Location Nation

Location Nation is an interesting new company that is marketing a multi purpose GPS tracker devices and SIMs along with the supporting online maps and communities to be used with those devices, while also offering a more simple way for those more sophisticated users that already own devices and capture waypoints on their devices to move POI data to and from navigation devices and share this data more easily with others.

Adding and or retrieving custom POI data from a personal navigation device is not an easy task if you've ever tried it. The Location Nation solution is attempting to change this by allowing users who already own a GPS device to easily grab POI data from a PND using their GPS Connector software and then publish it up to the Location Nation website to either share with friends or a larger web community. You can purchase disk space from Location Nation to upload lots of trip data and even add pictures and other multimedia elements to really give your friends back home a picture of the whole experience.

If you don't already own your own device Location Nation will also either rent or sell you one. It uses GPS combined w/ access to the GSM cellular network to report back the location of the device for pretty much any situation you may want. If you own a cell phone with built in GPS, LN Mobile is a small application that runs on your phone, which allows you to report location to the Location Nations web servers directly from the phone. This service seems to just be available on Boost at the moment.

The company offers a variety of service plans including 15 and 30 day rental models which include 10 minute reporting updates. So say you're about to take a cross country trip and think it would be fun to report on your progress to all your friends and family back home, you can rent the device and set up the online community online at locationation.com and invite your friends to follow your progress.

Other service plans appeal to corporate customers and individuals who may want to use the system longer term, either as an emergency beacon device ($12.95 per month) for 30 manual on demand locates up to a $39.95 per month plan for 2 minute updates when the device is in motion.

The hard core GPS users, particularly the geo caching types, will likely find this a great community and valuable software in GPS Connect. The online community aspect will add some additional value where other multi purpose GPS trackers don’t. It will be an interesting company to follow and see what kind of traction they get with the multi/any purpose approach to their devices.

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Really just looking for an excuse to post infomercial video

Ok I admit, I am mostly just trying to spice up the blog a bit with a funny infomercial video for a LBS start up called Dopplr. So check it out…



Dopplr is still in private beta so chances are you haven’t played with it yet, so in case you’re curious and can’t figure out from the video what the heck it does, here is how best I can explain it… its kind of a mash up of MeetUp meets LinkedIn meets Socialight for the road warrior crowd. In other words you can plan to meet up with people you may know who may be in the same areas as you as you travel around the country, using a handy dandy web and map interface. You can also use Dopplr to document past trips and to share your plans for future trips, so anyone in your group can see that you’re heading to Los Angeles next week and make suggestions on good places to stay or eat during your stay.

Seems like an interesting idea, although I am not sure how big the audience is of folks who regularly jet-set all around, and would spend the time to check in on Dopplr for each trip. I am also not sure how you’d make money if you’re Dopplr, but it’s a pretty funny video to enjoy while we wait to see how it all works out.

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Location Aware Sticky Notes and the need for richer POI’s?

I recently stumbled onto a paper about Place It’s on the Microsoft Research website that makes for an interesting read. “Place Its” are the authors name given to the basic concept of a virtual sticky note that can be assigned to a certain geographic area, say your home or your local grocery store, to be triggered as a reminder when you next visit that area, typically via an application on a location aware cell phone. I can’t say that the paper arrives at any grand conclusions about the future of such applications, but it does provide a nice overview of the concept, as well as some real world usage insights based on their ten person study of the subject

Virtual sticky notes seem like a useful thing for someone to create and the idea seems to have received its fair share of attention over recent years, including recent initiatives like Siemens Digital Grafitti. I for one would love to just go about adding items to a grocery list on my cell phone throughout the week and then have it pop up with that list as an alert the next time I am in a supermarket as a helpful reminder. The usefulness would stretch into many applications like clients kids names set to trigger just as you’re arriving at the clients offices, or a reminder to buy a birthday card for your mother in law a week before her birthday the next time you’re near a card store, etc.

The problem with the current state of things is that I am not going to spend much time setting up the alert, people will only invest a very small effort into such reminders and certainly won’t go around marking each of the grocery stores or card stores that they may potentially ever want to shop at, in order to trigger the alerts. Which is where a private enterprise needs to step in.

As map and location based navigation becomes more and more widespread, and an increasingly important source of information for shopping for retail items in stores, the POI information contained within those systems will need to become much more robust and consistent. For example, currently Kroger’s is simply categorized under “Grocery”, but in the future additional store level specific metadata like "wine", "cards", "pharmacy" would be invaluable in making things like the virtual sticky note become a reality, not to mention increased sales of cards, wine and pharmaceuticals for the companies that invest in being properly represented in these systems.

