One that particularly caught my attention was Layar (iTunes link)(Android Market), it is an augmented reality application. This is a category of application that lets you look through the phones camera and the application puts an overlay on to offer more information. In the case of Layar this is the distance and direction to Points of Interest. Currently they are providing the Layar application for free (so it is definitely worth a look if you have either of these types of phone) and they are inviting the development community to develope new Layers to be shown in the application. Once in the application you can search the available Layers for interesting items. These guys are clearly making a bit of a business out of it at the moment.
Anyway upon seeing it I wondered how difficult it would be to add a Pubs Layer as I couldn't already see one there. So I applied for a developers key on the Layar site last Friday, on Monday the developers key arrived, by the end of the day I had a working Layer using their instructions. If you have done any REST interface work (Google Maps, Facebook, AJAX) it is really easy to just pick up, in our case most of the back end work is already being done by our Google Maps code. On Tuesday I tried to improve the presentation so that the interface was a little more Pubs Galore and the listings showed some useful stuff, Wednesday we submitted it for approval. Thursday it was rejected :-( which was actually good, their review comments were excellent and showed that they had looked at the information we sent them, so we made the minor corrections that they had identified and resubmitted and today (Friday) it has been approved and we have published it. So if you want to find pubs in the UK search for Pubs Galore and a layer showing all our open pubs will be available.
Looking at Layar's T's & C's it seems likely that at some point in the future they will charge to publish the layers (which seems fair enough) and may try and provide some advertising through the application. For the moment though it seems like an excellent tool to play with, I didn't like the layout of their documentation, but all the information was there, they have provided enough options to personalise your layer and excellent pointers on making it as smooth as possible. If you have done Google Maps mash-ups as far as I can see there is no reason you can't just publish this onto layar if your data fits that model.
Some screen shots taken locally
