Mobile Computing: February 2006 Archives
Two companies have teemed up to offer a location-aware system in Japan. The user process is amazingly simple—just point at what you want. The service uses GPS enabled CDMA phones with compass orientation to grab location and info data. I would venture a guess that this solution would be improved with cell-tower triangulation (to combat the urban canyon effect of cities), to beat a dead horse.
Danny Ayers blogged about the Triple Tag, a good extension of the... Single(?) tag.
The form of such a tag:
[namespace]:[key]=[value]
Which, in terms of geocoding would look a little something like this:
geotagged
geo:lat=53.1234
geo:long=-2.5678
Simple, short, sweet. The examples Danny gave are from a project called MobiLife, which looks pretty interesting.
I have just finished downloading and installing the application. I'm eager to play around with it and see the actual value of the service. From what I can tell, its quite accurate and reliable.
Dan Albritton and I have been talking about creating a mobile phone application that finds location via cell-tower strength. The tower information would be harvested through a (nightmarish) process akin to war-driving. A small group of researchers recently did something similar (or exactly the same?) in Seatle, which I will be looking into. Any help would be most welcome—in helping with development of the harvesting application (J2ME and/or Python), harvesting data, and testing the app once we have a critical mass of organized information.
