Forget GPS, for some time there has been a way for any application on your cell phone to know exactly where you are, kind of. Every cell tower has an id which your phone knows about. The problem is that it doesn't tell you where that is geographically. Some developers have realized that many services only need to know this much, such as the excellent miniGPS from Psiloc for Symbian phones. Every phone should be able to switch profiles like this so that I don't have to listen to yet another idoits amusing ringtone while I am in a meeting. Also some interesting work at MIT.
What we really need is an open online database and webservice of all available cell towers. There are some folks out there trying to make this happen, such as cellspotting.
Yahoo's new Zonetag service for flickr is attempting to make it happen over time by having users tag their photos with the location.
There are probably another hundred projects like this out there trying to accomplish the same thing. Maybe someone is closer than I realize. For now I guess I just have to wait for GPS.
No comments:
Post a Comment