WCA LBS Event

by Eric / July 29th, 2008

This event held at Parc in Palo Alto was about what’s next in Location Based Services. The style of the event was similar to how Demo is run. Presenters get a tight timeframe to present the company and their product/service. Afterwards a rapid fire question and answer session ensues. It’s grueling, but for those who suffer from tech ADHD, you get the core highlights.

One of the more interesting services that was shown was GeoSpot. Joe Chen, Founder at GeoSpot talked about how location information for brick and mortar places such as coffee shops, banks, restaurants and stores were one level of information that people seek. The problem beyond this is knowing if that merchant is open or closed. This is adding in a time and local surfing filter. What this means is getting the store hours and detailed features of a store. As shown by the pictures (from GeoSpot), you not only get info about a Starbucks near you, but also the hours of operation, services such as WiFi access and whether or not they have a drive-through. These little incremental improvements over an address or point of interest in a map can help decision making easier.

I tried to compare this with Yelp on my iPhone and while it has improved some of the details about their database of listings, I think the color-coded dashboard is a better UI (Geospot) than simply putting hours of operation (Yelp).

The other interesting presentation was by Steve Lee, Product Manager for Google Maps for Mobile from Google. First off, this was one of the first presentation I have heard in a while from Google, where they actually talked about the technology as well as disclose information about their product offering and more. This was a welcome change! He first mentioned that the company is using cell tower based location and not relying on GPS. They have over 200+ carrier relationships and support 2G, 2.5G, 3G and CDMA networks. The list of phones currently supported:

RIM Blackberry
Windows Mobile
Symbian
SonyEricsson
Apple iPhone
Palm Centro
Google Android

Google claims that they do not capture mobile phone numbers and that all data is anonymous, only obtaining aggregated cell tower location database information. Based on the current API that Google has access to, they can only get the CellID from the tower, instead of triangulation, thus the accuracy of Google Maps is somewhat lacking. This will improve however through higher subscriber usage. He admitted that in some places the accuracy is potentially off by many meters, but over time will get better.

I have first-hand seen this on my iPhone as I have tried it several times either lagging behind my actual location, or when I turn, charting my position off the path of travel and then correcting after a few seconds. There are a few cell sites that I regularly pass by that have the noticable lag of location update.

All in all this was a great event and I hope that I can attend future WCA (Wireless Communications Alliance) events.