Posts tagged “GPS” from longer posts

I'm at Columbia Business School for Focus on Locus, a conference on location-aware gizmos and gadgets, and I've got a hot tip for you on this, iPhone Day. Tom Ted Morgan is CEO of Skyhook Wireless, and he says that turning the new 3G sideways, like you might do to use the new scientific calculator feature, hugely decreases the accuracy of the iPhone's GPS. So if you're using your unit to find your way around, keep it oriented straight up to the sky. So now you know.

The Barabási study was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research (though it's unclear what their interest is), but Barabási et al conducted the research outside the U.S. because it would be illegal to use call records the way they did here. Researchers didn't go through the university research ethics review process because the Navy had decided that it was a physics study didn't actually involve human subjects and, it seems, because the way the experiment was run it was anonymous. Even so, plenty of people are up in arms about what the study means for privacy, and both the school and the journal have tried to defend the study.

But let's get to the question I'm really interested in. What was tracked in the Barabási study were calls and text messages, which enjoy a certain level of protection in the U.S. But in the U.S. every mobile phone is required under e-911 legislation to be capable of sending back to the mothership a fairly accurate location read, within 150 yards most of the time. And now comes the next generation iPhone, equipped with assisted-GPS that pinpoints location using a powerful combination of true GPS (which alone is accurate, I think, within something like 30 feet), cell tower triangulation, and wifi location data.

An expert I recently grilled on the topic tells me that the law on location records in the U.S. -- separate and apart from call records -- is a matter of some controversy and is still fuzzy. If a U.S. company, either carrier or location-aware app provider like Loopt or BrightKite, wanted to work with researchers on a study like this that used location data, would that be illegal here? Will keep digging...

(Photo thx Vagamundos)

Having just finished watching the Steve Jobs keynote from WWDC on the new iPhone, I'm now packing a bag for the next month I'll be waiting outside the Apple store to buy one. I waited and waited and waited, but it's time. Sure, you'll hear people grumbling about how you can't activate it at the iTunes store anymore, it still only (officially) runs on the AT&T network, and the data plan is 10 bucks more than it is currently. Yeah, those things might suck. But they're more than offset by the fact that the things that this palm-held device can now do are, simply put, amazing.

What sold me isn't any one thing that the iPhone can now do. It's how beautifully it integrates so many different kinds of things -- things are are more than a sum of its parts. Those parts are indeed neat -- the GPS, the accelerometer, the camera, the SDK -- but it's the integration where the magic happens. The iPhone now supports:

• enhanced GPS location awareness tied to social tools,
• mobile blogging with built in photo editing,
• full-featured gaming that reacts to tilting,
• medical imaging linked to Wikipedia's entries on particular body parts,
• and the list goes on.