LBS

May 2007 | Comments Off

INDUSTRY | LBS | GPS | GIS | REMOTE SENSING | GALILEO UPDATE

Mobile industry set to boom with GPS technology

may

As per the RNCOS report, “Globally, the GPS market is expected to exceed US$ 30 Billion by 2008. The two segments under this technology namely people tracking & handset market will have maximum growth rate, about 9%.” Mobile industry is set to boom in 2007 with mobile giants, application developers, and OS managers planning to introduce various large-scale rollouts of GPS technology. Most phone manufacturers will introduce devices enabled for navigating with a GPS like Nokia has plans to introduce a personal mapping program that’ll let users to send messages to each other and also have instructions on how to congregate, delivered to the handset. www.rncos.com

SiRF GPS powers Intel ultra mobile solutions

SiRFstarIII(TM) architecture will provide the GPS-based location awareness for products based on the new Intel Ultra Mobile Platform 2007. It will provide GPS functionality for Intel Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) and Mobile Internet Device (MID) platforms, which will enable manufacturers to create compelling new locationbased applications. www.sirf.com

MTC-Vodafone Bahrain offers interactive mobile LBS

MTC-Vodafone (Bahrain) has upgraded its intelligent location- finding facilities. Customers can receive driving directions via SMS and MMS using M-Guide, a Directory Service on a specially-designed menu on each customer’s phone. The upgraded LBS service results from an agreement with GEOMATEC enabling access to frequent road information updates. www.mtc-vodafone.com

VZ Navigator provides LBS in Spanish

Verizon Wireless customers can now add VZ Navigator in Spanish to their Get It Now enabled phones to get maps and audible turn-by-turn directions to over 14 million points of interest. Verizon www.verizonwireless.com

Vodafone GPS BlackBerry ready in may

Vodafone has announced GPSenabled Blackberry 8800 that will be mapping out the country for Australian road warriors. The smartphone has built-in GPS and manages to pack in the usual BlackBerry email functionality plus multimedia features on top of the mapping and variety of location based applications and services. www.mobilised.com.au

eSpatial’s LBS application deployed by the US DoD

The Military homefront now offers mobile capability enabling anyone with supported mobile devices to use the mobile version of the website (http://militaryinstallations.dod. mil/mobile/). The application assists the military community to locate, learn about, and travel to a variety of Programs and Services located on over 250 military installations worldwide. www.espatial.com

Patent awarded to TCS for wireless applications

TeleCommunication Systems, Inc. (TCS), USA has been awarded patent number 7,200,380 for “Wireless Telecommunications LBS Scheme Selection.” Given a request by an application to locate a mobile device within a certified level of accuracy for a given time period, the patent proposes a way to select the location scheme that will achieve the best result. The location scheme may be an A-GPS location fix, a network-based location fix or the last known cached fix, depending upon the accuracy required and the time sensitivity of the application. www1.telecomsys.com

Nissan developing GPS-based ITS

Nissan’s ITS will employ the next 3G cellular communications system where the GPS function is used as the basis to provide location information of the cellular phone. In this system, location data transmitted from the pedestrian’s cellular phone and vehicle is fed to the ITS to allow the system to determine the corresponding positions between the pedestrian and the vehicle. This system will help to reduce road accidents particularly in a blind-spot situation. www.technologynewsdaily.com

Putting a GPS Chip Inside a SIM Card

BlueSky Positioning has developed patent-pending technology and processes to embed Assisted Global Positioning System (A-GPS) capability in the SIM card. The SIM uses an assistance data server in the mobile network to reduce the location identification time and increase accuracy within buildings and densely populated areas. This would enable network operators to launch location based services without either relying on network intensive cellpositioning, or requiring customers to upgrade to a GPS capable handset.

Wayfinder Location Software to be Preinstalled on Nokia N95 Phones

mobilkom austria has agreed to start pre-loading software from Wayfinder into the Nokia N95 phone with builtin GPS when sold by the operator. The latest software comes equipped with 3D maps, Power Search and a night mode.

Nextel deploys GPS services

Nextel México has launched GPS value added services. The iFollow and iLocator services allow the company’s push-to-talk (PTT) subscribers to use the GPS services through an integrated GPS chipset available for most of its handsets. It uses a platform provided by location services company Openwave.