"It's not a Mona Lisa painting. It's a car."

NY cab drivers filed a court case recently about being forced to have GPS locators/monitors in their vehicles - they lost the battle yesterday. It may improve the situation for drivers, especially if the locators/monitors have navigation, traffic, and other LBS services associated with them. Don't be surprised, however, if prices for cab rides go up as a direct result...or if there is a strike and you can't find one on Monday morning.

I like the idea of credit cards for cab rides though - we are rarely a cash-based society anymore.

"A federal judge on Friday refused to block a new city rule that requires taxi drivers to install global positioning systems and credit card machines in their cabs by Monday.

The drivers argue that the city overstepped its authority and acted unconstitutionally when it mandated the units. Their lawsuit also claims GPS will give away trade secrets by disclosing the cabbies' driving patterns, which they say give them a competitive edge.

U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman refused to immediately block the rule from taking effect, saying Friday that the use of the technology to improve taxi service appeared to outweigh drivers' privacy rights in this case. He urged the two sides to negotiate and set the next hearing for Oct. 10.

Malcolm Goldstein, a lawyer for the taxi drivers, said he was reading the judge's ruling and had no immediate comment.

Berman said that on the limited amount of evidence he had viewed so far, it did not appear the drivers would succeed in claims that the city acted improperly, caused them "severe and debilitating economic harm" and prevented them from earning their livelihood.

At an earlier hearing on Wednesday, Berman had expressed skepticism toward the drivers' arguments, saying, "It's not a Mona Lisa painting. It's a car."

After that hearing, dejected driver Beres Ford Simmons said: 'Gentlemen, prepare for another strike.'

Hundreds of drivers idled their cabs for a two-day protest of the GPS technology in early September. More than 13,000 yellow cabs must be equipped with GPS and software that record where the cars are every eight seconds or the drivers could face fines. The group leading that strike called it a "resounding success," while city officials said disruption was minimal."

What about the urban canyon effect for GPS? Will it really be able to pinpoint where they are every 8 seconds?

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070928/ap_on_re_us/taxi_technology

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Former CEO of Centrality Insights Video

Very interesting interview from the former CEO of Centrality with regards to the recent acquisition of Centrality by SIRF from GPS Business News. He describes the concept of system on a chip (SOC) in layman terms and why he thinks that SIRF has a nice lead there with three full generations of products behind it, relative to more new-comers to the space. Also why he thinks that hardware solutions like theirs have and likely always will have better performance than software based solution for many applications, not that SIRF won’t have a software solution itself just in case. He also sees the connected PND as one of the major developments in the navigation space in the next few years.
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Mousetrapped

"The Walt Disney Co. is shutting down its remaining mobile virtual network operator, Disney Mobile, as of Dec. 31. The company announced this morning that it would dismantle Disney Mobile and would explore 'a new business model for its content and services that might include offering its popular Family Center product through a partnership with a major U.S. carrier.'"

I, for one, am interested in learning who the major U.S. carrier is. Due to the recent issues with Amp'd (Verizon) , ESPN, and now Disney (Sprint), does that leave hope for Cingular and/or T-Mobile to launch the Disney Family Center product? My guess is that all major carriers in the U.S. are skittish regarding launching anything that whiffs of an MVNO (or former MVNO) - Disney should consider partnering with another small company that can get them retail coverage as well as other advantages that they appear to be lacking.

Given their recent success with MVNOs (ESPN and now Disney Mobile), Disney needs to consider more than just finding a new business model - they need to reconsider their strategic plans of how to enter the wireless business.

More of the story from RCR Wireless News' article "Mousetrapped" below.

"Disney's former Mobile ESPN MVNO now exists as an application available through Verizon Wireless. The company pulled the plug on Mobile ESPN after less than a year of operations; Disney Mobile launched in June 2006, and runs its service over Sprint Nextel Corp.'s network. 'It's been clear since we launched the MVNO that we were offering something both unique and useful for families that wanted to provide their kids with a mobile phone with suitable content and features while retaining a measure of control on how and when it would be used,' said Steve Wadsworth, president of the Walt Disney Internet Group. 'Our feedback from customers and critics from the beginning has been that we exceeded the mark in that respect. However, the MVNO model has proven, as we've seen with other companies this past year, to be a difficult proposition in the hyper-competitive US mobile phone market.'"

Part of the problem could have been that they tried to compete as a different carrier for families, rather than hyper-focusing their product on more of a niche play (like huge fans of the Mouse). Also, their pricing didn't work in their favor. Story continues below.

