Part 2: Maybe Soon Your TV Can Sit On It’s Butt and Watch You
After some more digging around on the web, I’ve now dug up enough new stuff to update the original post about Rosum’s new TV-GPS technology with some fresh tidbits.
So, first a quick review:
- Rosum is trying to develop a technology to supplement GPS and solve some of the major shortcomings of GPS… most notably the inability of GPS to be able to determine location indoors where it can’t see GPS satellites.
- Its solution: why not use something a little closer to home like broadcast television signals rather than those weak girly-man GPS signals from outer-space that have trouble even getting through the flimsy roof on your ’71 AMC Gremlin !
Now for the new updates. So it seems that they’ve rolled out coverage in the Northeast corridor from Washington DC to New Hampshire, well actually had it back in Fall of 2006… and given that the company has raised just $20 million to date, that must mean that the required network infrastructure build out must not be too much of a big, expensive an unwieldy process.
Rosum does talk extensively about how their solution uses existing technology on the broadcast tower. I can remember working with a company in the late 90’s called WavePhore that was trying to stuff various digital media down to web users over the unused portion of the broadcast signal called the vertical blanking interval (ie the portion reserved for the government to send emergency broadcast messages), so I just assume it works something like that.
Their solution does require regional monitoring units, but it seems that just a few, 3-4, are sufficient to cover each market, so maybe nothing like the thousands of boxes needed for alternative solutions. Overall the network deployment costs look like they may be favorable to alternatives like S5 Wireless.
It also looks like the actual location calculation is done on a server, off device. The Rosum equipped device will know only its pseudo location and need to check in with the regional monitoring unit to get a proper location fix. Which brings up the question of how does the device communicate with the location server to get a fix… well the answer right now is SMS. And it does seem that this poses an economical hurdle for use as a consumer solution… although I guess it depends on exactly how much SMS is necessary. And they’re working on a GPRS solution it seems. For folks like the military and first response teams, this SMS issue is of course a non issue.
It also looks like they’re pursuing a software only strategy that relies on mobile devices having tv tuner cards installed… but I am not sure I see that happening anytime soon despite what official research reports may say.
If you want to read more, fortunately their presentations seem to be all over the web, here are a few links:
http://www.e911institute.org/Events/2007/Rosum_CompanyOverview_WCAHomelandDefenseE9-1-1panel_18-January-2006_2.pdf
http://www.nlectc.org/training/commcorr2006/young_commcorr2006_indoor.pdf
http://www.ece.wpi.edu/Research/PPL/Workshops/2006/PDF/Rosum.pdf
Overall it looks pretty promising.
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