So Google has announced their My Location service for the mobile version of Google Maps, a sneek peek what their Android platform is capable of.
The My Location feature takes information broadcast from mobile towers near you to approximate your current location on the map – it’s not GPS, but it comes pretty close (approximately 1000m close, on average).
It’s a native app, meaning that you have to download and install it on your desktop for it to work. Just a couple of phones are supported, and it currently seems to be US-only. So it’s not available for services running thru say, the browser. Or any other app for that matter, even the native ones. No soup for the rest of us then, at least not until they release Android, which has the My Location-stuff included in the core libraries, accessible for all native apps. But not the browser, which might be good. Maybe it has some standardized opt-in procedure to clear access for certain websites (kind of like cookies are handled now in browsers)?
Anyhow. I pondered a little on how they might have done it, and came to the conclusion that they must employ something like the Intel Placelab project, meaning that they listen to “radio beacons”, such as cell towers, wifi hotspots, bluetooth etc. These “beacons” all have unique MAC IDs, which has been geotagged in the Placelab database. Establishing the position is a matter of triangulating different beacons, combined with signal strength and bam! you’ve got a location.
Although Google seems to be only using one beacon, the tower you’re connecting to right now, so maybe they have watered down this principle a little? Kind of like what Plazes does with Wifi. But knowing what tower you connect to is a bit tricky, if you’re using your phones preset values for IP-traffic, so maybe they employ some type of hybrid approach… ie. send an SMS thru the tower, which contains an session-ID and tower info, matching this to a database of geotagged towers, routing this info back to the user thru IP-traffic?
Anyhow, it’s nice to see that they’re keeping a steady pace. From what I know, the iPhone has no feature like this, even if it’s completely integrated from hardware interface, to operating system, to operator services.
Gotta go, have to take a stab at the Android API! 
Tags: Advertising, android, geo, Google, gps, location, maps, Mobile, my location, placelab, plazes
14 December, 2007 at 10:24 am |
I use this on my Ericsson phone here in Sweden (and in Denmark) and it works pretty darn well. They have to use more than one tower, although they may use them asynchronously, because they are doing this with triangulation.
Still, Google maps may be too interactive to use on the phone interface, it is just too damn hard to use. But on the iPhone I bet it is a different story.