Garmin announces delays for the Nuvifone

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MobileCrunch reports today that Garmin has provided details in its second quarter earnings call that the Nuvifone has been delayed until the first quarter of 2009.

From the analysis calls today:

The nüvifone will not be available in fourth quarter as previously announced. While we had hoped to have carrier launches in the fourth quarter, we have found that meeting some of the carrier specific requirements will take longer than anticipated. We remain pleased with carrier interest in the device and are working toward making necessary design changes to meet their requirements. We anticipate launching the product during the first half of 2009

In short: The Apple iPhone 3G is beating a lot of players in this space and I suspect that the availability of the Nuvifone right now would be a real flop.

I'm still unsure about the viability of this product as it was announced to counter the iPhone 3G announcement at the WWDC in June.

My best guess is that this product will be pulled before it actually hits the road. It's too late now for Garmin to get any traction over the iPhone 3G which already has an embbeded GPS chip. Carriers knows this and that's why they are reluctant in supporting this phone.

Happy location reporting - Martin

The Location-based revolution is coming according to GigaOm

Om Malik, founder and senior writer of GigaOm, has a nice perspective on why the commoditization of GPS and the associated emergence of Location-Based services is poised to change the market. Here's the interesting excerpt:

But lately I’ve been feeling like I may have been too conservative with my outlook for the location-based services revolution.
The main reason is the ubiquitousness of mobile phones; the sheer number of them that get shipped each year guarantees LBS a huge audience. Of course, in order for LBS to be on mobile phones, we need applications, which is where I believe the iPhone plays a vital role. Its large screen and built-in GPS (and now its 3G speeds) enable and encourage truly interesting LBS applications.

I think the introduction of an embedded GPS chip within the iPhone is what the LBS industry needs to move itself forward. Sure, we had a number of different cell phones in the past with embedded GPS chips. And this is the core of the problem: they were different cell phones with very different characteristics. So why is the iPhone different? It relies mostly with developers and their ability to create truly rich mobile applications. No more of those crappy Java-based apps. With that richness, comes very immersive applications.

If you add into the mix location-based services, then you got the perfect recipe for the best location-based device. And this was echoed by the Loopt CEO at the WWDC keynote: "This is the best version of Loopt we've ever made, and by far the best device we've had the opportunity to work with. We've developed for every mobile platform out there, this one is the best and the most powerful" [WWDC Keynote @ 0:28:32]

Although this comment was made in the context of the WWDC, so you should remove some adjectives, I'm convinced that this platform will push forward LBS services further than anything that has been attempted so far.

Happy location reporting - Martin

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Are Location-based services too early ?

Today while reading blog news with Google Reader, I hit the report from TechCrunch about the shutdown of another location-based service: Meetro.



Here's the functional description of Meetro for the post in TechCrunch:

To those of you not familiar with Meetro, we were one of the first location-based social networks. We figured out where you were physically and then we would tell you else was around you in real-time. You would then be able to instant message with them, check out their profiles, and hopefully meet up. Other functionality included telling you about restaurants close by, media created nearby, and various local information that pertained to your location. We also supported all your various instant messaging protocols (AIM, MSN, Yahoo) and a slew of other social features.

And the telling quote is: "Even with a robust product we simply couldn’t capture enough market share". This echoes by own words in the interview I gave Austin Hill on his blog.

Seems the physical location problem is an interesting problem but very difficult to get right. And I think it has to do with the dilution of the network. When you launch a location-based service (LBS) on the internet, it is accessible world-wide. You have users (aka internet friends) from every part of the globe.

However a LBS real value is proximity of your network, so the service can detect and properly tell you who's nearby. When you user base is widely located, these functions, although very interesting on paper, do not work. Thus the value of your service is widely diminished and so is it's stickiness.

Dodgeball tried it and they failed, Kakiloc (us) tried it and we failed and now Meetro is joining the bench.