"'In assessing our business model, we decided that changing strategies was a better alternative to pursue profitable growth in the mobile services area.' The move is not a total surprise; Tom Staggs, senior executive VP and CFO of Walt Disney Co., indicated at a recent investor conference that the company was re-evaluating its MVNO business due to concerns about distribution and scale. Disney Mobile has not disclosed the size of its customer base."

So they had trouble getting retail coverage, as well as getting and retaining customers. Could be why they would not reveal how many customers they had...

"According to Disney, current Disney Mobile customers will receive service and support until Dec. 31, 2007. The company said it will offer a reimbursement program for eligible customers. Details of the reimbursement program were not immediately available, but the company said they would be posted on the Disney Mobile Web site no later than Oct. 8.

Time will tell if other MVNOs can meet the success of Boost and Virgin (both of which really tried to find a niche in the market that was being unfulfilled by the existing offerings in the market) or if they will go the way of ESPN, Amp'd, and now Disney. Watch out, Helio...

Note: Article source: http://www.rcrnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070927/FREE/70927008/1018&template=printart

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Tracking Zebras and Consumers?

Wireless networks have been used before to track animals, such as elephants, koalas, and even pigeons. Now, U.S. researchers are using social networking software to track zebras. They hope to discover how animals interact — especially when lions are near a herd. They also think their software can help ecologists devise new techniques to protect endangered species. They even think that their computational tools can easily be adapted to study our buying habits. Does this mean that we’ll be fitted with a GPS tracking collar before entering a shopping mall?

You can see above a picture of a zebra with a sensor collar and a snapshot of zebra population in Kenya (Credit: Computational Tools for Population Biology). This project has been led by University of Illinois at Chicago assistant professor of computer science Tanya Berger-Wolf, director of the Laboratory for Computational Population Biology. She worked with Princeton University ecologist Daniel Rubenstein and University of New Mexico computer scientist Jared Saia.

So how these researchers will track a zebra population? “The initial focus is on zebras living in Kenya’s vast Mpala conservancy. A number of the animals will be fitted with GPS tracking collars that will provide researchers with a more accurate picture of life among the herd, showing how animals interact and which one leads the herd to flee when predators, notably lions, are near. Zebra species have mainly been reduced to three — the endangered Grevy’s, the Mountain and the common Plains. Rubenstein has studied zebras for more than two decades and hopes to learn more from tracking the social habits of the Plains and Grevy’s species to see how they differ in evading predators.”

And how this will really work? “The zebras will be tracked every 8 to 15 minutes, and the data will be relayed by cell phone to the researchers’ computers, where new computational and analytical software tools developed as part of the project will help map and analyze the animals’ social networking in ways never done before. The tools will help researchers study the time and order of animal social interaction. The approach combines ideas from academic disciplines such as social network analysis, Internet computing, data mining and machine learning to solve the complicated puzzles of population biology.”

Speaking about computational population biology, here is how Tanya Berger-Wolf describes her research. “Flu pandemic, political microtargeting, behavioral response to predator presence, species genetic diversity. Populations contain intricate connections that occur on time scales ranging from milliseconds to generations. At the Laboratory for Computational Population Biology, we explore the growing interface between Population Biology and Computer Science, from genetics to social interactions.”

And here is her description of Dynamic Network Analysis. “Finding patterns of social interaction within a population has applications from epidemiology and marketing to conservation biology and behavioral ecology. An intrinsic characteristics of societies is their continual change. Yet, few analysis methods are explicitly dynamic. We are working on novel conceptual and computational frameworks to accurately describe the social context of an individual at time scales matching changes in individual and group activity. Current projects in this direction include finding communities and critical individuals in dynamic networks, and fine-grained interaction prediction in dynamic networks.”

Still, I don’t know how the researchers want to study our buying habits without equipping us with special devices. After all, we don’t all carry GPS collars…

from zdnet

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Doom meets Space Invaders

from redferret.net

The ARQuake augmented reality gaming project lets you play Quake on a portable computer, headset and GPS unit. At that point it was very much a college project, and even today it involves quite a bit of clunky equipment (weighing 6 kilograms and incorporating a full 2GHz belt worn computer).

