Jason Hong's Confabulations

Oddly enough, I was thinking of a service like this when my credit card was declined in London. The problem of course is someone robbing you + your phone. ------------------- Visa Takes Fraud Busting to Next Level with Mobile Phone Location Tracking The company recently formed a partnership with ValidSoft and is going to start using information about the location of customers’ mobile phones to prevent credit card fraud. Visa will be able to establish whether your mobile phone is in the same place as the merchant or ATM where your card is being used. In most cases, the two devices are in close proximity, which allows Visa to surmise that it is probably you using the card (even if you are outside of your usual shopping patterns). However, if the two devices are not in the same place, the system may send up an alert.

One of the writers at MIT Tech Review has blogged about our work on Locaccino. "Locaccino Shows How Facebook Places Should Work" http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25832/

Really interesting article in the NYTimes about the Eye-Fi card, which also geotags your photos for you using Skyhook. Also, see below about interesting news about the location capabilities of the next iPhone. NYTimes [The Eye-Fi Share card] is a 2-gigabyte memory card ($100), compatible with most digital cameras, with a twist: it has Wi-Fi networking built in. Each time you bring your camera home to your wireless network, it transmits your photos back to the computer, automatically and wirelessly. It can also upload them to Flickr, Picasa or another online photo-gallery site, automatically and wirelessly. You know how your digital camera gives every photo an invisible time and date stamp? Well, the Eye-Fi Explore ($130) card invisibly stamps every photo with where you took it. ... (Indeed, the new iPhone, coming July 11, incorporates both G.P.S. and Skyhook. It even has a third location system, developed by Google, that pinpoints your location by studying your proximity to cellphone t...

http://www.loopt.com/ , description via Joe McCarthy ...they already have 40K users, and will be doing a major launch in December (at which point the application will be pre-installed on all Boost phones). ...Managing privacy issues will be crucial to their success; Mark said everything is opt-in, requiring an explicit invitation, acceptance, and activation, and it only works if you know someone's phone number."

Rich Presence trials are participatory, distributed, and experimental. Participants download and install a specially tuned integrated communications client on their laptops. This client allows participants to initiate voice, instant messaging, and video calls to each other using the receiver's email address as a single, converged electronic identity. Communication is enhanced through the inclusion of rich presence services, through which participants may see not only who is on-line, but also where they are and what they are doing. As participants connect to the wireless LAN, their location and calendar presence is updated automatically. Room location is derived through triangulation of 802.11 signals and is cross-referenced with the meeting calendar to learn the name and duration of the session in that room at that time. Link

One reader asks about ubicomp and its relationship to supply chain management. [We think ubicomp is] simply the philosophy of using computation to augment the ability of entities in a non-invasive way. If our definition is correct, then would it follow that technologies which can vastly improve transparency across a supply chain without requiring significant process changes be one valid application of ubiquitous computing? If so, then wouldn't any and all supporting technologies (data storage facility, barcodes, etc.) be part of ubiquitous computing technologies within that context? My response: Well, on the one hand, the term ubiquitous computing is sufficiently general that it could include lots of things, sort of like personal computing. On the other hand, if you look at the specific research that calls itself ubiquitous computing, you only see certain kinds of things. For example, mobile computing, sensor networks, large displays, etc. Lots of areas with previous work done (e...

http://ludimate.com/geominder/index.php For Nokia phones... Geominder allows you to create location-based reminders that stay attached to physical locations. When arriving at a marked location, Geominder can play an alarm and display a stored text note or a voice note previously associated to the location.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/06/09/google.map.hacks.ap/index.html Google charts each point on its maps by latitude and longitude -- that's how Google can produce driving directions to practically anywhere in the nation. Seasoned developers have figured out how to match these points with locations from outside databases that can contain vast amounts of information -- anything from police blotters to real estate listings. Thanks to Adrian Holovaty, 24, who overlayed Chicago Police Department crime statistics on a Google map, house-hunters in the Albany Park neighborhood can pinpoint all the sexual assaults in the district between May 19 and April 19 on a single map. With each crime marked by a virtual pushpin, Chicagoans can quickly learn what dangerous train stations, pool rooms and alleys to avoid. ... Visitors to Floridasexualpredators.com, which combines Google Maps with data on convicted sex offenders, can call up maps of their communities and click on the pushpins to s...

