Saw Tom Coates' talk on Fire Eagle at ETech today. Actually quite different from what I had expected. It's basically a service into which devices and apps can feed location information, users can control access rights to that information, and devices and apps can consume a normalized and standardized view of that information. It's interesting that it's not just a set of APIs, but also a service that implements those APIs.
This has a lot of potential. Anyone can create a location provider, and anyone can build apps using those locations. Users have a unified place to deal with permissions. For example I could have my GPS from my blackberry be a location provider, or I could create a FireFox plug-in that tires to determine my location based on my IP address, or any number of other things. I could also write an app that doesn't care what device is providing the location or in what format and deals only with the FireEagle service.
I'm hoping to write a FireFox plug-in location provider, but likely it'll join my list of projects I'll never get around to. hostip.info already has most of what's needed.
I have two invites, let me know if you want one.