The New Smartphones: A Universal Remote For...Everything

The ability to control all your other gadgets, even your car and
your house, could be coming to a smartphone near you.

As reported by ReadWrite: Imagine that your new iPhone 5S or Android smartphone could control all aspects of your life. Change channels on your TV, start your car, change the temperature in your house, pay for your coffee, the watch on your wrist … everything. Think of a smartphone as universal remote for your entire life.

It’s a reality that is not so far away.

Three aspects of iOS and Android, the operating systems that run the majority of smartphones, are leading us to a future where those phones will have the ability to control everything around us: the explosion of the app ecosystem, the evolution of Bluetooth and the adoption of a standard called Wi-Fi Direct.

Couple these aspects with the continued growth and maturation of what is called the “Internet of Things,” and you have laid the groundwork for a smartphone that can directly control, track or measure everything with which you come in contact.

Take the just-announced iPhone 5S, for example. It will support both Bluetooth Smart and Wi-Fi Direct, and has capabilities built in to perform new functions such as AirDrop local sharing. Behind it stands Apple's thriving ecosystem, which will continue to churn out new apps that take advantage of those functions. All that makes the iPhone 5S not just Apple’s latest and greatest device, but one of the first devices available that has the potential to be a true universal remote.

Apps & Cloud Provide Interface & Opportunity
You’ve probably seen commercials where a person uses a smartphone to start their car or set a home alarm. These are examples of how apps can control things in your life. Yet these examples are not direct one-to-one connections where the smartphone connects directly to the gadget (alarm system or vehicle’s computer) in question. Rather these types of apps use cloud computing to provide functionality.

To control objects that aren't in their general vicinity, apps must go through an intermediary. This intermediary can be a server in the cloud or a home's Wi-Fi router. A smartphone user can then use an app to tell the object (the car or home security system) what they want it to do. The request is routed through the router or the cloud. The target object retrieves that information from the cloud and makes the appropriate action.

It is hard to overstate how much the maturation of cloud computing has enabled mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. By connecting to the cloud, smartphones and tablets don't have to perform processor-intensive calculations directly, and instead can leave the heavy lifting to a much more powerful server somewhere else.

The same goes for the other side of the equation. Vehicles, home thermostats and security systems don't have to perform complex calculations directly; all they have to do is act on directives passed down from the cloud.

The app is the vehicle that creates the opportunity to build this type of functionality. Think of it as a wormhole through which you can reach your hand and perform an action somewhere else. The more people with smartphones in their hands, the more wormholes—apps—will make smartphones the remotes that control our lives.

Over the past few years, the cloud has been the center of how smart devices and the Internet of Things interact. Yet with advances in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct, the cloud won't have to carry the main burden.

The Direct Connection: Bluetooth Smart & Wi-Fi Direct
Smartphones are getting smarter, and two different wireless standards are helping spur that evolution.

Bluetooth Low Energy (also known as Bluetooth Smart) is part of the Bluetooth Core Specification 4.0. It allows for devices to connect over a distance of about 160 feet and transfer data and wireless connections to each other. It does this (as you may have guessed by the name) in a power efficient manner so as to save the battery of both devices. Bluetooth Smart is a one-to-one connection between devices that does not require an intermediary yet still allows rich data (music, notifications, cellular connectivity like 3G/4G and others) to be shared.

The best recent example of Bluetooth Smart in action is the way the new Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch connects with the Galaxy Note 3 smartphone. Apple also uses a Bluetooth Smart function in iOS 7 with a new feature called iBeacon. This feature creates a bubble area around an app "a beacon" that is similar to a geo-fence. When you and your bubble come into contact with another bubble (say, a grocery or a retail store) an action will occur. For instance, if I am at my local coffee shop and it has an iBeacon, it will connect to iPhone and allow me to do something like make a payment or send me a coupon. iBeacon could be set up in an apartment to connect other gadgets to the iPhone via Bluetooth Smart the minute you walk in the door.

Wi-Fi Direct is similar to Bluetooth Low Energy, but in many ways is more robust. Wi-Fi Direct is a way to create a connection between two devices without going through Wi-Fi router in a fairly simple manner. The best example of Wi-Fi Direct is how easy it has become to connect your home printer with your computer. Instead of the lengthy and complicated process that used to take place when connecting two devices, now it is simple as hitting a single button on the computer and one on the printer and saying “connect.”

Wi-Fi Direct can be used for streaming music or video from one device to another, sharing documents, media or pictures or letting one device control another (such a your PC to your printer).

Apple will use Wi-Fi Direct in iOS 7 for a feature called AirDrop that will allow you to share pictures and documents from one iPhone to another. The feature has been available in Mac computers since Apple released the Mac OS X “Lion” update.

What do Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct have in common? They allow interaction between devices on a one-to-one basis. Imagine walking into your house and everything inside automatically connecting to your smartphone. From an app, you could turn on the lights in the kitchen, turn on the TV (and tell it what to watch), pre-heat the oven for dinner and download your work files from your home computer.

That would be pretty cool, right? It is technically possible right now, though there are some obstacles that would have to be overcome for your smartphone to become the universal remote for your life.

Adoption & Ecosystems: Getting Everybody On The Same Page
Getting all of these devices to play nice with each other may be the biggest obstacle. Different companies have different agendas, different platforms and the same basic need: your money. Hence, those companies will create solutions that will force you to stay within their ecosystem and product lines.

