Wireless

BARCELONA - Skyhook Wireless announced on Monday at the GSMA Mobile World Congress here that Texas Instruments will use its hybrid positioning technology in its mobile chips, so that cell phones can provide more accurate location information.

Skyhook has developed a hybrid technology that uses GPS satellite technology and Wi-Fi to help provide geolocation services. Skyhook's technology is used today on Apple's iPhone, among other services and devices.

The way it works is that Skyhook will use Wi-Fi access points to triangulate and get a fix on known Wi-Fi hot spots. The company has a database of where Wi-Fi hot spots all over the country are located. Specifically, it uses the Mac address, a unique identifier that every piece of hardware on the Internet must have, to identify the router, and it matches that identifier with the location. Using multiple signals in the same geographic location, the Skyhook technology is able to pinpoint a location.

The company has also integrated GPS into its technology, so that it can be used to get an even more accurate location-fix on phones that have GPS receivers. GPS allows Skyhook to cover more ground with its geolocation technology. And it also provides location information more quickly than GPS alone. Because GPS uses three or four low-orbiting satellites to pinpoint a location, it can take a few seconds before it's able to calculate a location. Skyhook's Wi-Fi technology can get location information much faster.

The Skyhook XPS hybrid software will be used in TI's current and future NaviLin 6.0 and WiLink 6.0 solutions.

NEW YORK--GPS map maker Navteq is teaming with its parent company Nokia to help drivers get more accurate information about traffic conditions.

Before Nokia bought Navteq last year, the two began working on a project in conjunction with the University of California at Berkeley called Mobile Millennium that uses GPS-enabled cell phones as traffic monitors or "probes" to collect real-time traffic data.

A Nokia GPS-enabled phone acts as a traffic "probe" to provide real-time traffic information to drivers.

(Credit: Marguerite Reardon/CNET News)

A pilot program using more than 10,000 handsets has already launched in the San Francisco Bay Area. And on Tuesday the companies were showing off the technology at the Intelligent Transport Systems World Congress here in New York.

As part of the pilot program, researchers are collecting data via GPS and tracking usage patterns to provide real-time traffic reports for individual drivers. All the information is collected anonymously and aggregated statistically to provide the most up-to-date and accurate information.

"The beauty of this approach is that the users also become contributors and the more data that is collected the better the accuracy and range of the service," said Quinn Jacobson, a research leader at the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, Calif.

Navteq is a leader in the mapping and navigation market. Its maps have been used by Google and others to fuel their navigation services. And its technology is already being used for cell phone services, such as Verizon Wireless' VZ Navigator. In addition to turn-by-turn navigation, VZ Navigator also provides up-to-date traffic information.

But the problem is that most of the traffic information available through Navteq's technology is collected using government deployed sensors. While these sensors, which sit on the roads and monitor car speeds and traffic volume, do a good job, they are too expensive to be deployed everywhere. This means that traffic information is usually only available for busy highways in large metropolitan areas, but it's missing on arterial roads feeding into these highways or on rural secondary roads.

The application being developed in the Mobile Millennium project will solve this problem, Jacobson said.

Currently, the Mobile Millennium application is only being used in the pilot testing program, but Jacobson said he expects a commercial offering to be available within the next two years. It's not clear yet if Nokia will make the application available to phones other than ones made by Nokia. It's likely that the application could be made available as part of a service offered through a wireless operator. This would likely mean that it would be available on a wide range of handsets from other manufacturers.

Jacobson said those business details haven't been worked out, but it's technically possible to offer the application on any GPS device. Jacobson also emphasized that the application performs better with more users, which means it might be in Nokia's best interest to open it up to other devices.

"The application works really well with 2 percent of the drivers on the road using it," he said. "But 4 percent is even better and so on."

Jacobson said the application will become really useful when it allows users to input specific routes and is integrated with other applications. For example, a daily commuter could program into the phone several routes he drives to work. The traffic application would be able to choose the best route depending on the current traffic conditions. If something changes en route, the application would be smart enough to alter the route.

