Chart topper
Don’t worry about getting lost or mugged with a new smart map. Just watch out for the marketers.
Walking down a city street, your mobile phone rings with a warning. You are getting too close to a high-crime area, as a quick glance at the mugging rate on the screen’s 3D city map reveals, and the automated system offers better directions to where you want to go. But if you need to summon a taxi or call for more urgent help, rest assured the location data will be sent automatically. The emergency services will know exactly where to find you.
This is the near future according to LBS, or location-based services, on phones, palmtop computers and in-car navigation systems with an alphabet soup of fancy features. These could include voice communications (GSM), always-on internet connections (GPRS) and the ability to get a fix from the network of global positioning satellites (GPS). But what really helps turn these raw technologies into useful services is the GIS (geographical information system) running in the background. In other words, a very smart map.
With LBS, you will never get lost, you should be safer and, best of all, from a commercial point of view, you will always be able to find somewhere to buy something specific. But you will also have lost another part of your remaining privacy.
Nick Jones, an analyst with Gartner in the UK, says: ”Do you really want your employer – or your spouse – to know where you are at every moment of every day?”
Well, the network already knows where you are, to some extent, if you are packing a mobile phone. GPS gives a more accurate position, which makes it commercially much more attractive.
But it may not be an easy sale. As Jones says, ”putting GPS in a phone is frightfully expensive: a £500 phone is too much for my 17-year-old daughter, and it’s too big to be fashionable.” However, people in the industry, such as Cellpoint’s Lars Pettersson, say GPS chips will get smaller and the cost will come down to ”a few pounds”. A system that was once used mainly for ships and military applications, then graduated to lorries and cars, is now available in handheld receivers sold in high street stores. Putting GPS chips in phones is the obvious next step.
Prash Vadgama of Navman GPS Navigation Solutions, which already sells GPS add-ons for Palm and PocketPC handhelds, says: ”Manufacturers have made phones very sophisticated and very small, and at the moment, mapping is a hindrance. But in two years, you are going to get GPS as standard in smart phones. It is up to the service providers to make it cost effective.”
This section of the industry has been given a huge boost by the US government’s Enhanced 911 regulations, according to Rik Temmink, who works on mapping for Microsoft in Seattle. (Calling 911 is the US equivalent of the UK’s 999.) E911 requires the network operators ”to provide emergency services personnel with location information that will enable them to locate and provide assistance to wireless 911 callers much more quickly.”
”That’s been a multibillion investment for all the big carriers here,” says Temmink. ”They’d rather not have made it, and now they are looking to monetize it.”
At least half of all the new mobile phones activated in the US must be E911-capable by June 30, and all of them by the end of the year. Although the accuracy is poor – mostly it locates you within 125 metres – it could open up a mass market to an industry that has previously concentrated almost entirely on professional uses such as transportation (including charging for road use), property and land management services (where should you build a new supermarket?), and government applications, including policing.
But delivering useful services is not a simple matter, and many companies are involved in the supply chain. First, you need digital maps, which are provided by suppliers such as Ordnance Survey in the UK. To be useful, the maps must be linked to software and data, for things like calculating distances, and locating points of interest from churches to cash machines. Then you need to be able to deliver the service by many different means -via the web and perhaps the paging network, as well as to GSM, GPRS and 3G phones – to a wide range of clients from the most basic mobiles to full-spec desktop computers. This can only be done if the industry adopts common standards, which it is trying to do at the moment.
In the UK, Ordnance Survey has already re-engineered its maps to create a national, digital MasterMap with more than 400m computer-friendly 16-digit identifiers, according to OS’s director general, Vanessa Lawrence. These ”topographic identifiers” or ”toids” enable different layers of data to be added to the basic map. ”The latest version has nine layers or themes,” she says, ”such as water and roads. We’re doing [satellite] imagery and a points of interest database, and three more layers this year. You can buy maps by area and by theme, so you are always being charged by the toid.”
Toids do not replace the old grid reference system, but provide greater accuracy and much more detail. ”The grid reference is very good for getting you to the pub,” she says, ”but if you buy a map in the newsagent’s, your street may not even be on it. I’ve probably got your bay window. I’ve certainly got the post box outside,” she says.
