Microsoft Steps in the WiFi Positioning Market

There is always a good news and a bad news having a a giant entering a niche market. The field will get more attention and finance, but the air is expected to grow really thick.

Microsoft tracks WiFi for new mapping system

In a new initiative, Microsoft has dispatched cars to trawl many city and suburban streets across the U.S. to locate the signals sent out by millions of short-range home and office wireless (or WiFi) networks. The unusual move, now being repeated in the U.K. and some other countries, is part of a plan to create a ground-based location system as an alternative to the GPS satellite system.

In the same time I stumbled accross “Skyhook lands customer for its wi-fi location service” that mentions that Skyhook Wireless signed its first customer for its wi-fi location service. A Tennessee-based company that provides data security, tracking and recovery services for PCs and laptops, will use Skyhook’s WiFi positioning technology to help track and recover stolen laptops for commercial and individual clients.

Skyhook needs users to survive, because they are the ones updating the AP database.

Wochenende in Zürich

Hell’s door, threatening sky, sad trolley, Bloomberg has encountered a problem and needs to close.

Vis-a-Vis: Mobile and Pervasive Electronic Gaming

Afte WiFi Bedouin and other mobile, location-based games, one of Julian Bleecker current project along with Peter Brinson is called Vis-a-Vis. They’ve cobbled together a mobile gaming framework composed of light-weight, outdoor viewable TabletPCs, the Torque available source game engine, a GPS, a mil-spec 3D sensor that’s able to measure where one points the TabletPC. The plan with Vis-a-Vis Games is to take ordinary electronic gaming off the old fashioned video game console and desktop PC and moves it out into the real world.

On of their current demo, is an implementation of the Red Light, Green Light game.

Start-on-boot MIDlet

Arvind Gupta delivers again and again, with a straight forward Symbian code that autostarts a MIDlet using a Recognizer and the Push Registry.

Traffic Awareness Tool

Palm has released Traffic, an application the Treo 600/650 that provides, for a monthly fee, live traffic data and maps for 10 U.S. cities. The added value being that cameras and human inputs supplement traffic sensor data. Since the data are “humanized”, I would expect the interface to display a better sense of flows and to become a richer awareness tool. For example showing the map in terms of time instead of distance.

A rather cluttered interface…

GSM World Coverage 2005

The GSM Association and coveragemaps.com provide the GSM World Coverage map 2005. This poster illustrates the extent of GSM network coverage worldwide. It gives a sense of the level of worldwide ubiquity of GSM as the dominant global mobile communications standard.

Stamps Gets Access to Native Services

Back on Stamps. I used sockets (as explained in JNI workaround) to get access to GSM data provided by the native Symbian code of Place Lab’s and CRAFT’s GSM trackers. I also extended the coverage of the map of Geneva. Latency is good. The current 145 messages of the database are loaded via GPRS in 2-3 secondes. Runs great on a Nokia 6630.

Buzztracker

Buzztracker is software that visualizes frequencies and relationships between locations in the Google world news directory.

Buzztracker tries to show you how interconnected the world is: big events in one area ripple to other areas across the globe. Connections between cities thousands of miles apart become apparent at a glance.

Cartograme versions off this kind of news or buzz maps might be more readable.

Barcelona Media Park

The Barcelona Media Park will be my future home in 2006 at the University of Pompeu Fabra.

Mobile Google Maps

MGMaps that stands for Mobile Google Maps, is a J2ME MIDP 1.0 interface to display Google Maps. Very much still under development…