GloPos Re-invents Cell Tower Triangulation with ‘Self Learning Algorithms’
Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Maybe in 2009 it would be Algorithms.
I was reading up on some of the latest industry press and I came across the announcement from a company called GloPos from last week which announced their new software only technology which will allow any cell phone with a data connection to gain location awareness with an accuracy of 1-40 meters.
So it seems these days that if it emits a signal, someone has tried to create a new novel way to triangulate position from it… but GloPos seems to be sticking with making improvements to the old fashioned cell tower triangulation method.
Using the location of cell towers to determine location is nothing new, but what is new here is a few things:
- GloPos claims to acheive accuracy of 1-40 meters, when other cell tower triangulation methods are much more coarse at accuracies of 100-1,000 meters. The GloPos secret? “Self-learning algorithms”.
- very little additional battery usage compared to wi-fi and GPS positioning systems which can allow for always on, behind the scenes location … something that has thus far been elusive but is potetially important if new LBS services are going to materialize
The company seems to be eyeing the opportunity in bringing location to over a billion ‘legacy’ handsets while also becoming an enabler of interesting new applications like mobile social networking and location based advertising which often fall short of their potential because the battery demands of existing technologies don’t allow for always on location.
The one thing not mentioned in the press release is the 100kb of data per locate that needs to be transmmitted to servers to get the position fix, nor the time it takes to get a fix.
See slides below for some GloPos business backgrounder slides and nice article from Gigaom for additional information.
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