And for people who never leave themselves enough time to get to the airport or an important meeting, the traffic application could help. Once the application is integrated into the calendar, it could calculate how long it will take, based on current traffic conditions, to get to that appointment. And it could alert the user when he or she should leave in order to get there on time.

Verizon Wireless and Walt Disney Parks and Resorts are teaming up to create a new mobile application to help families plan their trips and get the most out of their Disney vacations.

(Credit: Verizon Wireless)

With more than 90 percent of its guests walking through the gates with mobile phones, Disney Parks and Resorts executives see cell phones as a perfect way to connect with their customers.

On Wednesday, Disney will announce it has entered into an exclusive multi-year agreement with Verizon Wireless. The two companies will develop an application, which will be hosted by Verizon. Also as part of the deal, Verizon has agreed to boost network capacity and coverage within the Disney theme parks to ensure optimal coverage and performance of its service.

The new application will be available for download from Verizon's "Get It Now" store in early 2009. Initially the application will only work for Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., and Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif. The companies will add support for other Disney resorts later.

Specific details about what the application will actually do haven't been announced yet. But some of the likely features include the ability to make reservations for restaurants, hotels, and even attractions right from a Verizon handset. Using GPS-based location services, subscribers will also be able to access a Disney character map that will pinpoint exactly where Minnie Mouse is at any given moment, thus saving scores of parents from running around the park all day looking for their kids' favorite characters.

There will also be information about show times and the best places to view characters and other attractions. Disney will also offer mobile games and fun facts that can be downloaded inside the park to provide more information about what people are seeing and doing on their vacation.

Loopt, the friend tracking software developer, has struck a licensing deal with a Qualcomm subsidiary to help lower the cost of providing location services.

The company will announce Thursday that it has signed an agreement with SnapTrack, a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm, to use QPoint location-based server software to provide social mapping and other advanced location services.

Location-based services are expected to generate a lot of money for carriers in the future. Already, most major mobile operators are offering some kind of location-based service, such as GPS-enabled navigation or tracking. But the service hasn't taken off in any big way yet.

One of the main barriers has been the fact that the licensing fees on the GPS location information captured by the phone via the SnapTrack technology is very high. Today, carriers must pay at least a few pennies every time a location query is made. This may sound low, but it adds up. And it's a cost that is difficult to make up considering that most targeted location-based advertising generates less cash per query than the licensing fee, said Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of Loopt.

"The cost structure for location based services has been out whack," he said. "That's one of the reasons that these services and location-based advertising haven't take off yet."

Under the new arrangement, Loopt will pay a flat fee per month per user, which provides unlimited location queries. This means than instead of paying a few cents for every query, the cost of discovering a location can be scaled back to tenths or hundredths of a cent depending on how many location queries a customer makes in a month.

This makes implementing location-based services much more affordable for carriers, who would like to generate revenue on these services through targeted advertising.

Loopt also plans to provide its location-based technology to other software developers, so that they can develop location-aware applications. The new licensing arrangement with Qualcomm will also allow these software developers to benefit from the Loopt-SnapTrack licensing deal.

Loopt already offers its friend-finding and alerts service to Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and Alltel. It also offers its application through Apple's iPhone App Store.

Chipmaker Broadcom is adding Wi-Fi positioning technology from Skyhook Wireless to its semiconductors to help provide more accurate location-based services.

Broadcom plans to use GPS (Global Positioning System) and Wi-Fi to help provide accurate location-based information for mobile devices, the company said. Location-based services are becoming hot, especially since the launch of Apple's iPhone 3G, which comes with GPS. The location applications that use GPS have been among the most popular applications downloaded from the Apple App Store.

But GPS has its limitations. Skyhook's Wi-Fi location technology can use known Wi-Fi hot spots to augment GPS. The service works very well in densely populated areas where there are a lot of Wi-Fi radios transmitting signals. And it's great for locating places indoors or in cities with a lot of tall buildings, all places where satellite-based GPS technology has difficulty getting a location fix.

Now Broadcom, which makes many of the GPS, Wi-Fi, and other types of chips that go into many mobile phones will add Skyhook's Wi-Fi positioning to its chips. And this should help improve accuracy for location-based services in the future.