Well guess what? Something similar has just made its way onto the Palm Treo, using nothing more sophisticated than the internal camera and some software smarts. Arcade Reality is a £7.50 3D FPP game in which you battle aliens or destroy asteroids, with rockets, shields etc etc. Think Doom meets Space Invaders. OK, so the graphics are definitely of the ‘early school’ 8 bit variety, but remember the platform, OK? So watch out for more examples of this type of innovative mobile technology over the coming months, as in-built GPS, high speed HSDPA and more powerful mobile phone processors start to arrive on store shelves in volume.

No more killing feeble aliens on the tiny 2″ x 2″ screen! In this game you must handle hostile creatures floating around you in the real world. How is this possible? Imagine you have a device, like night vision goggles, that can detect out-of-this-world objects… and when playing Arcade Reality, your Treo is such device….game objects are overlaid on the live camera view (this technology is called Augmented Reality). When you turn around, your motion is calculated based on what is seen by the camera and the game view gets updated accordingly. As you can see, motion is the key. Unlike most games where you only train your fingers, you must actually move to play Arcade Reality!

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Picture Yourself

There is a new blog from the Navpix GPS people, which marries their GPS camera navigation technology with a useful and interesting diary of interesting locations that you can visit using your Navman GPS system. Yes it’s a shameless marketing ploy to get people to buy Navman products, but if it gets traction it could actually turn out to be quite a valuable place to find new locations to visit on your travels.

The idea is that the blog features interesting locations, you click on the link to download location image and GPS co-ordinates, which you upload to your Navman and bingo, you’re ready to navigate there without any maps or further hassle. I still think they should open source a basic version of the software so that a bigger community starts using this tech in earnest. But what do I know?

Picture Yourself There is all about locations. Beautiful, fascinating, educational or just plain curious. Use Picture Yourself There to give you ideas for minibreaks and day trips, or for things to see and do when you’re looking to brighten your day: restaurants, exhibitions, farmers’ markets, great gigs, theme parks, haunted houses, secret gardens… every day we’ll be letting you know about something, somewhere that you just have to see. But Picture Yourself There is not just about telling you where to go – we can tell you how to get there too. Use NavPix technology, and you can be directed straight to any location on the blog with a single click…

from redferret.net


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Impulse shopping via camera phone

Mobile phones can boost up the sales?

H&M has involved billboard and magazine print executions that contain an embedded semacode in Europe, aiming to create another point of sale opportunity with this high-tech technology. As what you see in the photo, consumers can buy the clothes that available in printed media carrying a small bar code, via their cellphone’s integrated camera. It’s a very cool and innovative idea for shoppers.

from picturephoning


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Traffic.com Offers Solutions to Traffic Problems Highlighted in Texas Transportation Institute Study

Web Site, Toll-Free Hotline, and Mobile Alerting Solutions

CNN Money

WAYNE, Pa., Sept. 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Traffic.com, a NAVTEQ company , and a leading provider of personalized traffic information, provides information to help drivers avoid the worsening traffic conditions reported in yesterday's Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) 2007 Urban Mobility Report. Traffic.com offers free, convenient solutions that equip drivers with the information they need to get where they're going faster.

According to the TTI report, 4.2 billion hours are spent stuck in traffic each year in the U.S., wasting 2.9 billion gallons of fuel at a cost of $78 billion. Traffic has gotten worse, affecting more of the day, and becoming more unpredictable. With morning and evening rush hours lasting as long as 3 hours in large U.S. urban areas, a reliable and immediate source of current roadway conditions is imperative for drivers. On-demand, real-time updates as well as scheduled alerts have become a necessity for on-the-go drivers.

"Free commuter solutions offered by Traffic.com keep drivers more informed and better able to plan routes to avoid traffic congestion," explained John MacLeod, Executive Vice President of NAVTEQ, "and we've packaged that information so it is at people's fingertips, wherever they may be."

Traffic.com's free Web site and personalized alerting solutions give users comprehensive city-wide information as well as detailed traffic condition information.

For free real-time traffic information on-demand, drivers across the country can:

   Call Traffic.com's free traffic hotline at 1-866-MY-TRAFC (1-866-698-7232)

    Text a city code or saved MyTraffic drive name to TRAFC (87232)

    Access Traffic.com mobile Web site at http://mobi.traffic.com, via Web-enabled cell phone or mobile device browser

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NYC Taxi Assoc. Sues Over GPS, Exhibit 1: Proprietary Driving Routes

In case you missed it, there was a taxi strike about two weeks ago over the required use of GPS enabled devices in NYC taxis. Well the same folks that led the strike, The NYC Taxi Workers Alliance, is now bringing a lawsuit over the issue and they're arguing among other things that the driving patterns their drivers use is proprietary and that use of a GPS tracking system will "give away" these patterns.

