6 August 2008 No Comment

Occasionally, we publish an article that explains a concept that is of interest to us and - hopefully, our readers. This article on Location-Based Services is one such article and it is written by Tim Davis. Location-Based Services or LBS, is the most popular aspect of mobile social interaction, and it has been projected to be a big money maker for those involved in the business aspect of it. Read on:

Location Based Technologies

I have often wondered whether people really understand Location Based Services (LBS) technology and whether they would like a bit more insight into how exactly location based services work, and more importantly – what information is actually passed from your phone to a server in order to establish your exact location co-ordinates. Obviously, in building Fluc we need to know all about location based services technologies. Most of the time, the accuracy of your co-ordinates is entirely correlated to the accuracy of the method being used to determine your location - such that some methods use mathematical approximations to determine your location, and others use global positioning data bounced from satellites to gain a more accurate understanding of your position. Of course, some use a combination of both. All of the methods I will explain below do, very much, depend on your surroundings as well. Obviously, if you are surrounded by iron sheeting 100 meters underneath the ground - your location will be pretty hard to determine. Conversely, if you are standing next to a mobile phone tower and can see 5 other towers and have a clear vision of the sky - your position is going to be very accurate.

I will make special mention now that all this information is entirely understood by industry professionals, so nothing that I am going to detail here is “secret” or contains some sort of “special sauce” which I know that other people don’t. The idea of this post is to give people out there, who don’t know really anything about Location Based Services (LBS), a better understanding of the technologies which are utilized in a non-technical format.

Parameters on your Phone

Before I dive into an explanation about what types of location based technologies are actually out there – a good place to start is what information actually sits on your mobile phone which allows location based services to actually work.

A typical mobile phone contains a whole bunch of communication information which tells the mobile phone what network operator your mobile phone is connected with, and how to optimize your mobile signal in order to ascertain the best signal strength. You can usually access all this information by typing in a special character combination on your mobile phone which will take you to the engineering information screen. Most of you out there won’t really be all that interested in checking this stuff out because it’s a whole bunch of numbers that aren’t going to make sense – but for those that want too, just search the internet for your handset model and the unique engineering unlock code. It’s usually pretty easy to find.

So what information is available?

Read the complete article here