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Google Maps: Damn Thats Cool (Part 87)

Ok, I hate to have two posts in a row on new Google related innovations, but I must say I thought this one was pretty cool. Nothing revolutionary, but just seems like a very nicely executed functionality on Google Maps that allows you to drag and drop routing as well as insert way points to very easily change routes and the corresponding driving directions on the fly. It speaks to a need that is seemingly so obvious, like selecting a new route if traffic is bad or you decide that you want to make a pit stop or two en route. Surprised that no one has done this before... but seems that some of the best ideas are ones that you end up saying 'why didn't I think of that?!"
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Google Gas Station?!

Well not exactly, but thanks to Gilbarco Veeder-Root, a leading provider of pumps and dispensers to the retail convenience and fuel market, Google Maps will now be integrated into the company’s newest offering. Customers will soon be able to display maps and find local points of interest via the companies encore line of fuel dispensers as they stand by their pump waiting to fuel their car. According to the company’s release, customer will be able to search Google’s local business listings as well as print driving directions right there at the pump. The system is an alternative that, according to Kirsten Paust, the company’s VP of Glocal Retail Systems, is “safer than using internet-enabled devices from the driver’s seat and far more reliable than just asking a stranger”

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S5 Wireless: Another potential competitor for GPS for asset tracking?

A Utah based company, S5 Wireless recently announced that they have successfully tested their new location awareness technology in Salt Lake City. The technology claims to be able to determine location within 14 meters indoors and 9 meters outdoors and to offer some interesting benefits over existing location awareness alternatives. Its important to note that the system seems more designed to track the whereabouts of something at a distance rather as a replacement to a GPS chip in say a navigation device where the user of the device wants to know his location right there on the device.

Since the transmitter just seems to burst out with its location every once in a while either on a set schedule or when poked to do so, there is less energy spent continually listening to the network for information. This process seems to be part of their secret sauce.

The system uses the familiar process of determining position by listening for a signal traveling out from the S5W chip/beacon device, on the public 915 Mhz frequency, to each of the base stations in and around the device and comparing the time of arrival at each of the 3 or more receivers in order to calculate position. They key to the technology seems to be the IP of being able to pick out the location signal from all the other noise at that frequency and also the very small footprint necessary for the chip.

It’s unclear beyond Salt Lake City how many S5W base stations have been deployed, but presumably further build out of the network is what the companies fund raising efforts have been earmarked for… if they’re able to get a national network up and running they could be on to something big.

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Notes on an Apple LBS patent

I noticed a new patent filing picked up on the Directions Magazine blog noting a new LBS patent from Apple that looked interesting. Seems that Apple will plan to have GPS chips in those next generation of Ipods and Iphones, not just for navigation but to give you a new way to blend location into your media experience. The patent seems to essentially cover the process of linking location to media presentment. One way it seem that this patent could be applied would be to present different songs or playlists at a given point in time… let’s say you’re an avid runner and like to bring your iPod with you on runs… you probably already have a run mix just so you don’t have to fiddle with picking songs while you’re running… well blending location awareness could do the playlist one better by giving you the songs you want at the place you want it… say super high energy songs for those long hills and more mellow wind down music for the after run cool down. The location based controls could also control volume to know if you typically need more volume say next to a busy highway or less volume in a more secluded area like a library. Similarly, video brightness and contrast could vary for indoor or outdoor environments.

The patent is interesting enough, but what would be a more interesting application of location tied to iPod and iTunes would be to create location based zones that sellers of audio or video media could use to highlight offerings relative to ones location. For example, let’s say that Madonna wanted to give each person attending her concert on opening night a free download of her new single, attendees at the concert who bring their iPods should be able to navigate to a section within their iPod to see and download such location relevant offers. Same goes for community bands, and garage bands everywhere, rather than the wasted expense of burning CDs and convincing local stores to carry their music… those bands could simply set up geo boundaries around their concert events so concert goers with iPods could buy albums right there on the spot through their iTunes account, while the iron is hot and the concert goer is caught up in the passion that real time events can create.

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Fitness GPS

There appears to be emerging a real trend in GPS that a company with the right product can dominate the market - Fitness GPS. A recent article, "Rate your Fitness Routine with GPS" mentions that there are currently "millions of athletes" who use the products today, and whose usage and commitment to using the devices increase when they feel there is a real community of others like them to plug into. Some opportunities mentioned in the article seem to center around swimmers, as well as development of smaller, less clunky devices. This is a trend that should be followed closely to view how it succeeds in coming months.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071102/ap_on_hi_te/gps_sports_4

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