Brightkite is having a go a it right now. However looking at my friends statuses, only a few of them are actively using it. The others (early adopters) came, look and went away. I argue that most of the false-traction that Brightkite is having now is from those early adopters but the stickiness is not there yet. They have real nice interfaces to the service and a very cool iPhone web application as well. Still I'm not convinced on the success until they implement the key elements.

If you are building another location-based service, you should learn from these post-mortem experiences and you should really leverage other services that can help you move forward. The FireEagle service is one of them.

As for me, I'm currently parked on the Falkland Islands within BrightKite until they send me a message in a bottle that they fully support FireEagle.

Happy location reporting - Martin

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Reportage - Checkpoint

The development of the native iPhone application "Reportage" is progressing slowly. The transition from Ruby to Objective-C takes a little time to get used to.

But I really like the development environment provided by Apple (XCode / Interface Builder) and especially the stability of the 4th release of the SDK.

Here's a screenshot of the Reportage icon on the iPhone Home page. I'll continue posting progress on the development of "Reportage". Stay tuned.



Happy location reporting - Martin

Reportage - The Splash Screen

Here's the splash screen for Reportage.



But according to the iPhone User Interface Guidelines, application should not have a splash screen, so this is going into the credits section then.

Coming soon for your iPhone
Happy location reporting - Martin

Reportage en cours...

Coming soon for the iPhone...

Happy location reporting - Martin

iPhone SDK works on PowerMac Architecture

The iPhone SDK has been released by Apple a week ago and already there is has been over 100 000 downloads of the kit. As you can imagine, I was the first inline to get it. However upon installation on my Dual G5, I was surprised to see that there was no iPhone project templates available in XCode. After some researching, it found this note posted on Apple Site about support for Intel-based architecture Mac only.



So I was contemplating the purchase of a dedicated Mac Mini box as a development machine until I hit this site that explains how to use the SDK on a PowerMac architecture.

After following every steps, voila !!!



Now I will delve into the CoreLocation API and report back here soon.

Update: If you are using the iPhone SDK Beta 2, please follow the directions here instead.

Happy location reporting - Martin

iPhone SDK and developer's roadmap to be announced on March 6th

Apple sent a number of press invitations to attend the unveiling of the iPhone SDK / roadmap on March 6th at the Apple Cupertino Campus.

I'm really eager to learn what Apple is planning for developers and especially the deployment model of iPhone third-party applications. As I eluded in a previous post, I'm afraid that all applications will have to be channelled through the ITunes application and that they will exercise some kind of policing of applications.

I just remember when FaceBook application directory was flooded with pending applications and developers had to provide backdoor links to provide Facebook users access to it.

More info and move coverage to be done after the unveiling.

Happy location reporting - Martin

Update: It seems my fear of Apple being the watchdog of iPhone third-party applications has been officialized by AppleInsider.

Mobile Location-Based services: The Ins and Outs of the latest crop

I've noticed that there is a lot of activity around Mobile Location-based services lately. My Google reader starred items is showing a higher number of articles on that subject that I need to research.

Let's review some of the early announcements and provide some insights starting with the new Apple iPhone Firmware 1.1.3 announced at MacWorld in early January.

Apple iPhone/iPod Touch firmware 1.1.3

This announcement has been covered in numerous blogs and brings the "MyLocation" feature of Google Maps to the iPhone which I have covered earlier. However Apple has added the Wifi-sensing technology from SkyHook Wireless to the mix. This is very interesting as this technology is also available in the latest firmware upgrade for the iPod Touch as well. SkyHook Wireless is really the leading provider of Wifi-sensing positioning technology today. The inclusion of this technology within the new firmware is also a huge setback for it's competitor: Navizon. I've been following both companies for a long time now and I'm now surprised to see SkyHook being selected as the chosen winner by Apple.

SkyHook was financed early on by Intel Capital and is based on derivative work from the PlaceLab projet originated at Intel Labs. Given Apple very close relationship with Intel, it was natural fit that they would be selected. Navizon is surely not gaining any strengths with this announcement and will likely go underwater unless they can strike a deal with a competing company. Which one ? I'm still searching.