Hmm, well this is rational, if I knew a really good short cut around town, I wouldn't want to share that short cut with the world because then it wouldn't really be a short cut much longer.... but my guess is that the bigger risk is that it will uncover a systematic pattern of slightly more "scenic" routes and routes that keep the taxi and its meter rolling irregardless of the time it takes to get to the destination.
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LBS Mini Company Profile: TAO City Guides

TAO City Guides is a Paris based company offering location aware tour guides of the city via hand-held PDA type devices. Tourists can rent and return the GPS enabled devices at one of many popular city hotels or via the company’s own Paris based store, with a 200 euro deposit. Rental arrangements can also be made through the taocityguide.com website and are typically priced at ~10-15 euro per day.

The guides can help tourists navigate between various hand picked points of interest around the city, find nearby restaurants and stores, and read about or hear audio tour information on major points of interest throughout the city. TAO City claims that the devices are loaded with the equivalent of four guidebooks worth of information.

As a nice added feature the devices also contains bi lingual dictionaries, food vocabulary and phrase finder features to help their English, Japanese and Spanish speaking visitors more easily communicate in French.

It sounds like recent visitors to Paris have found the devices being offered on a special 1 euro per day, which would seem to indicate the TAO is trying to either spark demand or is potentially moving to an ad sponsorship model where advertising businesses within the device is supplementing rental income.

The use of un assisted GPS technology likely presents some user experience challenges for customers trying to plan itineraries and get their bearings from within their hotel or their next stop from within the Louvre for example. Also, the long time to first fix may be challenging in more urban sections of Paris, but standing on a street corner waiting for a signal fix, still beats pulling out that 40 panel folding map, and spending 20 minutes trying to figure out how to fold it back up. According to the company, battery life is limited to 3-4 hours, depending on the level of use.

Despite some of the potential shortcomings, these type of services could have huge potential. They will not only allow visitors a new found sense of confidence in exploring a new city without concern of getting lost, but also eliminating the often times embarrassing need to ask for direction from locals who may not be very understanding of non French speaking visitors.

The Calabash World Explorer offers a similar service for travelers visiting the US Virgin Islands, and from the number of tourist I see each day wandering haplessly through mid town Manhattan, a NYC service with its 40 million annual visitors could be a huge hit.

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Soaring Theft of Personal Navigation Devices

As portable, in-vehicle GPS navigation devices grow in popularity among consumers, they are also growing in popularity among a less-than-desirable segment of the population - thieves. According to a recent article from the Associated Press ("As prices drop, theft of GPS devices soar,") theft of these popular devices are "dramatically increasing" in many areas. Forget to remove your device from your dash because you are running a quick errand? Ask Austin Sweazy what happened to his. "In the few minutes the couple were inside the store, a thief smashed the window of Sweazy's car, snatched his $600 TomTom portable navigation unit off the windshield and fled into the gathering dusk."

"Even people who take their GPS gadgets off their dashboards when they leave their cars are returning to find windows smashed, as thieves gamble that an empty plastic cradle suction-cupped to the windshield means a GPS unit has been hidden somewhere in the car."..."It gets worse: Taking the plastic cradle off the windshield might not be enough if the suction cup leaves a ring of film on the glass. That alone can signal a thief."

To make the theft even more painful, the units are rarely covered by insurance, and if they are, their value is usually less than the deductible. So why has the level of thefts risen in this market? Easy. The value of the item makes the theft lucrative - "so lucrative, in fact, that victims often say GPS thieves ignored other items in their cars."

Why can't the drivers just locate the car when stolen? Because the GPS devices are receivers, not locators. It looks like what we really need is someone to come along and develop a GPS navigation device with the ability to locate itself (when missing).

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070918/ap_on_bi_ge/business_of_life


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This Map of the Deep South Brought to you by Moon Pies

You may not have yet heard of the term Mapvertising, but Lat49 hopes to change that soon enough. Lat49, a division of Canadian based IDELIX is trying to create an online map based advertising network, where the world will be sold off to sponsorship one parcel at a time.

Advertisers with a strong affinity for a geographic area can bid on plots of land to sponsor… any one of four zoom levels: street, neighborhood, urban area or brand (state/nation level) which can means sponsoring anywhere from four city blocks to half of a state.