MasterMap also represents a brave, early move into XML, the eXtensible Markup Language that is being used to deliver next-generation web services. In this case, Ordnance Survey has used an XML schema called GML (Geography Markup Language), which is supported by the Open GIS Consortium. This should help solve the current problem where different government services have incompatible systems, and some services have several incompatible systems.
Being able to put different data sets on the same map allows all sorts of possibilities, especially if you have maps of things like crime incidents, road accidents, house prices and supermarket purchases. British police forces may not want to make detailed maps of crime patterns publicly available, with animations to show changes by time of day and things like school holidays, but it will happen in parts of the US, if it hasn’t already.
As one of the first big vendors to back XML, Microsoft is developing MapPoint.net, which will enable companies to develop their own location-based services. If you develop applications in the Visual Studio.net programming environment, launched last month, then you can include a mapping component just as easily as any other component. And while it could be anyone else’s mapping service, Microsoft’s is handily available in beta test form.
Microsoft, the new kid on the mapping block, became involved in 1995 when it bought a very small but very bright British company, NextBase, and took the seven key staff to the US. It backed the further development of the consumer product, AutoRoute, which is now a popular adjunct to Microsoft Works and Microsoft Office. With MapPoint, however, it is pioneering a market that is so small, it barely exists.
Temmink says: ”We’re operating an XML service, so it is a hosted platform: we run it in a big data centre here in Redmond.” An application could send the host queries in XML – give me a map, the distance between two points, and driving directions – and get answers back in the same web standard format, which is entirely independent of any Windows software or hardware. If the user has a Compaq iPaq, the answer could be displayed on a map; if a mobile phone, it could be a voice or SMS text message.
MapPoint is already running one interesting application for a well-known retailer. What it does is perform geographical queries against repeated credit card transactions, by looking at the times and places things were bought. If the transactions would be physically impossi ble without the use of duplicate cards, it alerts the store to a potential fraud – ideally before the thief has left the shop. ”So you have got an application that doesn’t display any maps, and it doesn’t even have a user interface, but it is very valuable, and it is enabled by using location as an ingredient,” says Temmink.
To make MapPoint more convenient and more attractive to corporate users, Microsoft has preloaded maps from Ordnance Survey and other companies, and as much demographic and yellow pages-type data as it can get. Mark Bramley, a NextBase original, adds: ”One of the barriers people perceive to building geographical information systems is that you need a lot of maps, a lot of data, and a lot of expertise. We’re aggregating content so that people don’t need to do it themselves.”
Of course, Microsoft isn’t building MapPoint for nothing. It is the XML engine behind MSN MapPoint, the mapping service on Microsoft’s own website. MapPoint is barely visible in the UK because it does not have an adequate selection of local maps and data. That will start to appear next week, preparing the way for a UK launch.
One alternative would have been to use MapQuest, which is by far the biggest mapping service on the web. However, two years ago, MapQuest was bought by AOL for $1.1bn in stock. Yahoo has also decided to go it alone, and has just replaced MapQuest with its own mapping service. The stage is set for a global battle between the big three – Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft – and more focused suppliers of web maps such as Multimap.com and Maporama.
The problem with web-based services is that, while they are hugely popular, there is no money in them. Sean Phelan, Multimap’s chief executive, says, ”The real business, from our point of view, is providing professional services. That’s what keeps us in business.” Examples include providing location services to retailers, and maps for estate agents’ websites. And as Gartner’s Nick Jones says, ”If you can track lorries carrying stock, or field service engineers, businesses will pay because the cost is nothing compared to the cost of owning a truck or a field service engineer.” Getting consumers to pay is another matter, and this explains the network operators’ enthusiasm for the combination of LBS and third-generation phones.
Guillaume Dordes, vice president of marketing for Alcatel’s Nextenso, explains: 3G ”allows for a new business model” where the phone becomes a marketing medium, like television. ”The current operator model is based on paying services, but with 3G, you can either have a free service with advertisements, or else you pay.”
So if you don’t pay for directions, or whatever, you may find that every shop within three streets will want to buzz your smart phone with virtual flyers and money-off coupons. And if you are ever involved in an accident, its colourful little screen could become a prime site for wireless adverts for ambulance services, private hospitals, and special offers on insurance policies. I’m sure you are looking forward to that. – The Guardian