The Dutch National Committee for International Cooperation and Sustainable Development setup Mapping Worlds that has a nice set of distorted maps to rais international awareness on various topics like the EU, asylum and development aid.
Place Lab that promotes a mixed approach to positioning (GPS, WiFi, GSM and Bluetooth) are gaining some mainstream attention in Cnet’s article “Intel experiments with Wi-Fi as GPS substitute“. One of Place Lab’s key phrase is that “humans spend most of their time inside or in dense environments where GPS does not work”. To help prove the point, Ian Smith (Intel Senior Researcher) wore a backpack for 3.5 months with a monitor. It found that, on average, he spent only 4.5 percent of each day outside. However, the experiment was most probably ran in rainy Seattle.
The article contains a flagrant inaccuracy, by mentioning that “wireless can also determine height and thus figure out what floor of a particular building a person is on”. If it was the case, this blog would not be named “7.5th Floor”. I guess the write meant “roughly predict in some cases” instead of “determine”.
MapQuest Find Me runs on GPS enabled Nextel Phone. It allows to identify your location on a cell phone, find out what is nearby, and share the location with trusted others.
2 articles explaining how to automatically start a MIDlet by using the Push Registry
- How can a MIDlet be launched automatically?
- The MIDP 2.0 Push Registry
Thanks Arvind Gupta for the tip!
The mobile industry is still so desperately technology driven. Even without real services, operators still push the technology to market. Two recent articles on Location Based Services and mobile TV show clear examples of this push frenzy:
Location-Based Services “Gathering Steam”
There are instances where location information could be useful other than getting driving directions or finding the nearest cafe, even if operators can’t think of what they might be. Sooner or later, carriers will have to realize they can’t provide every service themselves, and that some other people might be able to come up with some things to make them money and provide use for subscribers.
Never Mind The (Lack Of) Interest: Mobile TV Marches On
There is only a little consumer “enthusiasm or demand” for mobile TV, an unwillingness to pay for it and low desire to see mobile TV functionality in forthcoming devices. [...] New services are too often based around the “what can it do?” question — which is concerned with the functionality of the technology. But what consumers want to know is “what can I do?” — that’s about services.
John Krumm of Microsoft Research gives an interview on Wi-Fi positioning, based on the paper he co-wrote Accuracy Characterization for Metropolitan-Scale Wi-Fi Localization with other Place Lab members. He goes exactly in the same direction I took for developing CatchBob!. That is WiFi positioning is of 13-40 meters in an uncontrolled urban and residential environment, measuring the signal strength is almost useless, and complicated algorithms are not more accurate.
Using Wi-Fi to Make Your Device Find Where You Are interview of John Krumm by Rob Knies.
We learned that we can estimate the location of a mobile Wi-Fi device to an accuracy of 13-40 meters, depending on the environment, using just the access points that are already deployed in urban and residential neighborhoods.
We found that measuring the signal strength of Wi-Fi access points really doesn’t help that much in estimating position.
One of the pleasant conclusions from our study is that, for this task, a simple algorithm worked almost as well as a much more complicated one.
GeoGeny, developed by the Swiss-based CPR Group Inc is being used at the Montreux Jazz festival to follow the movements of all the interveners in the field – the police, firemen, ambulance men, tow trucks and life boats – and kept them permanently informed how the situation was evolving. In addition, the system handled all the searches for festival goers who had got lost. The system uses an impressive list of technologies GPS, SMS, MMS, GSM, GPRS, EVF, RFID, and UMTS. GPS positioning is done using the SiRFstartIII chipset that is supposed to work in many indoor environments, urban canyons, and under dense foliage by using signal-processing correlators to increase the sensitivity.
Complementary information (en french)
Personal World Map, developed by Roxanna Torre, reshaps maps according to time and money to travel. It is a designer version of cartographic anamorphosis that represent travel in terms of time instead of distance.
Extending the Reach of MIDlets: how MIDlets can access native services explains how to get access to Symbian phones native code in J2ME (since the sandbox does not allow JNI). The writer of the article, Arvind Gupta, also provides explaination and code sample in MIDP JNI Workaround.
I will use it to plug my STAMPS J2ME prototype to GSM Tracker written in Symbian.
There are mainly 2 ways to launch native applications at boot time on Symbian systems:
Start-on-Boot Registration API allows to specify that an executable be launched and kept running indefinitely by registering it for re-launch as part of the phone’s boot sequence.
EzBoot: A boot manager application. It allow you to autostart an application (typically a server) when the phone is powered on.