I've tried to use the Navizon software on my iPhone and the experience was really painful. The web site would not register me correctly and the software failed every time.

SkyHook: in, Navizon: out

Loopt partnership with CBS Mobile

On February 6th, GigaOM and a number of bloggers announced that Loopt has signed a partnership with CBS Mobile to help them push location-based ads to their customers. CBS will be using Loopt GPS technology to enable location-specific ads to be overlaid of top of web sites browsed by CBS mobile customers. I'm not really sure what is the added value of Loopt in this equation. Loopt, which was covered earlier as well, started out as a mobile personal-locator service and is financed by Sequoia Capital. However, there has been some shakeup within Loopt as the executive vice president of corporate development and marketing left the company to become the EIR at Charles River Ventures. Was that a sign of the new orientation for the company? Also given all the VC money going into Mobile Ads company (AdMob is a prime example), it seems that Loopt is moving sideways from it's early direction.

Also, compared to SkyHook or Navizon, Loopt does not have a lot of investments into locating technologies. It mainly relies on the embedded GPS chips within the cellphone or uses the AutoDesk positioning framework to pinpoint the location of the user. And currently, it's offering can only be used by Sprint / Boost Mobile customers. I think this is a too narrow market to actually be successful and something I still argue needs to be addressed. We will see where this is going but I doubt very much that Loopt will be successful in the Location-Based Advertisements (LBA) market.

Loopt: fading

Happy location reporting - Martin

Air: The Only Thing Left In Your Wallet After You Buy Apple’s New Laptop

Very interesting quote from Duncan Riley of TechCrunch

Air: The Only Thing Left In Your Wallet After You Buy Apple’s New Laptop

Also,  I'm in the process of updating my iPhone to firmware release 1.1.3 and I will report on the new
pseudo-GPS functionality (via cell tower trilateration and wifi beacon sensing) in an upcoming post.

Happy location reporting - Martin

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The iPhone untold story revealed

A very very interesting article by Wired about the untold story of the iPhone:

The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry

Happy location reporting - Martin

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Is Jaiku being dodgeballed ???

An interesting post from Ars technica this morning about problems with the Jaiku RSS servers and the lack of response from the Jaiku team since its acquisition by Google.

There seems to be no new development and new features with the Jaiku service and the blog is still silent since the acquisition by Google. Users are leaving the service to go to competing Twitter. Well this is exactly what I have done. My Jaiku account was closed a few weeks ago and I'm now exclusively on Twitter.

Is the Jaiku team preparing a big coup or are they too busy trying to debug and develop on the Android platform ?.

If they do not react quickly, looks like the Jaiku service will be DodgeBalled pretty soon. That would be too bad because it was very stable and quite promising.

Happy location reporting - Martin

SiRF to Optimize Location Awareness on Android Platform

The push is now stronger for all handheld devices to have an embedded GPS chip that will support the Android platform:

SiRF to Optimize Location Awareness on Android Platform | Telematics Journal

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Google Maps for Mobile: No GPS needed !!!

Google released today a new version of Google Maps for Mobile devices. Apart from some cosmetic changes and menu cleanup, the big splash is the My Location feature which enables the software to derive your location using cell tower calculation also known as trilateration.

Here's the explanation of such technology from Wikipedia :

Trilateration is a method of determining the relative positions of objects using the geometry of triangles in a similar fashion as triangulation. Unlike triangulation, which uses angle measurements (together with at least one known distance) to calculate the subject's location, trilateration uses the known locations of two or more reference points, and the measured distance between the subject and each reference point. To accurately and uniquely determine the relative location of a point on a 2D plane using trilateration alone, generally at least 3 reference points are needed.

