Whether looking for the nearest coffee shop on a GPS-enabled smartphone, nearby friends via a social-networking site, or all trucks within the city delivering a certain product, more and more people and businesses are using location-aware search services. Creating such services has often been the domain of expensive proprietary solutions and geospatial experts. Recently, however, the popular open source search library, Apache Lucene, and the powerful Lucene-powered search server, Apache Solr, have added spatial capabilities. Lucene and Solr committer Grant Ingersoll walks you through the basics of spatial search and shows you how to leverage its capabilities to power your next location-aware application.

A father who orchestrated the ‘balloon boy’ hoax began his 90-day jail sentence yesterday.

In preparing for the upcoming Age of Conan server merges, Funcom has made an announcement that characters below level 20 on inactive accounts (7+ months inactive) will be deleted. Former customers are being informed in advance with via e-mail, in case you want to you know, subscribe to save your poor newbie.

THE NEW WEBMAIL service planned by Internet search engine Google was attacked yesterday as nothing more than online snooping.

Tickets can be used at Cineworld, Vue, Showcase, Empire and Odeon cinemas across the UK**.

The editorial staff here at MMORPG.com has made their decisions, and today we start to unveil the winners of the 2009 MMORPG.com awards by naming our Most Improved Game of 2009.