A single tile is currently being offered for $1 a month, but will soon open up to the good ol’ free markets auction system for any parcels that haven’t previously been squatted upon… er spoken for.

The ads will appear on the maps of any publisher that has chosen to use the system and uses any of the major online mapping providers including MapQuest, Google Maps, Microsoft Live Search, and Yahoo! Local.

The whole set up seems a reasonable extension of what has worked well enough for all the premium display advertising networks out there such as advertising.com, Burst Media, etc… which proved that servicing hundreds of thousands of small publishers who are creating niche content destinations with little or no means to make money from them is a potentially lucrative business.

With the burgeoning popularity of online mapping, the creation of an online map network was an inevitable extension.

I can already picture it “This Map of Alaska brought to you by Burlington Coat Factory” or the deep south brought to you by MoonPie. The possibilities are endless.

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LocaModa raises $6.18 Million Funding

Somerville, MA base LocaModa has raised just over $6 million in Series A funding according to recent regulatory filings. The company's primary offering is the Wiffiti application which combines a virtual graffiti wall in the form of a flat screen television that can be interacted with by any passerby via mobile text messaging. The technology is trying to take the success of online virtual social networks and bring them in to the real world anywhere location specific ad hoc social networks are created... around bar patron and conference attendees for example. Wherever a Wiffiti screen is present, patrons can text messages in to LocaModa to have their messages posted to the screen for all to see or to vote on location specific topics. A bar patron can post messages like 'After the bar closes, after party is at my house!" or at a sports bar patrons can post a poll, "Anyone else want to watch the Washington Vs Oregon Game instead of this blow out?".

The Wiffiti solution solves some interesting problems, but as a business model, the technology seems pretty simple to replicate... and once you get all the big folks who typically do bar promotions signed up, like Bacardi, growing it into the local ad markets seems potentially tricky... nonetheless it will be an interesting one to watch and see how they approach it.

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Latest FCC e911 Requirements

Last night the FCC passed new requirements for carriers to provide wireless e911 services. U.S. carriers will have until 2012 to achieve phase II location accuracy, which means locating devices to between 150 to 300 yards 95% of the time, depending on the technology in use. Be sure to check out last months post about the different technologies in use to satisfy these requirements and why all e911 calls aren’t created equal.

The FCC evidently decided that it needs to more closely project manage the whole thing this time around and is requiring carriers to meet interim milestones to ensure that they’re effectively working toward that goal. Given that the original goal was end of 2005, this is probably not a bad idea.

But the CTIA is not so happy with a new wrinkle that the FCC added… requiring that carriers test and achieve this level of accuracy down to the individual local e911 calling area rather than just achieving accuracy at a statewide average.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin comments "Meeting location accuracy standards on average in the entire state of New York by providing enhanced 911 capability in Manhattan does not help first responders in Buffalo."

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Sony Playstation PSP Personal Navigation Device??

In case you missed it a few weeks ago the Sony Playstation folks announced they are planning to begin selling a GPS navigation service that will turn its portable game consoles into a personal navigation device in a service called Go! Explore due out in Europe in early 2008. Sony collaborated with Tele Atlas and NavNGo on the product.

Just goes to show that the consumer GPS market right now is synonymous with navigation, navigation, navigation... When you have a market leader in portable gaming decide to focus efforts of building personal navigation into their devices rather than focusing on using the technology to build massive multi player games or in some way leverage GPS in actual gameplay, that has to raise some eyebrows about how the location awareness market is stuck in personal navigation gear at the moment.

There are a two major titles that leverage the new PSP GPS accessory, Konami's Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops which allows gamers to navigate in the real world to find and recruit fighting comrades... and Everybody's Golf, which doesn't actually involve much in the way of location related game play... the GPS function operates more simply as a virtual caddy helping golfers navigate and calculate hole distance as they play golf on one of dozens of Japanese golf courses.

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Maps and more: Nokia revamps its location-based experiences

A better UI for more devices and more coverage illuminate Nokia's navigation plans

Helsinki, Finland - Speaking at the Canalys Navigation forum in Barcelona, Michael Halbherr shared insights about the current state of navigation and plans for updates and improvements for Nokia Maps. Launched in February of this year, the Nokia Maps mobile application and the Nokia Map Loader for PC's have each been downloaded over 1 million times.