I've seen some web references that says this is now possible due to the earlier purchase of Jaiku. However I do not think this is the case. The Jaiku mobile software
was only recording the current cell id and associating a name to it and relaying that information to the server.  This information is readily available in a Nokia S60 phone.
You can witness it yourself by downloading the very good Symbian S60 CellTrack application available here.

In order to get a valid location reading, you need the cell information from three adjacent towers (3 reference points). This information is only available from the mobile provider. And the accuracy depends on the size of the cells (larger cells in farm land = less accurate, smaller cells (or pico cells) in urban areas = much more accurate).

Google could be using a third-party provider to get that information like KnowledgeWhere in Calgary, Alberta.  But I'm pretty sure they build that infrastructure internally to ensure compatibility with the Android platform and it's integrated Location API.

However I latched onto something very interesting while listening to the demonstration video : "the service gets better the more you use it" @ 1:51.
Why is this of importance ? Why would it get better ? The towers are not moving, the cell ids are very static. Perhaps their database of cells gets better.

So I'm venturing that Google is (perhaps) sending cell id information to their servers when users are enabling their cell-phone GPS chips to augment their cell location information. That is very feasible and was demonstrated early on by the PlaceLab project which folded into Skyhook Wireless somehow.

This way, as more people are using GPSs, they would provide more location information about cells and in return would augment the accuracy of the "My Location" service.

Location-Based Services are being push forward again and thanks to Google for doing it so.

Happy location reporting - Martin

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iUi running within the Android Emulator

The iPhoneWeb dev group reports that these guys have successfully been running the iUi toolkit within the Android Emulator.

The iUi toolkit is a set of .js and .css files developped by Joe Hewitt of Firebug fame and now working for Facebook. Using that toolkit you can easy create iPhone web application that mimics native applications but within a web environment.

I used the iUi toolkit in order to support the iPhone / iPod Touch for Kakiloc Mobile and I really liked it. Once you know which CSS class and id to use in order to obtain the visual representation you want, the rest is pretty easy. The toolkit also takes care, automatically, of loading subsequent screens using AJAX technology.

Here's the first public screenshot of the iPhone interface I did for Kakiloc Mobile using iUi. The top part was displaying the latest "on the move" information while the bottom part was enabling actions for selected friends.

So the fact that iUi is running within the Android emulator is a good test of compatibility of the WebKit browser, however I think it should stay that way: only a test. Frankly, I do not want to see iPhone like applications running on Android infrastructure and devices. The Android UI and user interaction model is what characterize the platform. When you select a mobile device, you select it based on these characteristics.

Those characteristics is also what defines a mobile device. Some are better than others and I must disclose that I do use, everyday, a Windows Mobile 6 device.

I'm sure Android applications and devices will have a character of their own. Let them play in that mobile ecosystem and we will see which one is able to get over the noise and provide a better user experience. Their own native characters will act as the differentiator.

Happy location reporting - Martin

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Google using Dalvik VM in Android Platform

Google is not using J2ME for it's latest mobile handset platform. I did not really focused on that detail when I saw the architecture diagram. Instead Google created Dalvik, a virtual machine for mobile handset and according to this posting from CNET, it has more to do with licensing and actual functionality.

The latest announcement concerns Android, Google's mobile phone software platform. As Nancy Gohring of the IDG News Service writes: Instead of using the standards-based Java Micro Edition (JME) as an engine to run Java applications, Google wrote its own virtual machine for Android, calling it Dalvik. There are technical advantages and disadvantages to using Dalvik, developers say, but technology may not have been the driver for Google. Google most likely built Dalvik as a way to get around licensing issues with Sun that would have come with using JME, said Stefano Mazzocchi, a developer and board member at Apache Labs.

Google is becoming a computer systems company | The Pervasive Datacenter - CNET Blogs

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Google Android and LBS Services

Google announced the Android Platform on November 5th and released the first public SDK for it on November 12th. After reading comments and looking at the overall architecture view of the framework, I decided to investigate the android.location API a little more closely.

