via the mobile application. Although this still isn't the ideal solution for making Facebook a true mobile social network (nothing short of a location-aware mobile Facebook app would really do that), it comes very close. All you have to do is convince your friends to accept the invite.

About the Platform

In addition to proactively monitoring your location, Aloqa can also send out "push notifications" based on your own preferences for the types of alerts and levels of intrusiveness you want. For example, you can choose to receive a text-based alert when you walk past a nearby store offering a mobile coupon or you could receive a phone call when an important event occurs - like when your child leaves a pre-configured safety zone.

Surprisingly, Aloqa doesn't exclusively use GPS technology to deliver its location-aware information. If your phone doesn't have a GPS chip, then Aloqa will use cell towers or Wi-Fi to determine your relative position. Not only is this data "accurate enough," explains Aloqa CEO (and ex-Googler) Sanjeev Agrawal in an interview with VentureBeat, it's less of a drain on battery life, too.

Where to Get It

Currently Aloqa is available only on the Android platform in beta form. Over the coming weeks, the app will be made available for other phones, too. Stay tuned to this company's news - this is one app you're going to want to try.

For the Google public badge, users can choose if they want the widget to show their location at a city-level only, or if they want to allow it to show their location more precisely. Given the public nature of the badge, this will surely raise some security concerns, especially when users choose to update their Latitude data automatically.

The Google Talk widget only uses the name of the city the user is currently staying in to update their status.

Google stresses that it takes its users privacy very seriously, but there can be no doubt that privacy concerns are currently limiting the mainstream appeal of many of these applications.

Google is clearly taking a very serious look at location aware services and according to today's blog post, the company plans to introduce more applications that can make use of one's Latitude data in the near future. Google is also soliciting new ideas from its users here.

As usual, RWW Live will be hosted by Sean Ammirati. Our guests are:

• Dennis Crowley from the previously mentioned Four Square (iTunes link). Check out ReadWriteWeb's review of Four Square. Before that, Dennis was co-founder of Dodgeball, which was acquired by Google.
• Tom Coates, from Yahoo! (creator of Fire Eagle). See ReadWriteWeb's coverage of Fire Eagle's go-live.
• Mark Josephson CEO at Outside.in. See ReadWriteWeb's coverage of Outside.in.

We welcome your suggestions for discussion points, either in the comments here or by tuning in LIVE to the show - via Calliflower or Facebook - and participating in the chat room.

UPDATE: The podcast is now available for listening to here.

What's interesting about this new attack vector is the fact that the worm is customizing the relevancy of its message by using geo-awareness... and this isn't the first time the worm has done so. Although an IP lookup isn't going to yield pinpoint accuracy, it will usually get the city name correct and for now, that may be good enough. But if we know malware writers, then we know that it's only a matter of time before they attempt to exploit the new geo-aware services, too, in order to deliver even more precisely targeted messages.

Are Mobile-Based Geo-Aware Exploits Next?

For truly accurate geo-aware targeting, attacks would have to come across the mobile front where people carry pocket-sized GPS units integrated into their handhelds. Mobile computing is on the rise and where the people go, so go the hackers.

In a relatively short period of time, we've seen the rise of mobile social networks like Brightkite, Loopt and others; Google's new location-based tracking service Latitude made its debut; and more recently, Yahoo's Fire Eagle technology arrived on Facebook and in Firefox. With any one of these services, a user's exact location could be plotted. Armed with that info, what could a malware author do? Send you news stories about the restaurant where you're dining? Text you drink specials when you're at a bar? Who knows! But combine that level of accuracy with mobile-ready malware-laden web sites and we could have a real threat on our hands.

Mobile Malware is Still Quiet... for Now

However, this is all just speculation at this point. Today's mobile malware incidents are few and far between. Still, the treasure troves of personal information stored on our smartphones make them appealing targets to malware writers. No matter how tight the security of these modern devices is, eventually, hackers can find their way in.

According to Andrew Storms, director of information technology at nCircle Network Security, bigger phone-based threats are just around the corner. "No one should be surprised if we see the first major threat of the migration of botnets from traditional computing devices to mobile platforms," Storms says. "Some smartphones already have more memory and higher processing power than laptops from just a few years ago. A constantly moving and adapting mobile botnet presents a compelling business proposition for hackers and an interesting real-world case study in chaos theory."

Patrik Runald, Chief Security Advisor at F-Secure, agrees. "At some point, the criminals now developing PC malware will start focusing on mobile devices," Runald said. "It's not a question of if, but when and how. I'm keeping a close eye on the iPhone -- it may be the tipping point that sets the mobile malware field afire."

Frankly, we're surprised it isn't here already. Are modern smartphones really that much more secure or do they still not yet exist in large enough numbers to make them worth attacking?

Image credit: kmevans

When you click the "Get Started" button in the Friends on Fire Facebook application, you're redirected to Yahoo's Fire Eagle page where you have to sign in with a Yahoo ID. If you don't already have one, then you'll need to create one here - an extra step that may be a bit off-putting for new users.

Once you've signed in, you must provide an email address for receiving important updates from Fire Eagle. You then must also specify at what intervals you want to receive an email that asks if you're still comfortable sharing your location. The choices you're given are "once per month," "once every 3 months," and "don't bother." Finally, you have to accept the terms of service and give the Facebook app access to your location.

Back in Facebook, you'll be shown the other Fire Eagle users among your friends and given the opportunity to connect with them. You can also configure additional settings like how exact the location updates are, who can see them on the map, and whether or not the posts update your wall.

Mobile Updaters

Of course, if you're out and about, you're not necessarily going to be hauling around your computer with you. Instead, you'll want to grab one of the mobile Fire Eagle updaters from Yahoo's Gallery. These apps include simple mobile updaters like Fire Fone for the iPhone as well as more robust social networking apps like Brightkite. However, even though these apps are integrated with Fire Eagle, we had some problems getting one of them to also update the Facebook Fire Eagle map. Our preferred mobile social network Brighkite, for instance, updated our Wall but the Fire Eagle map did not show our location.

According to Tom Coates, the head of the Fire Eagle project, it might take a couple of minutes for your location to show up when you use a third party application, but we've waited for 20 minutes so far and the Brightkite update never made its way to the map. Obviously, this delay could hamper the usefulness of a location-aware app - especially if you're checking in at places you're only going to be for a short while - like the local coffee shop or a restaurant where you stopped for lunch.

There are several apps in the list to try, so it looks like we'll need to check them one-by-one to see if that's a common issue, or something specifically related to Brightkite. (Share your experiences in the comments!)

Fire Eagle Updater for Firefox

The Fire Eagle Firefox add-on is much simpler to use. After installing the extension, you only need to click a button in your browser toolbar to update your location. This is useful for those scenarios when you are, in fact, toting your laptop around. It's easy to imagine college students using this on campus, traveling business executives checking in as they launch their browsers in airports and hotel rooms, or web workers checking in from their favorite Wi-Fi hotspots.

Both the add-on and the new Facebook application will help push the concept of location-awareness even further into the mainstream. Although, as we mentioned yesterday, the next step after location-aware apps may be location-aware ads. However, we're still excited to see the developments taking place in this area, especially when it comes from a standards-based platform with strong privacy controls like Yahoo's Fire Eagle.