If you have sufficiently recovered form the hullabaloo surrounding last week’s release of Latitude, whereby you could invite your friends to track your every movement using a clever combination of Google Maps, GPS and your mobile phone, then feel free to get excited all over again – location awareness has come to your emails too!
A side project from Dublin-based Google software engineer Marco Bonechi, the new ‘Location in Signature’ feature in the Labs section (which contains experimental trial features) of Gmail lets you tag on your current location to your signature.
This is done using Google Gears, the same technology that allows Gmail to be used in offline mode. Gears has geo-location technology that recognises where you are, be it in your office or on the move. It locates you through either your IP address or the co-ordinates of your Wi-Fi access point.
To activate the location feature, access Labs from within your Gmail account and click on the option to enable it. Then go into Settings and amend your signature to append your location to all out-going email.
