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The first cellular mobile telephone network was introduced in Japan in 1979. Since then the coverage and the use of mobile devices has grown tremendously. We have small, portable devices that keep us in contact, constantly and instantly. Another ‘wireless’ application is the availability of Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity), which provides immediate wireless access to the Internet. The availability of Wi-Fi services is being ‘logged’ or ‘mapped’ by various groups, and one in particular has been called the WorldWide WarDrive. This mapping project has revealed the extent of Wi-Fi access points (25,000 access points were mapped in 2002) (Jardin, 2003). The University of Kansas (external site) also provides information about sites and signal strengths. Websites, such as wifinder.com and 80211hotspots.com, are used as global directories of Wi-Fi base-stations, and sites are located by entering a postcode or a particular address (The Economist, 2003).
Location services, sometimes referred to as L-commerce, has seen European operators struggling to create LBS revenue models. Short Message Services (SMS) was seen as providing the most dependable revenues from location services over the next several years (Gisler, 2001). E-OTD location measurement was seen as the basis of high-value services. ‘Assisted GPS location solutions looked-upon favourably by ‘location services’ company Snaptrack and telco Sprint, who have conducted a joint case study. The industry sees that the biggest potential money earner is mobile location entertainment, especially amongst teenagers (Gisler, 2001). A fairly recent example is the Zingo cab (external site) service in London that provides a direct connection to available taxis to subscribers. Users call Zingo from a pre-registered mobile telephone, then Zingo’s location technology – Cellular and GPS for the user, and GPS for the taxi – links the customer with the nearest available taxi (Zingo, 2003). The system pinpoints the potential passenger’s location by locking on to the location of the mobile ‘phone The system operates using the UKs Vodafone, O2, Orange, Virgin and Three cellular telephone systems. It works automatically with O2 and Vodafone. In April 2003 there were 400 cabs using this system, with ‘several thousand’ planned (Rubens, 2003). There are already some concerns about privacy. Comments solicited about Ruben’s story in the BBC News ‘feedback’ section saw correspondents concerned about Zingo’s privacy statement – “… by calling the Zingo hailing number you give your consent to the use of your information as described above”. But an issue was raised about how the mobile service providers, the ‘partners’ in this service, would use this information, or how they would release or sell this information. It was noted by another respondent that recording of pick-up and drop-off points, a process that is assumed to be part of Zingo’s service, would not be allowed under the UK’s Data Protection Act unless a user specifically signed-up for it (Rubens, 2003).
Ubiquitous computing has been named as the ‘third wave’ in computing, or “...the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives” by the father of ubiquitous computing, the late Mark Weiser (1996). We now see this type of computing in the form of handheld PCs, mobile phones, wireless sensors, radio tags and Wi-Fi (Baard 2003). Designers of ubiquitous systems envision seeding private and public places with sensors and transmitters that are embedded into objects and hidden from view, providing for the deployment of things like ‘Audio Tags’, which plays an infrared sensor-triggered message once a person is within a pre-determined proximity (Wired News, 2003). In the mapping world, the interest in ubiquitous cartography has been formalised with the International Cartographic Association’s Commission on Ubiquitous Mapping (external site). Currently ubiquitous mapping is being delivered via cellular telephone systems, through the use of wireless Internet ‘zones and sensors that upload current data like train timetables etc. to users who have subscribed to a service. Such services are deemed to be ubiquitous when a user does not need to ‘log-in’ or actively connect to a service. According to Morita (2004), ubiquitous mapping provides the ability to create and use maps any place at any time to resolve spatial problems.
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| Zingo (external link) | GPS-directed taxi service |  |
| Websigns (external link) | GPS/PDA/server system for leaving ‘virtual notes’ regarding landmarks. |  |
| PDAs and Ordnance Survey (external link) | Research and development for ‘porting’ the ordnance Survey’s map database to mobile telephones. |  |
| Wearable computing and Ubiquitous computing (external link) | Research at the MIT Media Lab |  |
| Mobile Community Design (external link) | Application of LBS with community design |  |
| Virtual Playground (external link) | University of Washington HIT Lab research project for collaboration. |  |
| University of Kansas (external link) | Wi-Fi mapping |  |
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This document was last reviewed on 28/11/2008