A key point highlighted by Halbherr, head of the location-based experience team in Nokia Multimedia was the evolution of Nokia Maps from the first version, announced in February, to the next phase, which is available for download today. "We have taken a lot of the consumer feedback that we received when we launched Nokia Maps and are feeding that into the next versions of the product," said Mr. Halbherr.

The updated Nokia Maps application has a new streamlined user interface with improved nearby search and detailed categories. "Many people were saying that they didn't know how much data they were using, so we have added a data download counter in the map view. We also added a GPS status indicator so that you know when your device is connected to the satellites." The updated version also comes with a bonus three-day trial Navigation license free of charge*. "With this trial users can try out the service over a weekend holiday or a short business trip and discover the convenience of having a personal navigation device integrated into their mobile."

"Speaking of streamlining things," added Halbherr, "We are happy to report that we have a new and improved PC Map Loader available for users to download." The Nokia Map Loader is used to conveniently side load maps on to the device before you need them. "The improved Map Loader transfers the maps up to 10 times faster than the first version and enables downloading the voice guidance files."

Both new versions of Nokia Maps and the Nokia Map Loader are freely available to download* for selected devices at http://maps.nokia.com/

Nokia is also updating the map coverage during the second half of 2007 to bring the total number of countries covered to over 150, with more than 50 of them navigable. "Our goal is to have the world covered," exclaimed Mr. Halbherr, "We want our navigation customers to feel assured that when they travel abroad, their Nokia device has the relevant maps for them. A map is like an insurance policy against getting lost, you need it most when you are lost, and when that happens, it is invaluable."

Nokia Maps is being integrated into Ovi. Ovi is the door to Nokia's Internet services, including the Nokia Music Store, Nokia Maps and N-Gage games. It will also be an open door to web communities, enabling people to access their content, communities and contacts from a single place, either directly from a compatible Nokia device or from a PC.

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It’s 10PM Do You Know Where Your Shark Is?

Discovery channel has a fun new location enabled educational game out called Shark Runner which is being used to promote their Shark Week franchise. It seems that someone at Discovery (probably the summer interns) outfitted real sharks with microwave telemetry equipment and released them into the Pacific. From the comfort of their living rooms or classrooms, game players (aka “shark researchers”) pilot virtual boats out into the ocean to find and collect data on the tagged sharks as they go about living their daily shark lives... definitely worth checking out.

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Kajeet and GeoSentric Raise Funds

A couple of LBS players announced that they recently completed fund raising rounds.

Kajeet an MVNO targeting kids and tweens and their parents closed $36.8 Million in a second round of funding. Kajeet offers pay as you go voice service combined with a dashboard for parental controls and location awareness capabilities. The company is hoping to navigate the treacherous MVNO waters that have recently sunk hi fliers including AMP’d and

A more pure play LBS start up, GeoSentric, announced that they have raised $13 million to expand sales and marketing as well as R&D behind their GyPSii product, and efforts to create a leading geo integration platform for mobile phones, PNDs, web browsers and other internet connected devices.

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AnyTrack Multi Purpose Tracker

AnyTrack, a subsidiary of AnyData, a wireless data solutions provider, just announced the availability of its cellular enhanced multi-purpose GPS tracking product for business and consumers. The GPS-100 device won a CTIA wireless E-Tech award for its innovative design which including its small size (2.36” x 1.85” x 0.8) and light weight (2.65 ounces). The devices operate on the Sprint network and data use plans ranging from $19.95 a month to $129 per year depending on your expected level of use. The GPS-100 device is marketed as a multi purpose tracker for anything and everything including pets, people packages and vehicles. Customers can log into the secure anytrack.net system at any time to locate the device.
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Microsoft and Siemens New Vehicle Infotainment Agreement

Microsoft and Siemens VDO are pairing up to have a multi function infotainment system on the market possibly as soon as 2009. Infotainment features are likely to include “navigation, high end multi-media and the interfaces to connect portable electronic entertainment devices.” The systems will use the Microsoft Auto Platform which includes voice recognition commands and text to voice features, including multi language support to allow driver to easily interact in a hands free manner. Microsoft Auto also touts flexible wireless capabilities to easily allow a variety of devices to connect to the vehicles system.

No doubt about it you will soon be watching a heck of a lot more television in your car in the near future... as well as searching the web, reading emails, sending text messages.
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Challenges with IP Address Based Systems for Determining Location in the Wired World

Let’s forget about the wireless world for a moment and have a look at the way Internet companies determine location in the traditional wired Internet. One of the popular methods used by many leading publishers, including folks like Google among many others, is the IP address look up. There are a few leading providers of this technology including Digital Envoy, Quova and Akamai who turn around and sell this capability as a service to leading publishers.

