Guest columnist Tughrul Arslan from SATSIS sees a real need for location information everywhere we go.
Despite the ubiquity of the mobile phone, the mobile communications industry faces huge challenges. The price of both voice and text communication continues to fall, whilst competition remains intense, and consumers searching for the best deals are putting pressure on prices for both equipment and service.
There is some good news for the industry: both revenue and profit are growing for mobile apps, presenting opportunities for equipment manufacturers, operators and software authors. A particularly exciting sector of the app market is location-aware applications, which create new ways to use a phone, taking it beyond a communications device and casual gaming platform.
Location awareness creates opportunities for new mobile apps, and completely new ways of using a mobile phone. Many location-aware apps already exist, such as: providing local information of nearby restaurants; augmenting reality with data about the current location; documenting location by geotagging pictures, tweets and other content; and providing tracking information, particularly parents monitoring the location of their children.
The evidence is that mobile phone users value location services and use them frequently. For example in the US iPhone users check their location 250 million times a day: i.e. on average each user checks their location six times every day. Developers have also been quick to see the opportunity offered by location: the iTunes App Store already has over 3000 location-aware apps available.
Location aware apps are still in their infancy, with developers continually finding new uses for location information. Perhaps the biggest opportunity is location-aware social applications that enable social gaming or simply tell you in which bar your friends are sitting. Many commentators believe location will not only be an opportunity in the mobile phone industry, but will also drive a step increase in the use – and usefulness – of social networks.
Location services on phones, however, have a major drawback. Most systems rely on the phone’s GPS receiver: a great location tool when outside with clear line-of-sight to the satellites, but a failure indoors or in heavily built-up areas. In these locations, GPS typically provides coverage between 30-70% of the time. As mapping services such as Nokia Maps and Google Maps provide interior maps of Airports, Hotels and Shopping centres, consumers will be increasingly aware of, and frustrated by, this problem. It is possible that users will soon be as annoyed by the loss of location information as they were by the frequent loss of signal in the early days of mobile phones.
New technologies are emerging that solve this problem by providing fast, accurate positioning in all locations. Typically positioning is determined by a combination of GPS and the signal strength from a variety of radio sources such as cell towers, WiFi hotspots and Bluetooth.
By triangulating these signals, the phone can quickly and accurately determine its location. By augmenting the GPS information, a position can be determined more than 99% of the time: even when the user is indoors.
The additional information can also increase the positional accuracy – SATSIS’s radical positioning system achieves better than 1m accuracy in a typical shopping centre – as well as reducing the time to get a positional fix to one second. All of this is achieved with fraction of the computational power required for techniques such as fingerprinting making it ideal for portable and handheld devices.
There is a clear need for accurate location information all the time. So what is stopping everyone having accurate positional fixes wherever they are? The problem isn’t a simply technical barrier: the major challenge is the database infrastructure. Whilst it is possible to access information about operators’ cell towers.
Currently no comprehensive database exists of all the WiFi hotspots in the world. The biggest challenge is building and maintaining a comprehensive database of these radio devices across the world, and the first company to do so will become the leading indoor positioning company.
How can these huge databases be created? It’s simply not practical to drive or walk around logging the information: a huge number of systems in the field are required to collect and collate the data. In addition to the continuous updating required due to new or reallocated WiFi hotspots. At SATSIS we’ve developed innovative crowd-sourcing technology that records data as the consumer uses our applications. We’ve found a technical solution to this basic problem, which will help us build a database faster than anyone else, so soon your phone will know your exact location (within 1 metre accuracy).
From providing augmented reality for tourists to social networking applications, we’re going to think less of the mobile phone as a communication device, and more as a tool to help make our lives better - and more fun.
Author is Tughrul Arslan, chief technical officer at SATSIS