I read today that bug #2037 (use GeoClue with Maemo) is closed WONTFIX with the following comment:
Only when I read this I realized how much a cellular modem in a future tablet will improve location based services... Not only will we probably have more user-friendly, improved A-GPS, it will also be possible to estimate the current location when there's no chance to get a GPS signal.
Cool.

Yes, the possibilities are endless, there are only a few things to keep in mind like limited bandwidth, caps, latency, and max throughput. You can then also use SkyHook Wireless API (iPhone v1 used this for GPS). DNS-based, or GeoIP, could load the correct map for the navigation software, or welcome you to the country in their own language (). Your OMWeather will always show the correct weather. You can always log in to Ovi where you can host files, buy music, and so on. You can also use your GPS data together with say Nokia-Google Maps to find the nearest restaurant, with up2date POI. Best of all, you can always use your e-mail client or web browser. You can have up2date RSS feeds, using the nice NIT screen to check news out.

This most likely does not have anything to do with HSPA, but with Nokia's LBS plans.

You cannot offer any location based service if you don't know the location of the device.

The cellular connectivity will probably make it a lot easier to detect the approximate location of the tablet at any time, even indoors.

(Just waiting for Darius to appear with his A-GPS comments

But yes. I personally have very high hopes for location based services. Whereas most applications on mobile devices compete against their desktop PC counterparts - and it's not an easy job, location based services literally go where desktops and laptops really do not go to.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see why people are excited about location-based services.

Let me recap what my experiences have been:

-GPS maps are the most obvious location based service. We have those on the N810 and, frankly, I would prefer that the chip would not need a-gps (i.e. the Net), because in most of the places where I actually need a GPS (hiking or travelling abroad), there is no connection.

-what is the use beyond maps? Apparently, I am supposed to be able to find "things I need", like shops and restaurants. My experience with these databases are that they are either severely outdated (like the wifi database in Nokia maps) or systematically suggest the most expensive places around (when I use a sponsored service like google, you get what you pay for).

-the last use I have heard about is to be able to "track your friends and relatives", etc... In one word: nobody I know cares so little about their privacy to advertise their location on the Net.


Frankly, I think the hype about location-based services is going to bomb like the defunct dot.com bubble. Who is going to pay for the database? Who is going to use it?


Besides: you can have location-based service on your cell phone now where I live. The cell phone company knows where you are and can offer the service. You just have to agree to the fine prints. I read the fine prints and I didn't.

Well, you don't need to get all excited about it, Jerome. But there's people who do and I'm one of them.

I like the concept of "remind me to ... when I'm near...".
I would love to share my location with certain contacts - all that's needed is a way to make sure I can control who gets the information and who doesn't. Would be nice to have my cellphone beep when a friend's two blocks away.
I still find it great to get the "where's the next ..." info on my cell phone. Why would I want to search endlessly for a cash mashine?
I would love to get the wikipedia-entry of whatever church/museum/palace/... i'm visiting during a holiday without actually typing "St. Whatshisname Cathedral" on the small keyboard.

I will not pay for any of these services, btw. Certainly not. So you're right if you're not excited about location based services as a business model. They tried it before, it didn't work. But anything that either comes for free or a neat add-on to a service you'd pay for, anyway.... that's a different story.

Well, the big location-based service I'd be (slightly) interested in is reminders; reminders before a meeting, class, etc. should allow a certain amount of time to get there, and a certain amount of time to prepare (gather notes, etc.) The preparation time is taken care of when you set up the appointment in whatever PIM you use, but the travel time depends where you are, which (for events outside your daily routine) may not be known beforehand.

Example: I used Google Calendar for all my classes, meetings, etc. my first year; as I had free incoming SMS on my plan at the time, I'd leave it on vibrate (as it usually was) and have a notification SMSed out 15 minutes before class/whatever. This didn't work out so well, since my office had poor reception for that network, so I often didn't get the notification till I was on my way to class...

But beyond that, the 15 minute delay was right if I was in my office, as classes were 10 minutes' walk away. But I completely missed one early morning meeting when I was driving in from home (an hour's drive), as I hadn't remembered it until i got the SMS about 45 minutes away. Then I almost missed another such meeting when I had set it up to warn an hour and a half early; I got that one while on the way in, and was at my desk an hour before the meeting -- and would have rolled right on through if someone else in the office hadn't tagged me at thirty seconds till.

