http://mobiforge.com/developing/story/adding-location-a-non-gps-phone-introducing-opencellid

Interesting to see there was an opensource initiative to map cellIDs. Don’t know if Google made the same process for Google Maps MyLocation but I guess its very similar. Would it be possible to integrate such technology for SMS/USSD Development? Meaning when a mobile request to a back end system, the cellID would be included in the header before being passed to the application. I am fully aware this process is possible, however, I’m wondering if it is possible without installing any application (most likely j2me) on the mobile?

This is interesting facts as it supports our theory in Call Center Directed Guiding. Although, a 360 or panoramic view of any point along the line would be ideal, an easier and more realistic approach for the time being would be to include important landmark snapshots along the route. However, I believe our organisation’s project is one step ahead since we have a warm body who already gave a summary of the route during the conversation. This means the caller have an idea of the route complexity beforehand. Then, we could also send this landmark images to the subscriber’s mobile as his future reference (which means additional VAS).

Another interesting location technology, fruitful for direction guiding, would be iPointer. I believe, base on the coordinates and orientation, the server could algorithmically predict which POI you are looking at or infront of. They mentioned they have a thin client on the mobile device, so I guess the S60 client tries to get the orientation base on the bearing. Also check this one out, “users can now walk down the street anywhere in Japan and point at over 700,000 objects such as buildings, shops, restaurants, banks, historical sites and instantly retrieve information on what they are looking at or find what they are looking for just by pointing their phone.”. Niche eh? Just compells me more to start up our mobile pursuit…

But what rocked me the most was indoor tracking by Ubisense using ultrawideband technology which is close to a foot?!?. This I have to see, as it opens new business cases for direction guiding indoors such as big malls, etc. Imagine mapjack views inside malls with Ubisense technology. Sweet.

Other References:
http://www.openlandmark.com/