The Benefits of Location Tracking for WLAN Management

Cisco Systems makes its entrance into the wireless mesh networking arena with a line of outdoor mesh products aimed at reducing the deployment costs involved in setting up indoor and outdoor networks.

The scenarios of usage seem to uniquely target wireless network managers in helping them in the planning and deployment of their WLAN networks, optimize ongoing network performance, enhance wireless security, and improve both the visibility and control of the air space. More in Location is Everything—The Benefits of Location Tracking in WLAN Environments.

LIFT06

February 2-3 2006, I’ll attend LIFT06 in Geneva. LIFT is a conference about new technologies and people organized by Laurent Haug and Nicolas Nova. These two guys, both from the country where the Minitel was born, have done an amazing work gathering a nice set of brains to hear from and meet.

Keynote will be done by BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow. I also expect to be well lectured by Avenir Suisse’s Xavier Comtesse (Internet and the ordinary people’s revolution), Marc Besson (Identity Revolution), Stefana Broadbent (The specialization of communication channels), Marc Laperrouza (Can China really control the Internet?), Pierre Carde (Managing clusters of creative companies), Thomas Madsen-Mygdal (10 things i’ve learned about creation), Euan Semple (Working In A Wired World), and hopefully some other last-minutes surprises.

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No doubt, there will also be appropriate moments to get into in-depth discussions about the “fourth places“.

Do Not Press the Button, Please

Physical accessibility to my Bank in Spain. Fortunately the web accessibility to my account is less tricky.

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BT's Boring LBS Services

Mobhappy has a critic of the British Telecom’s announce of new Location Based Services: BT Launches a Whole Range of Terribly Boring LBS Services. The 3 main scenarios seem to be:

• People tracking (employee, child and elderly)
• Traffic and directions
• Find my nearest things

I think traffic and direction as well as dispatched employee tracking already exist, work and are usefull. However they target a limited audience with very reliable positioning technologies and strong systems. However, I am really interested to know about plausible scenarios for BT to invest money on child and elderly tracking. Moreover, I am not aware of any “Find my nearest things” service that really work on my mobile phone and that is engaging enough for me to have my mobile phone in my hand and to watch a tiny screen.
Related to this are Intel’s Useless LBS Scenarios and NTT DoCoMo’s Interconnected World.

Sociallight, a Spatial Annotation Service

Socialight is a mobile phone and web based platform that allows users to create and share location-based messages. The current prototype is rather limited because it uses Bluetooth beacons to determine the location of the device. In the future, they plan to use GPS and operators data. When a Socialight-enabled device enters an area with a beacon, the user’s device scans the area, retrieves geographic positioning data from the beacon and then transmits its position to the server via GPRS.

The scenario presenting the service is also rather limited like many LBS scenarios currently. It is like finding a slice of pizza in a city is the ultimate holy grail in urban areas.

Augmented Reality Via Cellphones [2]

Last year, I got introduced to the use of semacodes to augment reality by the Entry Points into a Smart Campus Environment project at the ETHZ. Semapedia is democratizing the concept by combining the physical annotation technology of Semacode with high quality information from Wikipedia.

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Real-Time Location Sharing on GPS Phones

Via Augmented Reality Gaming, Mologogo is a free service to “track” friends with GPS enabled cell phone. It only works in the US and I am not sure how such a service would be perceived in a non-GPS friendly continent like Europe. For example, it would be useful to make the positioning less accurate and augment the map with the name of the place (or use the map in unknown places and drop the map and only use the name of the place in known locations).

Real-Time Maps of Wireless Internet Use

The people at iSPOTS “How Wireless Technology is Changing Life on the MIT Campus”. They have set up a real time map that displays wireless internet use on campus. The page loads an animation of the past 24 hours activity. As usual it looks very nice and it is not necessarily very hard to do.

Somehow related is another MIT project about is MIT’s Mobile Landscapes project in Graz done with GSM data.

Interactive Chart for Tailored Mobile Application Download

Local for Mobile targets very specific devices in the US. Google provides an interactive chart to determine the phone’s compatibility. Criterias are the carrier, the phone brand, the phone model and the data plan.

In order to download the beta,

Google and Self-Positioning

Google has to make clear that its Local for Mobile relies in fact on users self-positioning themselves:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – In a Nov. 6 story about Google Inc.’s new mapping software for mobile phones, The Associated Press quoted a company executive saying that users won’t have to type in their location to get directions on phones equipped with Global Positioning System technology. The story should have made clear that the GPS function isn’t available yet.