[Geowanking] the state of personal positioning?

[Dan Greening]

Let me express my love to Intel for this work, and for 802.16.   
Seemingly unrelated, but (my hope is) both will allow developers more  
freedom to deal with mobile services, and thus spark innovation.

Dan R. Greening, Ph.D.,  CEO BigTribe Corporation,  http:// 
dan.greening.name/contact.htm


On 7 Jul 2005, at 1:25 AM, Smith, Ian E wrote:

> Matthias:
>
> Although it is not available yet, here it Intel Research Seattle we  
> are
> putting together a release of our place lab system (www.placelab.org)
> that targets a mobile phone and uses GSM (only) for its location.  The
> only target phone platform is the Audiovox SMT 5600 windows  
> smartphone,
> sadly, for some technical reasons.  The system will be available as  
> open
> source in the forseeable future (we have some legal issues to sort out
> that are holding it up).
>
> Just as an example of what we are planning for the upcoming version:
> * Outdoor, triangulation based positioning of the phone with very
> limited calibration.  Currently, our outdoor error vs GPS is typically
> about 200m but I expect that to go down dramatically as we get better
> with the algorithms.
> * Place recognition algorithms that can detect when a user has been  
> "at
> a place" for a significant period of time and when the user returns to
> the same place.  Note this is a symbolic notion ("at place #8") not a
> geometric one.
> * Indoor position using (fairly extensive) calibration that should  
> allow
> you to get accuracy at perhaps a typical error of 8m and some tools  
> that
> allow you to exploit indoor geometry to give the perception of "room
> level" position.
> * Demos that show these things in action.
>
> If folks are interested, signing up on the placelab-announce mailing
> list is probalby the best way to stay informed.
>
> Ian
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: geowanking-bounces at lists.burri.to
> [mailto:geowanking-bounces at lists.burri.to] On Behalf Of Mattias
> Konradsson
> Sent: Wednesday, July 06, 2005 1:36 PM
> To: geowanking at lists.burri.to
> Subject: [Geowanking] the state of personal positioning?
>
> When building location-based services there's one crucial piece I  
> still
> feel
> is missing, and that's the ability to track my location online. 3G and
> gsm
> operators have started offering their own proprietary position-based
> services (often based upon triangulation rather than gps) but in my
> experience it's hard to make third-party services. Another thing is  
> that
> positioning is fairly expensive, sometimes taking a couple of bucks  
> per
> positionining which isnt exactly good for continuous positioning.
>
> I guess the optimal scenario from a developer standpoint is that the
> mobile
> operators would offer flat fee positioning services that the users
> themselves could subscribe to. Then they could simply point it to  
> an url
> of
> the service(s) of their choosing and when positioning was turned on it
> would
> in set intervals deliver the coordinates in xml-format to that url. As
> an
> added bonus it would be good if the positioning aspect was integrated
> into
> the design of the mobile phones so they could be turned on and off  
> with
> the
> press of a button and clearly indicated when they were on.
>
> Have anyone had experience with any operators going this way? I get  
> the
> feeling that the operators are wanting to keep their services
> proprietary.
> Which is stupid since services like this could actually make 3G  
> services
> useful. The subcription fees for the positioning (if they were
> reasonable)
> would probably be something people would pay if there's useful  
> services.
>
>
> mvh
> --
> Mattias Konradsson
>
> "GlobalVillage - world domination or mutual filigration"
> http://www.globalvillage.nu/mattias
>
>
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