Posts tagged as "geolocation"

When Geolocation Doesn't Locate

Geolocation in today's smartphones is a wonderful thing. The A-GPS chip in your phone talks to the satellites whizzing around above our heads and asks them where we are. If that doesn't work then a graceful degrading process, via public wifi triangulation and then cell tower triangulation will tell our phones where we are. Except when something odd happens.

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And odd is the only thing you can use to describe the fact that I'm currently sitting in Teddington in Southwest London and thanks to some glitch in the matrix, either Foursquare or my phone's A-GPS seems to think that a voting station in New England, yes, New England USA is close and local to me.

Geolocation is wonderful except when it doesn't.

Geolocating Yourself? In Europe, You're Not Alone

Exposure 2010, the recent study by Orange and TNS, makes for some interesting reading for the location industry. Although it should be taken with a large pinch of salt from the pot labelled lies, damned lies and statistics, the study's report shows the significant increase in use of geolocation services within the mobile space.

Pushpins in a map over France and Italy

In the UK, France, Spain and Poland, geolocation services occupy the 3rd, 2nd, 1st and 2nd slots respectively for most used mobile services. While the report only breaks geolocation down into two categories, streetmap/GPS and social networks, it's not difficult to see how the perception that location is finally going mainstream is worth some merit.

As Location Goes Mainstream, So Does The Potential For Abuse

Geolocation isn't really anything new. In a lot of cases we've come to expect it. Most smartphones sold today have an on-board GPS receiver and it's considered a selling point for a handset to have one. Today's mobile mapping applications and Location Based Mobile Services make use of the location fix that GPS provides. We're used to our technology saying "you are here". Without this there'd be no Ovi Maps, no Google Maps, no Foursquare and no Facebook Places.

Long before we put up a network of over 20 satellites a less accurate version of geolocation was available. Pretty much anything that puts out a signal in the radio spectrum can be used to triangulate your position, if there's enough radio sources spead out over a wide area and if someone's done the leg work needed to geolocate you based on the position and strength of those radio sources. This can be done with mobile cell towers, with radio masts and more recently with the proliferation of wifi enabled access points, both in people's homes, in offices and in public areas.