Coming out of stealth mode soon!

We have been making good progress on the application we are building at Spatial Networking, which in its initial release will run on the Facebook Platform. We plan to get an alpha release out to a small number of testers by the end of this week, and have a closed beta out within a few weeks after that. So I've decided it's time to start telling the world more about what we're up to, and I'll be doing this, and giving our first public demo, at next week's Boulder Denver New Technology Meetup Group, which is on Tuesday February 5 at 6pm in Boulder. I have found this to be a pretty interesting local group for anyone interested in technology startups. They had about 200 people at the last one. The general format is that 5 companies present for 5 minutes each (with 5 minutes for questions). So I'll have to be pretty concise, but I've been getting used to that with doing pitches to potential investors, who have pretty short attention spans :). If you're in the area please feel free to come to the Meetup, and if not I'll be posting much more information here in the coming weeks.

iPhone uses WiFi as well as cell signals to determine location

I just went out for a walk around my neighborhood in downtown Denver to test out the new "locate me" capability on my iPhone, and discovered something rather interesting: apparently the system is using not just cell phone signals but also WiFi to determine location, which explains the unexpectedly good first test result I mentioned in my previous post. I discovered this somewhat accidentally, but turning WiFi on and off on the phone made a big difference to accuracy. You do not have to be connected to a WiFi network in order to use WiFi for location determination.

Since I am in a WiFi-rich downtown location, using WiFi gives much more accurate results than triangulating cell phone signals. From a quick walk around the neighborhood here, I am consistently getting within half a block, or perhaps about 50 meters accuracy most of the time, and as good as 10-20m in some instances, when I have WiFi turned on. Of course it won't be nearly that good if you don't have a dense WiFi network, but this is much better than I expected. If I turned off the WiFi on the phone, the results were less accurate. It is a little hard to gauge the accuracy as the map display is zoomed out depending on the level of accuracy that the system thinks it can obtain (and there is a variable size circle displayed). But generally speaking, even without WiFi, the location generally seems to be within a block or two (say 100-200 meters) of the right location - though again this is in a downtown location with a high density of cell towers, so in a rural location it will be significantly less accurate.

If you look at Google's explanation of how "My Location" works, they only mention using cell tower location. I suppose that most of the other phones which have previously run Google Maps Mobile do not support WiFi, so this makes sense. Other vendors such as Navizon have used WiFi location for a while, and indeed they announced a version for the iPhone a little while ago (if you had hacked your phone, since of course it is still officially closed to third party applications at this point). But in general I haven't seen anything saying that Google was using WiFi for location determination.

I did find that the accuracy varied a fair amount from one attempt to another - I could stand on the same street corner and locate myself multiple times in quick succession, and get three different map scales (representing different accuracy levels) back. The true geo-geeks among you can check out this flickr album, which shows photos of the location given by my iPhone as I walked around the neighborhood, and each one is geotagged using my Garmin handheld, which gives a pretty accurate location. I have added various notes as I went through. On an individual photo you can click the map link to get an accurate view of where the photo was taken (you'll need to zoom in a little), and you can also see a map of the whole set.

Anyway, in summary, I am very pleasantly surprised with the performance of the location capabilities so far - the use of WiFi gives a much higher accuracy than I had expected. Not good enough for in-car navigation applications, but definitely good for local search applications.

Update on my original post: Slashgeo reports that the WiFi positioning technology used in the iPhone is from Skyhook Wireless. One other comment I forgot to make before is that the location determination is pretty quick - typically 3-5 seconds for the map to refresh with the location, most of which is probably just the time to redisplay the map using the EDGE network.

Location awareness on the iPhone is here

Well, the widely reported rumors were true, and today Apple released the 1.1.3 firmware update for the iPhone which provides location awareness, using cell phone triangulation. My first quick test had a much better result than I expected:

I am at home in my loft in downtown Denver and the center of the cross hair is pretty much exactly where I would have placed it on the map - within a few tens of feet of my location. I will do some more tests shortly, but it passed the first test well!

Incidentally, the photo above was automatically uploaded to flickr using my new-ish Eye-Fi card, which is a pretty cool gadget in case you haven't come across it. It's an SD card which includes Wi-Fi, and once you've done some setup, it will immediately upload pictures wirelessly to flickr or other online photo sharing services. I don't always want to do that, but for situations like this where you just want to take a photo and get it online quickly and easily, it's great!

Location awareness for iPhone coming soon?

There are unconfirmed rumors via various Mac blogs (GearLive which has photos of what is claimed to be the new update, and this was commented on at MacRumors and The Unofficial Apple Weblog) that the iPhone will soon be getting a firmware update which will add "locate me" functionality to Google Maps. This functionality was released a month or so ago on other Google Maps Mobile platforms, as Ed Parsons and others reported, so it would certainly make sense for it to appear on the iPhone sometime soon. It uses cell tower information to give an approximate location (reports seem to suggest accuracy to within a few hundred meters in urban locations, and lower accuracy in rural locations). Glenn at AnyGeo also just posted about a hardware add-on called locoGPS which will provide real GPS on the iPhone, which of course will give a more accurate location. This currently requires a Jail Broken iPhone (i.e. one that has been hacked to allow third party applications to be installed), but presumably this will change when Apple opens up the iPhone to third party apps in the next few months.

The report at GearLive also says that the new release of iPhone Google Maps will support the hybrid display mode (it currently just provides "Map" and "Satellite" displays), and the new Options screen that they show also adds a new "Drop pin" function, presumably for visually marking a location on the map.

So one way or another, it looks as though hopefully the location determination options for us iPhone owners will be improving soon!

Where the fugawi?

I just received an email announcing a new service called Touratel from a GPS company called Fugawi. My first thought was surely that's not a real company name, but it is, apparently they've been around since 1995, though I don't remember running into them before. There are a few old discussions about the company name if you google around. It makes a change to see a bit of a sense of humor in company names rather than just some boring old acronyms, I guess!

Keynote address at FME Worldwide User Conference (post number 100!)

Just a short post to say that I will be giving the keynote address at the Safe Software FME Worldwide User Conference 2008, which will be in Vancouver on March 6-7, at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue which is where the GeoWeb conference was held, and which is a great venue with its "in the round" main hall.

I have known the co-founders of Safe, Don Murray and Dale Lutz (pictured here in the Safe Insider Newsletter), since the very early days of Smallworld. They founded the company in 1993, which was the same year that we began in North America with Smallworld. We had an early mutual customer in electric utility BC Hydro, and I remember being introduced to them when Safe was still relatively unknown, by Marv Everett, who ran the transmission system GIS at BC Hydro back then (who incidentally is now retired and living in Campbell River on Vancouver Island, and enjoying spending time on his boat - see the picture below).

The BC government provided data back then in a format called SAIF, which BC Hydro needed to use, and Safe Software were the experts in this (which is where the company name came from). Marv was a big advocate of Safe, and they became a key business partner for Smallworld across our whole customer base after that initial BC Hydro project. And of course Safe works with all the major GIS vendors, so that partnership continued through my time at Intergraph.

Anyway, enough reminiscing ... I am very pleased to see how successful Don and Dale have been with Safe since then, and look forward to attending the FME conference, and spending some time in Vancouver which is one of my favorite cities.

Oh, I almost forgot (this ended up not being such a short post after all) - this is my 100th post since I began blogging on April 20th this year. It's been fun so far!

When navigation systems are superfluous

Took this photo earlier today in Buffalo, Wyoming, driving home from relatives in Sheridan. Instructions for getting home: continue straight on I-25 south for 376 miles, exit on 20th St and you're home. Bit of an easy day for the navigation system really, not too many instructions needed there!