First some background on how it all works...

If you want to access the internet you’ll need an IP address… think of it as your street address for the web. If you have access to the Internet and want to retrieve a web page, any web page, that page is going to be chopped up into a bunch of very tiny packets by the publisher and each packet will need to navigate its way across the Internet to your computer… either directly or via a proxy server. Each packet contains your IP address so it knows where it needs to go on the web.


IP address based geo identification involves examining one of those packets and seeing where it’s heading (looking at the IP address in the packet header) and then looking up information about the ‘owner’ of that destination IP in a database often using a WHOIS query. As you can imagine, your grandmother is not going out and buying a pool of IPs… people who buy IP addresses are most often corporations, governments, and internet or online service providers… not individuals. When someone purchases and registers a pool of addresses the administrator must provide information about the buyer including street address information that goes in the registry. The core assumption here is that all of the users of those IP address are at the location provided in this registry.


Now some background on how it doesn’t work...

There are many ways that this IP lookup can go awry, but a couple of big factors are the use or proxy servers and dynamically assigned IP addresses:

The proxy server issue: A proxy server is essentially a computer that does work for another computer. In many instances there is an Internet facing computer that is making request for web pages on behalf of other computers elsewhere in an organization, sometimes hundreds of miles away. As you can imagine this is a problem for location identifying technologies where the Internet facing machine can be correctly identified, but the location of the final recipient (requester) is someone and somewhere different and known only from within that organization.

Yield Management and dynamically assigned IP addresses. Does an office with 10 people need ten conference rooms? Of course not. Not everyone will need the conference room at the same time, 1 or 2 will likely support a busy office 99% of the time without anyone going without. Nobody likes waste and system administrators are no exception. An Internet service provider with 1000 customers will not need 1000 different IP addresses, but instead maybe just 400 since not everyone will want to be online at the same time. When a customer comes along and wants to get online he is dynamically assigned a new IP address for that session. So in the case of a large national ISP, in one moment that IP can be used by a person in Nashville and 30 minutes later it could be in use by another user in Florida.

Current solutions on the market get around these problems by simply saying I know that I don’t know enough about these IPs and just takes them out of the mix all together… which in the early days when AOL was a major source of Internet traffic would take out maybe 1/3 of the Internet population!

Even today the shortcomings of this technology is not well understood by publishers and complaints about inaccuracies are rampant across the web. Smart publishers will use IP lookup as only one of many methods to determine location.

On an interesting side note a couple of years back our friends over at the NSA patented a location tracking solution that looks a lot like TDOA for wireless or radar pings… essentially mapping how long it should take data to travel between various servers on the Internet and then pinging a users and seeing how long it takes to get a response back… longer time means further away and shorter time means closer.

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Wi-Fi Coupon and Ad Delivery: Beacon Stuffing

Back in the mid 90s there was this company WavePhore that was trying to bypass the very slow connections that folks were experiencing on the internet by pushing content down over the television broadcast signal using a section of the signal called the vertical blanking interval (VBI) reserved by the government for communicating those emergency broadcast system test… you know the ones with that had that annoying squeal followed by the ‘This has been a test of the emergency broadcast system, this is only a test, if this were a real emergency….”.

Well the company didn’t make it, for a variety of reasons that I won’t get in to, but it looks like Microsoft is channeling WavePhore ghosts in some research they’re conducting into a similar concept concerning delivering location relevant ads over Wi-Fi Networks. For those with hard core interests their paper makes for an interesting read, but for everyone else it essentially goes something like this:

Many Wi-Fi networks (if set up to do so, and most are) are constantly emitting beacons essentially saying ‘I am here” to allow potential users to find and connect. Whether or not you connect to the network or not the beacon from all networks in range will continually announce their presence and wireless (Wi-Fi) devices will always receive this announcement. The range for these beacons is limited to 100-200 meters so if you know the location of the thing transmitting, then you know the location of any recipient within that radius.

So what could happen is that simple ad messages or coupons (text, audio) could be ‘stuffed’ into this beacon and PUSHED out to any Wi-Fi enabled device within range. Some benefits of this approach are that it is device independent, doesn’t require an actual connection to be made, and is location relevant without being aware of specific device location, a nice privacy benefit.

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