Using New Technology to Locate Bad Guys
A while back I mentioned this interesting company called S5 Wireless, there is more detail in the original post, but to review they have developed a very small chip (see picture above) that requires very little power and is designed purely to track the whereabouts of stuff. All it needs is a series of base stations in the general vicinity to listen for the periodic signal at the 915 Mhz frequency from the chips and to triangulating their position. The signal can travel good distances, particularly out in wide open areas, and can even penetrate walls, or maybe into mountains?
Getting the base stations into place, should be no problem, but if we could only get the bad guys to carry these tiny chips around with them we’d be all set. One potential way to do this would be to invest the cost of one predator drone unit and embed these chips in 5-10 million units of ammo (obviously the kind favored by bad guys like maybe Ak-47 ammo which are plenty big enough) at a cost of $1-2 per unit and then flood the black market for ammo in target areas of interest with these units. From there it’s just a matter of sitting back a few weeks or months and seeing where all the ammo goes.
Bye Bye GPS?
GPS World had an article yesterday that says that it expects that within five years 25% of all positioning technology will be of the hybrid variety… ie GPS plus something else like Cell ID, Wi Fi, RFID, etc with the major goal of providing indoor coverage and also better time to first fix. Particular props go to SkyHook and its ability to do deals with major GPS chip manufacturers such as Broadcom, SiRF, Qualcomm etc. Although, why the “traditional” GPS players haven’t moved much more aggressively here is still a bit of a mystery.
On one hand, this is promising news in that it says things are moving in the right direction for making location awareness more widely available, which will no doubt create more and more useful location oriented services. Solutions that just work when you’re outside in clear view of the sky is kind of like an MP3 player that only works when you stand still… if you look at it from the consumers perspective it’s an absolutely silly limitation to have to deal with. But then again the consumer location awareness market is currently nearly synonymous with navigation which is of course generally conducted in the outdoors, so maybe that narrow view of the location awareness world explains why we are in the position we’re in.
I hope that in a few years we’ll look back on the years of the $500 outdoor GPS only navigation devices in the same way we now look back at 3 1/2 inch floppy disk… 27 satellites out in space?! Cost what?! Took how long to get working?! Only worked outside?! Only you could know where you were?! They only used it for driving directions?! Had to keep it plugged in or the battery would die?!
How funny!