The API is very similar to the JSR initiative for location-based services: JSR179
However there are a number of very interesting additions that Google decide to provide :

1:  public List android.location.LocationManager.getProviders(Criteria criteria)

Returns a list of LocationProviders that satisfy the given criteria, or null if none do When requesting the LocationProvider, the client application can define a criteria for the type of provider that should be returned. You can specify the power requirement and also the monetary cost associated to the usage of the API

2:  public void android.location.LocationManager.addProximityAlert(double latitude, double longitude, float radius, long expiration, Intent intent)

You can also register an intent (an action of a certain kind) to be executed when the devices "enter" or "leaves" a radius of a specific size from a central location.

The first item is interesting because it would allow you to conserve battery life and, I assume, toggle between (free) GPS positionning and perhaps (not so free) cell-tower triangulation.

The second item is where the interesting stuff can happen.

Imagine an application that knows the location of all your friends and the location of their favorite spots along with the permission associated to all those locations. When you are moving around the mobile application on the device could register some intents (by obtaining specific lat/long information from a dedicated server) to alert you of interesting places but also of nearby friends.

Looking at the Intent API, you could easily display the contact information of that contact in proximity and start an interaction.

This simple functionality is enabling a much higher functional value of client-side for LBS applications.

Instead of receiving basic text messages when friends are in proximity (which we were doing in Kakiloc), you can now be firing specific mobile applications based on a contextual location.

I'm sure Google is seeing this as a big enabler for location-based advertising and other potiential advertising applications. This has a lot of potential for integrating mobile applications with location-based technology.

I'll dig deeper and see what else Android is supplying. I will also look at OpenMoko because their framework also add a very interesting LBS API.

Happy location reporting - Martin

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New name, new coverage...

Our Kakiloc service was closed last week and, as such, the blog associated to it was no longer appropriate.

However I just love covering emerging mobile and location-based technologies, so I decided to rename it:

The Mobile Location-based Informant

As such, I will continue to look at mobile technologies from various companies and give you my inside look at the impact of those in the IT and social networking world.

Thanks for your readership - Martin

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An overview of the mobile handsets and data

I just finished reading an excellent article from Michael Mace on the state of mobile smart phones and mobile data usage. This is a really good read for anyone (like us) developing software for mobile handset.

The research article provides an eye-opening view on the usage of mobile data along with a description of the targeted user's for that domain. Go read it.

Happy location reporting - Martin

Apple introduces the iPhone.

After much speculation and a lot of rumors, Apple finally announced the iPhone today at the MacWorld 2007 Keynote event. I read the live blogging event and I took a look at the Quicktime QuickTours and I must say that this is a pretty impressive piece of technology.

A huge contrast to my first "smart phone", the Ericsson T28 World Phone. It was very tiny but so what the screen. Compared this to the iPhone and there is a world of difference.

The iPhone will be a quad-band phone working on GSM / Edge networks but the beauty is the OS powering this device.

Not Symbian, not J2ME but a full-fledge operating system: OSX.

This opens up a lot of possibility for mobile applications as the power and the functionality available on this device is way beyond what is out there today. And also the development environment; I venture that we will be able to easily port existing dashboard widgets to it (btw: we are working on such for Kakiloc).

However, for us Canadian citizens, we will have to wait and see if the iPhone upon it's introduction, will be GSM locked to Cingular only. They have been announced as the exclusive US partner for such.

Also, there was rumors that the device will contain an embedded GPS chip. Unfortunately, I do not think it is there.
It's availability is slated for June 2007. There was also a lot of emphasis over the partnership with Google and the integration of Google Maps on it. Given the push by Apple to align itself more with social networks is there an LBS application waiting in the wings; remember that Google bought Dodgeball some time ago.

Humm that could prove interesting...

We will get our hands on the iPhone and will support within the Kakiloc service.

But this is a revolutionary new cell phone.

No wonder RIM and Palm stocks took a hit today.

Happy location reporting - Martin