Trisent is new tracker star

location based services

Trisent Communications is on the verge of securing a deal for its mobile tracking technology with VimpelCom, Russia’s second-largest mobile phone operator.
VimpelCom has been testing out the technology in a paid-for pilot for the last few months. If the pilot is successful the application will be rolled out across Russia and the Ukraine.
Separately Trisent is also in negotiations for a similar pilot project with a Spanish location-based services operator.
The Dunfermline-based software company’s tracking application makes it easier and cheaper for employers to keep track of their staff through mobile phones. In the UK Trisent’s application is on offer from three tracking services companies: FollowUs, VeriLocation and Justfone.
At present, there are 500,000 phones and 200,000 vehicles tracked by global positioning satellite (GPS) technology in Britain.
GPS tracking, although accurate, is expensive at around 25p per location request and requires GPS equipment such as an aerial antenna. Tracking using cell-ID information is an alternative method currently in use but that too is expensive and a good deal less accurate than GPS.
The Trisent application is on offer at £20 per mobile phone per month, but it is thought that will be reduced to around £15 per mobile phone per month as more users adopt the system.
Trisent’s method of tracking mobile phones does away with the need for additional equipment to be installed on celluar networks.
The technology will locate a mobile phone to within 100 metres in real-time and, unlike GPS, works on public transport systems.
Gordon Povey, managing director of Trisent, said: “We’ve got the accuracy of our system to around 100m in dense urban areas such as London. Cell-ID techniques will give you a location to within 250m. We will get closer to GPS but we will not be able to match the accuracy of that method. There is scope, however, for us to improve our accuracy to around 50m in the next year.”
The key advantage of the Trisent system is that the software does not draw on the mobile phone’s battery. A mobile phone running a GPS application continuously will drain it of power in a couple of hours.
The Trisent system also means, that unlike GPS, there is no need to get a line of sight to the sky which means that it can be used on public transport.
Povey said: “The system works by running calculations on parameters such as signal strength and base station location. In all we are using 10 parameters.”
Trisent received £300,000 in venture capital funding from Edinburgh-based Sigma technology management in April 2005 and Povey is now trying to raise a further £500,000 in second-round funding.
Scottish Enterprise-backed Wireless Innovation Centre has been working alongside Trisent to help speed up the the market readiness of the application.
Alisdair Gunn, technology manager for the centre, said: “Trisent has found a real niche in a fast developing market. Once the market starts using the technology in their applications, it will be a serious competitor for GPS and existing alternatives.”
Gunn added: “Demand for location information is going to grow, there’s no doubt about that. At present Trisent’s focus is on fleet management but in the future applications such as Trisent’s could be combined with other applications such as Google Earth to provide applications for consumers.
Johan Fagerberg, of market analysts Berg Insight, believes mobile location services have not taken off as rapidly as many observers expected a few years ago.
In a report on the 2004 market, he estimates revenues from location-based services (LBS) in the European market were approximately £73.2 million. Over the coming five years, he believes this figure will grow to £1.5 billion and account for 4.5% of total non-voice revenues.
Fagerberg identified several factors which he says will bring about a mass market breakthrough for LBS.
These include improvements to handsets which will make the technology more user-friendly, a more widespread availability of high- accuracy technology and a need for operators to draw revenue from non-voice services
New European directives may also drive quicker implementation of high-accuracy positioning technology among mobile operators in Europe. Once the European LBS market takes off, says Fagerberg, the key market segments will be navigation, tracking and location-enhanced instant messaging.
Security conscious users should be reassured that the system cannot be loaded on to mobiles without a user’s knowledge. A small applet appears on the phone to inform the phone’s carrier that it is being tracked.
06 August