CellSpotting, A Global Location Based Information Service

location based services


A Global Location Based Information Service

“CellSpotting.com” is a global location based information service for mobile (GSM and UMTS) users.

Use CellSpotting to find information for the place you are at! and even better, you can help and give information to others about places you know! CellSpotting is a Collaborate Location Based service built by its users.

This is what you can use it for:

- Find the name and location information about a place you are at.

- Track your Cellspotting friends, You can find the whereabout of your Cellspotting friends.

- Find the distance and direction to spotted cells!

How do I use it:

Download the Cellspotting Client into your cellphone, (currently Nokia Series60, see Software section). Run the Cellspotting client, select the "Go Cellspotting" menu choice and it will connect to and query the CellSpotting Database. Hopefully the cell is already known and you can get some useful information back. The connection can be dial up or preferably gprs. If you stumble across an unknown cell you become a cell “Discoverer” and can help give additional information about the location!. This way you can help other CellSpotting users when they come to your home town!

Take a look at our Coverage Map (You can help extend it!)

You can also see some recent activity in the Statistics pages.

Services:

Friend Spotting

CellSpotting.com is not only a geographic location service, it also serves as an information exchange system among friends, It can from the beginning help to locate all your friends, provided that they also use the service. For it to work, the cell information and the location of each cell needs to be stored and kept updated, and this is done as a collaborate work made by its users. The use of the service is free of charge, it works as a collaborate surveying of the mobile networks of the world.

Tourist services, and more.....

We are working on additional services that make use of the database, such as tourist information, event-guides, local interest guides, maybe a “jazz clubs near me” and other types of categorized services. The goal is to keep it available for users free of charge. The location information provided by users stay in the public domain, but CellSpotting will still reserve the right to use the information for professional use. Furthermore, the service can help to give information (from various categories) relevant to your needs at the location you are at.

How CellSpotting works:

First some mobile network basics.
A mobile phone is a radio device, when turned on, it is in contact with a “cell”. A cell is the smallest geographic area covered by a base station in the mobile network. The size of a cell can be from 100 meters in urban areas up to a few kilometers in rural areas. Each cell is identified by a number, the “cellid”. Cells are grouped into areas and the cells and areas are operated by a Mobile Operator. The idea with CellSpotting.com is to read this information from the phone, use it as a “key” to look up the geographic location of the phone. If the cell is not known to the CellSpotting server then the user can assist, and help to provide with geographic information, it can can be a street address or some other information regarding the location of the cell. Is the cellid really unique, what about areas and operators? True, the cellid is a number and is only unique within an Area, but together with the areaid and the network code, they form a 3 part key and can uniquely identify the cell.

Using it

How do I use it and how can I help?

Users of Cellspotting.com can run the Cellspotting software, fill, use and have fun with CellSpotting. The software can read which cell it in, use the cell information as a key and lookup the location information from the CellSpotting server. If you happen to stumble across an unknown cell , then you have become a discoverer and can help to fill in relevant geographic information for this cell. What do I need to start using CellSpotting? The easiest way is if you have a modern phone such as a Nokia Series60 phone (3650, N-Gage, 7160, 6630 ...) Then you can download the CellSpotting software HERE.

If you have an Sony Ericsson P800, as soon as Sony Ericsson has made the functionality available for developers, then we hope that the UIQ software can be downloaded Here!. We are sorry that UIQ phones (from at least Sony Ericsson and Motorola) do not provide the correct cell information using the public Symbian api's at the moment. Sorry about that, but it is beyond our control.

How accurate is the geographic information in the database?

Technically it depends on how dense your operator has placed his cells, in urban areas it is dense and rural areas not so dense, The good thing is that it roughly represent how you would respond when someone asks “Where are you?“ If you are in a city you often refer to a street corner, building or so, and when you are in an rural area you respond with a name referring to rural location. Informationwise the accuracy depends on how well all of us users fill in the information about cells, areas and operators. please use common sense and good “CellSpotting Etiquette”


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