If event definitions include a location, and my location is known, it's possible to pick up a notification at the right time, neither too late to be useful, nor too early to remember. All that's needed is a travel-time metric between two locations. I'm interested in that; it's the one missing piece to make PIM useful for me. While this isn't really the place, I'll toss out a few ideas anyway:

There need to be zones, each with several separately defined distance metrics; each zone may have direct links to other zones, but must have a "perimeter set", a list of locations from which it may be entered and exited. (For a small node, like my apartment, there'd be only one; for campus, there'd be a handful.) Each perimeter point or direct link has a distance metric from that point to anywhere in the zone, and there is a separate distance metric from point-to-point in the zone.

The root zone is inherently different* from the other zones, with a predefined distance metric from Google Maps directions (driving or walking, as appropriate, and possibly with a universal multiplier to convert walking to cycling); all perimeter points of other zones are within it, as are all locations not claimed by another zone, so it doesn't have a perimeter set or direct links. Warning time may be determined by comparing routes from the destination through all the destination zone's perimeter points, through the root zone to each of the current zone's perimeter points, and to the current location, and picking the lowest; since this only involves n*m routes with n and m perimeter points in destination and current zones, it should work snappily enough on any system.

For travel between on-campus locations, walking time is good, and point-to-point distance at 3 mph is close enough. For one end-point on-campus, and the other elsewhere, a fixed time for getting parked and a walking time from the lot to the point on-campus is a good option (for car travel), or just a fixed bike-locking time and a somewhat faster-than-walking distance function for biking...

And of course, these definitions need to be readily shareable, so everyone doesn't have to make their own zone definition for their hometown, and especially for places they visit. That's just proper design, of course; no assigning sequential ID numbers to zones and linking by ID .

You can do all this without submitting your location info to anyone (except Google Maps, if you use it as one of the distance metrics, and it can be replaced with any routing solution, or just an average as-the-crow-flies speed). (Oh, and since it knows what route is the quickest, it could deliver that info with the reminder...) LBS still looking useless? Probably to the operators (since if they do sell it, someone will clone it for free), but not to me.


*This looks arbitrary and ugly; ideally, there wouldn't need to be a "special" zone, and zones could be nested arbitrarily. (On closer inspection, of course, there always is a special zone at the root of the tree, but Google maps shouldn't be it; really the nesting is the point here.) Maybe even better, ditch the tree, and make the perimeter set just direct links that happen to go to corresponding points in the surrounding zone. The only problem is that as the zones get nested deeper (or as more adjacent zones get linked with direct links), brute-forcing the route becomes more expensive, and you get out of my algorithmic depth. The advantages, though, are stuff like supporting public transit systems, where it can automatically determine the best bus stop for you to head to, different times for a meeting in the building next door and the other end of my building, etc.; definitely advantageous.




(And yes, I know I should stop being scatter-brained, and then this would be unnecessary, so no need to mention it. )

And this is the problem: there is no such thing as a free lunch. And this has been my experience with location-based services (they are available today on cell phones): they are just advertisements in disguise. They tell you things that are near, as long as they are expensive shops who have paid to be in the database. It is not a technical problem, it is a problem with the business model. Maintaining a database is expensive. Very expensive.



As I said, no friend of mine is willing to advertise their location to whatever service. I live in Europe and people are concerned about the privacy aspects. They also do not believe that they can really control who does not get the information, and rightly so: it is a business model problem again. If you are offered this service, somebody is going to pay for it. The financing model is to track your shopping habits and sell that information. My cell phone company is offering location based service and even, I think, this kind of "friend radar". I read the fine prints about it. They won't disclose the info about where you are to private people unless you declare them as friends, but they will disclose it to their "selected business partners". I declined the offer.


The tablet does not come with an appointment calendar. I don't see that service coming to the tablet soon. Maybe on Nokia smartphones or on the PDAs of a firm like Garmin.

Not everything's business-model driven, especially things not relying on a central server, or not on frequent communication to that server (like the calendar service noted above).

It's not a free lunch; some of us pay for it by coding, and others by putting up with RTFM!, etc. Think of it as a community-funded lunch.