Where are you?

location based services

Patrick Wilson, a 33-year-old San Ramon computer consultant, recently took his wife and two children to a crowded air show. But instead of being nervous about losing their kids among the masses, the family could relax because they had a way to find one another in an emergency.
The Wilson children, ages 5 and 6, each have their own Migo, a small phone for kids with a built-in computer chip that communicates their location. The Wilsons clipped the phones to their son's and daughter's clothing. If their children wandered out of sight, the parents could have used their own cell phones, also embedded with special microchip technology, to find them. The location awareness service, called Chaperone, was developed by Verizon Wireless.
Chaperone is only one of many emerging services now available in cell phones as a result of chip technology that communicates with global satellites and cell phone towers.
Best known for powering built-in car navigation services like OnStar, chips that use the global positioning system (GPS) also are at the heart of a growing number of handheld navigation devices. These devices, from companies like Magellan in Santa Clara, as well as Garmin and TomTom and in abundance at last week's Consumer Electronics Show, calculate a person's location data to provide directions in cars or while hiking.
``What's happening with GPS is you will start to see it incorporated into other consumer devices,'' said Stan Bruedele, a Gartner analyst. ``You might even see it incorporated into an iPod.''
In San Jose, GPS chip maker SiRF Technology is developing software to help cell phone companies and others more easily develop new location-based services. Kanwar Chadha, SiRF's founder and vice president of marketing, said digital cameras could be another device ripe for GPS, helping, for example, to identify locations in a digital photo.
The average cost for these kinds of extra services on cell phones is about $10 a month, but industry analysts say the market is poised for growth. ABI Research in New York predicts that subscribers of location services will grow from 10.3 million in 2006 to 309.7 million by 2011.
``As these services become more prevalent and make more money, and more operators begin rolling them out, that means operators have to enable their devices with GPS,'' said Don Fuchs, a founder and vice president of business development of Global Locate, another developer of GPS chips in San Jose.
GPS chips have gradually made their way into cell phones over the past decade as part of a federal mandate called Enhanced 911, which most carriers agreed to adopt by Dec. 31, 2005. The Federal Communications Commission requires those wireless phone carriers to incorporate some sort of location-finding technology in their cell phones as a safety measure so emergency call centers can find wireless callers who dial 911.
The family of James Kim, the CNET editor who died in the Oregon wilderness last month, was located because two engineers managed to trace a brief ping from his wife's cell phone to a nearby cell phone tower. The signal indicated that the Kims were in a certain sector of the cell tower's 26-mile radius, and that information helped rescuers narrow their search. But by the time they reached the Kims, James already had left the family to find help. If the Kims had had a GPS device to pinpoint their location, they might have been able to find their way out of the woods. Sometimes, however, GPS is impaired by tree cover.
But not all the carriers that agreed to install GPS chips in their phones have complied. Earlier this month, the FCC rejected a request for an extension from several of the non-compliant carriers. Four have been referred for enforcement action by the FCC and could be subject to fines.
According to Bruedele of Gartner in San Jose, about half the cell phones in the United States in 2005 contained GPS technology. Most are powered by chips developed by Qualcomm of San Diego and are offered by Verizon and SprintNextel.
``More and more, the operators are providing you with a portfolio of things you can do that are location-based,'' Bruedele said.
On the heels of Wherify Wireless in 2004, Sprint last year launched a Family Locator service to help parents locate their children. Verizon's Chaperone service followed a month later. The services cost the cell phone subscriber about an extra $9.99 a month.
Other services include cell phones that can provide directions, such as Verizon's VZ Navigator, a turn-by-turn direction service that can aid drivers or walkers. The company charges an additional $9.99 a month for this service, or $3.99 for 24 hours.
In November, another wireless carrier, Helio, rolled out a new device called Drift. It has built-in access to Google Maps and a ``Buddy Beacon'' to help locate others on the same service. Helio users can switch on their Buddy Beacon and broadcast their location to friends on their ``buddy'' list.
``The current model is to have people pay for these services, but whether that will remain in the future is the question,'' said Dan Benjamin, and analyst with ABI Research.
He noted that the MySpace generation, a target audience for friend-finder type GPS services, patronizes free social networking Web sites that generate revenue from advertising. It's a model that wireless carriers could imitate to increase their revenue.
But for all its convenience, there's a major downside to location-awareness services: loss of personal privacy. Carriers are creating services that consumers must agree to turn on, but privacy advocates worry that carriers will collect location data that could be used against consumers.
``It's a phenomenally useful technology that scares the bejesus out of me,'' said Mark Rasch, a Bethesda, Md., attorney who specializes in computer crime, privacy and security. Wilson, the father of two who uses the Chaperon service, said his children don't have any qualms about its use.
``We are raising our kids to know that we don't necessarily use it as a monitoring device,'' Wilson said. ``We use it more as a security device. Their reaction is one of both responsibility, they know where the phone is, and they take care of it and they feel more safe.''