LBS at MoMo London
Yesterday’s MoMo was themed location based services. I have always been disappointed with the lack of consistent operator support for LBS. GPS on some latest phones seems to solve the problem but brings with it battery drain, long initial discovery times and poor coverage in places other than open areas. Cell ID is inaccurate and difficult to pre-define. Also, I saw location as having privacy issues. Hence I went to this MoMo with a good dose of scepticism. Here are the key points I took away that I hadn’t previously considered…
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Its possible to use services such as those from Seeker Wireless to combine cell ID and GPS and other things like signal strength to get a more accurate position. (It was also interesting that the Seeker Wireless solution is SIM Toolkit rather than phone app based).
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When the cell IDs aren’t known its possible to have end users (who do know their position) enter their position and send it to a central server to build up a cell ID database.
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Carriers don’t necessarily have the infrastructure for high transaction rates required of most Cell ID based LBS applications.
Its also wise to remember a point I took away from a previous MoMo. People aren’t always interested in where they are now - where they are going is often just as relevant. Hence, there’s room for services such as m-Spatial that work on an arbitrary location.
Clarification 18th April: Seeker Wireless positioning is made without GPS and uses CID, network data etc… which gives the benefit of being compatible with legacy handsets and not having the limitations of GPS.
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