WirelessMoves

Experimenting with my newly acquired Bluetooth GPS receiver, Python and S60 phone to come up with a tracking and network measurement software, some further thoughts have sprung up about what could be done with the location data. Once the GPS device is embedded in the phone it’s easy to store the exact location as part of the ‘exif’ data of pictures taken with the built in camera. It’s already got a name: GeoTagging.  Here are some ideas what I would like to do with it:

Automatically geotag my pictures I upload to Flickr from the mobile phone via Shozu: Flickr could then be enhanced to detect the geo location in the picture and offer a link directly below a picture to a mapping site such as Google Maps / Google Earth or the Yahoo equivalent. The user clicks on the link and a map of the location where the picture was taken pops up. The photo site could also go through its database to see if other users have taken pictures in the surroundings and show provide a link on the map to those pictures.

Enrich my private picture archive with location information: How about adding some geo functionality in Nokia’s Lifeblog!? The software could detect the geoinformation in a picture and open up my locally installed Google Earth and show me the location. Beyond that the user could create ‘location sets’ of let’s say all pictures taken during a vacation or a trip. Lifeblog could then open Google Earth to show which route I was taken and provide a link back to my pictures at every location a picture was taken.

Enhanced eMail program that detects geotags in pictures: Let’s say I want to show a friend where I am. So I take a picture which has an embedded geotag and use my mobile phone’s eMail client to send the picture. When he receives the picture the eMail program or external picture viewer should detect the geotag and again offer me a link to either my locally installed mapping software (e.g. Google Earth) or a web link to an online service to see where the picture was taken.

The beauty of these solutions is the ease of use for both creator and consumer of the picture. No user interaction is required to geotag the picture as the phone automatically puts the GPS coordinates into the picture. Once programs and websites support geotags there’s also no complicated user interaction required to use the information. Just click on a link or a button and ‘voila’, a map pops up to bring you closer to the image.

So Yahoo, Flicker, Shozu, Nokia and all others, it’s time for some products 🙂

In an ideal world, the same radio frequencies would be used for wireless systems worldwide and a device bought on one continent would just work as well on another. Unfortunately, this is not quite the reality.

Countries in Europe, Asia and Africa use the 900 and 1800 MHz band for GSM while UMTS uses the 2100 MHz band. Consequently phones sold in these regions usually support these frequencies. Most phones also support GSM on 1900 MHz which is used in North America but lack the ability for GSM 850 and UMTS 1900 MHz which are also essential for this part of the world. So people visiting North America are always handicapped as in-house and rural coverage is sometimes a problem due to the missing 850 MHz band. UMTS does not work at all…

For people living in North America the situation is vice versa when they travel. Their phones support the 850 MHz band for GSM and the 1900 MHz for GSM and UMTS. These phones usually also support the 1800 MHz band which is one of the frequencies used for GSM in the rest of the world. However 900 MHz GSM and 2100 MHz UMTS is missing…

But hope is on the horizon. Sierra Wireless will launch a Quad Band GSM – Dual Band UMTS data card soon which will support GSM/GPRS/EDGE 850,900,1800 and 1900 as well as UMTS in both the 2100 MHz and 1900 MHz bands. Thus, such worries will be a thing of the past. Let’s hope the technology ends up in mobile phones soon. Nokia for example should have a great interest in this if they want to improve their position in the North America market. Even one of their latest flagship mobile, the N80 does not support both UMTS bands. There’s one for the world market with 2100 MHz UMTS support and another verison with 1900 MHz support for North America. Time to change this!

The question remains why mobile phone manufacturers are so reluctant to produce ‘world band’ phones!? Is the extra hardware cost so much higher than the overhead of producing  and maintaining different hardware and software versions?

A side note: The story is about to be continued. UMTS for the 900 MHz and is already specified and it seems only a matter of time before some countries will start using it. Also, I wonder when UMTS will make it’s appearance in the 850 MHz band.

Now that most work for the book is done, I have some time to experiment. I recently started to take a closer look at Python for the S60 mobile phone OS and what you can do with it. As I am pretty much into wireless networks, I wanted to have an application that tracks the network coverage where I go for later analysis. I am also quite interested in location based services and a firm believer that these services will only really take off once the GPS receiver is built into the phone. Combining these two interests with a little bit of programming and a recently bought Nokia LD-3W Bluetooth GPS receiver resulted in the following little quality time project:

The Python script I am currently working on queries the GPS receiver, measures the network signal quality and outputs the information in Google Earth format for visualization on the PC. The script is not quite finished yet but the  basic functionality of logging location and signal quality and visualize the data in Google Earth already works. The picture on the left (click to enlarge) shows a result of a 20 minutes test drive. While the line is green, network reception is good. Blue indicates average and red symbolizes a weak signal. Should you be one of the five people on this planet who does similar things and are interested in the source, let me know.

Another Mobile Monday Paris took place last night at the Zen Factory in Paris close to the Place de la République. Again a fabulous event, lots of good discussions with people coming to the event and very interesting presentations. For pictures of the event, see my Flickr picture set of the evening.

First speaker of the evening was Stephane Delbecque of Yahoo France presenting Yahoo’s Connected Life vision. Focus of the presentation was Yahoo’s partnering with the Fifa to bring the football world championship to mobile phones all around the world.

Next, Didier Lesteven of Medialive presented their product which protects digital content on the way from the content provider to the consumer. This is done by their product by stripping out 1% of a media flow which is then protected and sent to the consumer in a secure way.

Afterward Philippe Coup-Jambet of Mobitype gave an overview of their moblogging platform that lets you create your own blog from your mobile phone and also acts as a mobile RSS aggregator. The product is currently in a first trial phase with the public launch expected this summer. The service will be free and is funded by ads which are put into the generated pages. I specifically liked the options of having the top 24h hour posts in one menu as that is missing in my current mobile RSS software.

