Blog - MapMyGlobe

I just watched Steve Jobs’ keynote at Apple’s WWDC 2008, so let me first briefly give my take on the event:

• MobileMe is nothing really new except for Apple’s nice”level of polish”
• the whole lot around the iPhone in corporate environment sucked
• however, the games do look very promising (but you already know that if you’ve been smart enough to jailbreak your device)
• more importantly, the AppStore is a big change in the way software is delivered from developers to users. And by users, I don’t mean computer geeks but real, mainstream users. I’ll write more about that later.

But of course, the anouncement that’s most interesting to us, is the fact that the new iPhone 3G will contain a GPS and will enable auto-geolocating and geotagging. The first application is that the built-in camera will be able to add geotag metadata into each photograph (via the picture’s EXIF metadata). This is really great. You’re going to be able to upload a pic to a CMS on the Web and have it geolocated without even bothering to tell where you are. And the iPhone always asks for your permission to send your position so you shouldn’t have to worry about privacy and safety.

This is also a door wide open for geo-social networking, which is to say, connecting with your friends nearby, which is, after all, what a phone is all about in the first place. The geo-social networking app that’s introduced in the keynote is loopt, lets your friends know where you are and lets you know where they are. It also works as a Twitter-like app, as well as a Geo-recommendation app like tellmewhere and so many others. Which of these players will reach critical mass in this highly innovative - in terms of usage - space is still unknown but the battle will sure prove interesting to watch.

In any case, as Steve Jobs put it, location-based services are going to explode, and I’m not going to contradict that

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the exhilarating avenues opened by the advent and popularization of geo-conscious mobile devices, that is to say, mobile phones that can tell you - and other people or machines - where you are. This subject is, of course, deeply connected to geographic knowledge applications like MapMyGlobe.

As long as users access your app from their broadband, fixed connection, there’s only one main way to achieve geolocation, through IP addresses and databases of uncertain precision.

However, as more and more users browse Web 2.0-type apps from their handheld devices the precision as well as the variety of possible ways to geolocate them are increasing dramatically.

First, you can always resolve the device’s IP address in the same way you used to do it for fixed lines. The IP address is your network carrier’s, and this will give you, at best, a city-level precision.

From the phone and the network carrier’s point of view, now, another solution is to identify cells you’re receiving signals from, and triangulate them so as to get your position from the cell towers’ positions. This is better, but is still not that precise: in cities, interferences between waves and rebounds on buildings cause losses of precision, while in the countryside a single cell tower covers a very large area. It also implies you need to be connected using your carrier’s network, which might prove pricy and slow depending on your country and service plan

A remarkable way of achieving the same thing, possibly much more precisely, and while using a regular Wifi connection, is through the use of a MAC address-location mapping. The company that got to popularize this service is called Skyhook Wireless and they provide the impressive Wifi geolocation service for the iPhone. The way they work is that they basically just cruise around U.S. and European cities in a Wifi-probing GPS-enabled van and write down Wifi routers’ MAC addresses and geographic coordinates, a practice known as wardriving.

You can also, of course, directly use a GPS-enabled device (or Galileo in a few years…), which are more and more widespread.

Finally, if we look forward at a few years from now, cell phones will most certainly contain a RFID chip - so that you’ll be able to use your phone as a credit card or transportation ticket. So if there’s a critical mass of RFID sensors out there, which is probable, you’ll be able to track people directly from the actions they make or the things they buy. It doesn’t even require you to use your device as a phone anymore, as this geolocation scheme will rely on its own, external network - a Supranet. Of course, this is further away from today, and it will cause severe privacy and security issues. But is also opens worlds of possibilities in terms of services and applications.

As you can see, there are more and more different ways to geolocate your users. In a future post, I’ll write about how I think the ability to easily locate users on a Real-time basis can prove revolutionary in web applications in general, and in Content Management Systems in particular.