Posts tagged as "gps"

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.

20121106-165623.jpg

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.

A First Step Towards Indoor Navigation. Literally

The problems started the moment GPS became a commodity and made the transition from the car to the mobile device. Nowadays, GPS can be found in a vast range of smartphones and navigation is possible without being confined to your car. Of course, it's not always a great experience. GPS works best when there's a direct line of sight to the satellites whizzing around over your head and there are times when you just can't get a GPS lock. A-GPS was devised to help with such situations, allowing your location enabled to device to take advantage of a variety of other sensors, such as cell tower and wifi triangulation technologies.

But even then, GPS just doesn't work indoors most of the time and indoor location and routing has become something of the Holy Grail for navigation technology vendors. Granted there have been lots of technologies developed which use non A-GPS technologies such as RFID and other near field sensors. But so far these all require a not insignificant investment to install and require specialist devices to take advantage of; none of which are as ubiquitous as the combination of smart phone and GPS.

Maybe we're looking too deeply at this challenge. Take a category of location that lots of people go to, such as shopping malls, where GPS usually isn't available, and map each mall to a high degree of accuracy, both in terms of the layout of the mall and in terms of the stores and concessions in that mall. Add in key features, such as multiple levels, staircases, escalators and lifts and you can build a spatial map of the mall which doesn't need sensors. Simply tell your phone where you are and where you want to go and you can provide simplistic directions, without the need for GPS.

GPS Lock Fail Rage

Isn't GPS a wonderful invention? In the space of a few seconds, your GPS enabled handset can give you your precise location on the face of the Earth, allowing mobile maps to work, routing and navigation to get you to where you want to be or earning you another Mayor badge on a well known location based social networking site.

Except when it doesn't ... you're in an urban canyon, you're deep in a building or underground where you just can't get a GPS lock and you stand there watching the "waiting for GPS" message to disappear. GPS lock fail rage.

Horrible Truth: All Technological Progress ... Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal seems to sum up the rage and frustration rather neatly. We've all been there ...

Does Location Need Some PR Love?

In an interview with GoMo News earlier this year, I talked about "the Bay Area bubble", this is the mind-set found in Silicon Valley "where a lot of the products and services coming out seem to think your user will always have a smartphone, and will always have a GPS lock with an excellent data connection". But does the so called location industry live in its own version of the Bay Area Bubble? Let's call it the "location privacy bubble" for the sake of convenience.

Last week an article entitled "Can you digital photos reveal where you live?" was posted on the Big Brother Watch blog; pop over there and read it for a moment, it's only three paragraphs long ...

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.

Where 2.0 - Hype (or Local?)

Sometimes writing a talk and putting together an accompanying slide deck is an education in itself. You set out with a point you want to make and in researching the evidence to back up your assertions you find out that the point you originally wanted to make isn't actually correct. You could give up at this point, which is not to be recommended as you're already on the conference schedule, or you could accept that your reasoning was flawed in the first place and make your talk instead centre on why you were wrong.

Thus it was with the researching and background behind my talk at Where 2.0 in San Jose on Wednesday. Originally entitled as a declaration, it soon became obvious that "Ubiquitous location, the new frontier and hyperlocal nirvana" was missing a very significant question mark.

Deliberately (and Unexpectedly) Tracking My Journey

I've been tracking my journey and in doing so inadvertently uncovered a sea change in the way in which we view the whole thorny issue of location tracking.

Yesterday, Ed Parsons and I drove from London to Nottingham and back to attend the one day Supporting the Contextual Footprint event run by the Horizon Digital Economy Research institute at the University of Nottingham and I had Google Latitude running on my BlackBerry, with location history enabled, as I usually do.

Unofficial Google Latitude T-Shirt

Using the pre smartphone, pre GPS, pre Latitude method of writing it down, the journey went something like this:

The Location Battle Between You and Your Phone

Whenever I talk about the privacy implications inherent in sharing your location with an app or service, I keep coming back to the idea that it's essential to be your own source of truth for your location. This is a slightly verbose way of saying that you need to be able to lie about your location or that you need to be able to say "no, I really am here" despite what other location contexts such as GPS, cell tower triangulation or public wifi MAC address triangulation may have to say on the matter.

Of course, it's never quite as straightforward as that and here's why. The two location based mobile services that are getting a lot of coverage at the moment are FourSquare and Gowalla.