Presentation number four was by Vincent Berge of the PACA Mobile Center, a new parisian institution in Marseilles that offers a platform for Java developers to test their products on a multitude of different phones.

And finally, Catherine Ramus made sure the evening was not only about technology in itself but also about combining technology with art and her presentation was about how to use 2D bar codes in a museum to get video stream art right on your mobile phone.

Great presentations, thanks very much to the presenters, I really enjoyed the evening! The presentations might end up on the official Mobile Monday France website in a couple of days and you can check them out here.

Only 5 years ago, the Internet started to get mobile for me with the launch of the first GPRS networks in Germany and the advent of the first GPRS capable phones. What a different world it was compared to today.

I must have been one of the first GPRS users of the network because at this time and phones and networks were in a shaky beta phase at best. The Ericsson T-39 (first picture on the left) was my first GPRS phone. Equipped with a tiny monochrome display, it could bundle two timeslots to give me a blazing download speed of 25 kbit/s. For web browsing I used a Palm III, also with a monochrome display and one of the first embedded web browsers available at the time. Again, pretty much a beta experience but I loved it.

Yesterday, 5 years later, I was sitting in one of Paris’ best cafés, enjoying good company, an ice cream and discussing mobile lifestyle: Instead of bringing a magazine with me to browse through, my Nokia N70 is always with me ready to take pictures, videos and to connect me to people and the Internet. Here I was, reading the latest news using the Opera browser on the phone, when my eMail client informs me of a new eMail of my publisher in which he informs me that the shipping date for my next book will be July 14th. Great! A little while later, I uploaded some pictures in the background to Flickr which I took in the afternoon while reading some interesting blog entries in the mobile RSS reader at the same time. On the network side, UMTS is much more stable than GPRS was only 5 years ago and data rates have improved from the 25 kbit/s of 5 years ago to 384 kbit/s today.

So what are we in for in 5 years from now? Network speeds will certainly be beyond 8 MBit/s in downlink and 2-3 MBit/s in uplink direction. Prices for mobile data will (hopefully) be at a level to attract the general audience and in combination with the increased bandwidth and services such as video up- and download, LDA applications using the Internet connection and built in GPS receivers will make the application landscape even richer.

Not that I am the greatest football fan of all times but a recent entry in Christian’s blog has caught my interest: Yahoo has launched a mobile version of their football world cup coverage site and seems to be the official partner of the Fifa. Check it out at the Fifa web page. There’s a link leading to information how to access the mobile site in the middle of their home page. For those of you not living in one of the countries where they offer a free SMS with the link, point your mobile browser to http://www.fifa.com/e/wc.

There’s lots of content on the mobile site already and you can register for sweets like free SMS alerts on goals when your favourite team is playing. Looks like Yahoo sees this as a good opportunity to get people interested in the mobile web and of course what Yahoo is doing in this domain. With all the media hype around the world cup and people being so excited I tend to agree.

I haven’t seen too many mobile offerings for the last Winter Olympics (but I have to admit I didn’t really look for them). So is this the first time such a world wide event also get’s some world wide and free (to what an extend we will see) coverage on the mobile web? I wished there was a similar offer to keep track of what’s going on in Formula 1.

So here we are right in the battle between content providers such as Yahoo and mobile operators to get the attention of mobile users. Let’s see who does a better job. I’ve quickly checked if my home operator (Vodafone Germany) is offering anything similar and how it compares. Looks like they also offer free Goal alerts via SMS but beyond that I didn’t see much. Let’s see how it develops.

While having visited a colleague in his office yesterday I saw an interesting global map on the wall showing the current global GSM rollout status. The map was different from all other maps I’ve previously seen as countries which adopted GSM technology were not completely filled with a color marking them as "covered". Instead, the map showed the detailed coverage status in each country. The map together with even more detailed continental maps can be found at www.coveragemaps.com.

Here are some of my personal observations which quite surprised me:

The U.S.: When I last checked two or three years ago, GSM coverage in the U.S. was patchy at best. I still remember checking on Texas and finding an almost empty map. Quite a different picture now.

South America: Except for the rain forests, the continent is well covered with GSM now.

3G Rollout in Europe: The map gives quite a mixed picture varying from country to country. While the UMTS rollout seems to be quite advanced in some countries, there are lots of ‘GSM’ only areas in other countries:

Germany, U.K., Ireland, Sweden, Austria: These countries seem to be pretty well covered with 3G already. I can confirm this for Germany at least where Vodafone has dedicated coverage even in small villages (<5000 people). Nevertheless, it’s still patchy on the countryside. Same goes for Austria.

France: Quite disappointing, the green "GSM only" areas are still substantial. The map seems to be quite accurate as it compares quite well to the official map of Orange, France that can be found here.

Italy: This one is strange, only a couple of yellow "UMTS" patches here and there. But I don’t think the data is up to date in this case as Italy was one of the first countries deploying UMTS and the current Wikipedia entry on Vodafone Italy says that 70% of the population are now covered by UMTS. I tried to find coverage maps on tim.it and vodafone.it but it didn’t find any. Is my Italian so bad? If somebody sees maps, please tell me. The only info I found was on tim.it. On this page you can select you city and a database lookup reveals if there is coverage or not. No maps though… However, many cities I tried which were not covered on the map came back as UMTS covered.

Finland: Another strange case. The land of Nokia, the land of mobile phones and almost no UMTS areas on the map!? Can this really be!? Some of my Finnish readers, please check and comment. A link to a coverage map of a Finnish operator would also be nice…

Offshore: Also take a closer look at the GSM coverage spots in the North sea. They seem to be drilling platforms! Cool!