Microsoft is finding customers for its cell phone location server Junk remover 1-800-Got-Junk is among the first to use a specialized Microsoft server to incorporate real-time location information into maps and driving directions generated by Microsoft MapPoint Web Service, the companies announced on Monday. ... The Microsoft offering lets 1-800-Got-Junk pack capabilities into cell phones for its drivers, such as pushing a single cell phone button to adjust a delivery route on the fly should they get lost... The deal is a sign that the market for location-based services is starting to catch on among businesses. However, the technology has not yet caught on among the general public. While Microsoft has had some success with selling location information--it has more than 500 corporate customers generating 20 million maps and directions a day--Seinfeld conceded that it has been difficult getting consumers interested.

http://www.rosum.com/ Would be nice if they had some data about how well their service works. Would also be nice to see what hardware requirements there are, battery life tradeoffs, etc. Rosum's TV Advantage In contrast, television signals were designed for indoor reception. Rosum TV-GPS uses commercial broadcast TV signals to provide reliable positioning indoors and in urban environments. By combining TV signals with GPS signals, Rosum can provide seamless indoor/outdoor coverage across all environments.

From the GeoPriv RADIUS working standard http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-geopriv-radius-lo-02.txt +----------------------+----------------------+---------------------+ | Label | Description | Example | +----------------------+----------------------+---------------------+ | country | The country is | US | | | identified by the | | | | two-letter ISO 3166 | | | | code. | | | | | | | A1 | national | New York | | | subdivisions (state, | | | | region, province, | | | | prefecture) | | | ...

Interesting stuff, wonder how well it works, in terms of usability, scalability, etc? http://www.wavemarket.com/products.html Map.Me is a mobile phone map interface that allows users to pan/zoom and experience dynamic mobile city guides. Subscribers can download the application on their mobile phone to locate themselves, find addresses and businesses, and show directory listings on a map. Users can also request driving directions on how to reach their desired destination. Crunkie.com is a location-aware mobile social network that allows friends to locate each other as well as share location-tagged blog posts. It turns mobile handsets into location-enabled broadcasting and viewing devices. It is where you go to see postings from anywhere that interests you. The number of posts, pages, and channels we host is unlimited, but it’s all organized by place and time so you get where you want in just seconds. WaveAlert enables wireless operators to notify you when are near something important t...

Three different online services for doing lookups from IP Address to location information (roughly at the postal code level) http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm?GetLocation http://www.melissadata.com/Lookups/iplocation.asp http://www.ip2location.com/free.asp

http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1620794 Great article in the Economist about location-based services. Talks about uses of location information, geotagging, geoencryption (cool idea, but sounds tough to do well), geomarking ("I'm over here, meet me"). Best quote: The internet is an open platform, but it lacks ubiquitous wireless coverage and proper positioning technology. Only when openness, ubiquity and GPS-grade positioning are available in the same handset will it be possible to realise the true potential of location-based services.

Funny, last week in class I mentioned this as a potentially silly location-based app that could be built. http://www.gravitymonkey.com/gravity/monkey/redblue/ ------ red | blue (pronounced 'red or blue') is a free Java™ app that figures out where you stand, or perhaps more accurately, where you are standing in our politically polarized country. ... By taking your current location, and finding the nearest individual donors of campaign funds from the publicly available data from the Federal Elections Commission, red | blue is able to provide you an accurate reading of the political leanings of your surroundings -- red for Republican or blue for Democrat.

Cell phone software for determining one's location, similar to Place Lab . http://www.cellspotting.com/webpages/cellspotting.html

I wonder how long it will be before we start seeing egregious uses of location-enabled cell phones. ----- http://news.com.com/Big+boss+is+watching/2100-1036_3-5379953.html?tag=nefd.lede Earlier this month, mobile tracking firm Xora showed off the latest version of its Nextel GPS (global positioning system) phone software. The company says 1,600 corporate customers have signed up for its services, including "geofences" technology that sets off an alarm at the office when field workers go to preprogrammed off-limits sites, such as a bar or a park. "There's no electro shock--yet," Xora CEO Sanjay Shirole said.

I've been slowly becoming convinced that communication is the killer app for ubicomp. There's actually more to this statement than is immediately obvious, because researchers have been talking about ubicomp for nearly 15 years, and have come up with lots of applications, very few of which are compelling. Seriously, does anyone really want their refrigerator to tell them to buy more milk? Communication seems to be the key in many past applications, ranging from email to instant messenger to cell phones. By mixing location technologies, wireless communications, and multiple modes of input and output, ubicomp might be able to make new strides in this area, lowering barriers to entry and increasing the richness of communication with others. Apparently, this is something that some social scientists have been arguing for a while (so my colleagues say), but only recently have tech researchers started thinking along these lines. Besides the basic human need for communication, the...