AirDrop can only work with other Apple products. Google’s Chromecast TV dongle (that lets you use a tablet or smartphone as a remote for your TV to watch YouTube or Netflix) uses standard Wi-Fi and doesn’t play nice with other wireless streaming standards like Miracast or Wi-Fi Direct. Samsung’s “S Beam” and other sharing capabilities are intended to be used only with other Samsung devices like TVs, laptops or tablets.

Then there is the standard dilemma of consumer adoption. Mobile technology often moves faster than consumers do, making it hard to keep pace. Most consumers will get a new smartphone about once every two years. Multiply that by three or more for other consumer items, like a new car, home security system or television, and you can see the problem. To set up your new iPhone 5S as a universal remote, you are going to need to be on the bleeding edge of just about every kind of new technology.

That doesn’t mean that your new iPhone or top of the line Android smartphone won’t be able to perform many of these functions on an individual basis. You can use your iPhone 5S to stream media to an Apple TV and share files with friends. Or to control a smart thermostat like Nest.

Solutions may be scattered today, but the journey to make your smartphone the remote that controls everything around you is well on its way.

Three-Quarters Of Smartphone Users Rely On Location-Based Services

Smartphone apps and crowdsourced map data are quickly
overtaking the fixed sat-nav device market dominated by
Garmin and TomTom.

As reported by redOrbit: A majority of smartphone owners use their phones’ location-based services, and a growing number are adding location information to their online posts, according to a new report about the role location-based services play in our daily digital lives.

The report, released Thursday by the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project, was based on a survey of more than 2,000 adult smartphone users, which found that 74 percent use their phone to get directions or other information based on their current location.

The survey also revealed significant growth in the number of social media users who set their accounts to include location in their posts. Among adult social media users, 30 percent said that at least one of their accounts is currently set up to include their location in their posts, up from 14 percent who reported doing so in 2011.

The survey also found a decline in the number of smartphone owners who use “check in” location services, with 12 percent of adult smartphone owners saying they currently use a geosocial service to “check in” to certain locations, or share their location with a friend. In early 2012, 18 percent of adult smartphone users reported using “check in” services.

Among geosocial service users, 39 percent said they check into places on Facebook, while 18 percent said they use Foursquare and 14 percent use Google Plus, among other services.

The survey was based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International from April 17 to May 19, 2013, among a sample of 2,252 adults aged 18 and older. Telephone interviews were conducted in English and Spanish by landline and cell phone.

Crowdsourced Mapping Continues to be the New Force in Navigation

Telenav hasn’t just hired OpenStreetMap founder
Steve Coast away from Microsoft; the navigation
company plans to wean itself entirely off of proprietary
cartography, relying solely on OSM’s
collaborative, crowdsourced and freely available maps.

As reported by GigaOM: Given the craziness of the first two weeks in September in the tech world an interesting hire that should have gotten more attention slipped largely through the cracks. Steve Coast, founder of the OpenStreetMap project, has joined Telenav, signaling a big move by the navigation outfit toward crowdsourced mapping.

OpenStreetMap is the Wikipedia of mapping. OSM’s dedicated community of 1.3 million editors have gathered GPS data while driving, biking and walking the streets of the world to build a map from the ground up. They’ve even gone so far as to mark objects that exist on few other digital maps, from trees to park benches. That map was then offered up free to all comers.

What you probably didn’t know is that Telenav is has been an active contributor to OSM for years, using the data it collects from its Scout app and other nav products to improve OSM’s maps. Telenav’s Martijn van Exel is currently president of the OSM board in the U.S., and he created MapRoulette.org, which identifies problem spots on OSM’s maps and suggests corrections to its editors. What Telenav hasn’t done, though, is actually use OSM’s maps in its products.

Steve Coast

That’s all changing with the hire of Coast, who will oversee Telenav’s crowdsourced data gathering efforts and integrate OSM maps into the company’s navigation apps and services. Telenav isn’t moving tentatively either. OSM will eventually become the sole map data source for its consumer navigation software, starting with the browser-based version of Scout and then moving to its smartphone apps.

According to Coast, it’s a perfect marriage. For all of its strengths, OSM primarily has been a display map filled with an enormous amount of detail — Coast said editors will spend hours placing individual trees on boulevards. Many editors often don’t want to do the grunt work that makes maps truly useful for navigation, like filling in address data or labeling which turns are allowed at an intersection. What Telenav brings to the table is a huge base of users actually driving the map, generating all of those other bits of information that could make OSM navigable.

“Telenav and OpenStreetMap are sort of yin-yang partnership,” Coast said. “OpenStreetMap has this great rich map data set. What it doesn’t have is huge amounts of GPS data to improve the map, and millions of customers out there using the map every single day. When you combine those two things and get feedback from those customers – and there’s a variety of different pieces of feedback they can give to improve that map — it helps everybody.”

A world mapped by strangers

A decade ago, the world’s streets were mapped by Navteq and Tele Atlas (now owned by Nokia and TomTom respectively) and later by Google. They combined government data with satellite imagery and field huge fleets of mapping vehicles to generate detailed plans of our roadways.


But as GPS receivers became more readily available and mobile data connections more ubiquitous, regular old Joes like Coast started creating their own maps. After OSM got over the initial hump, its maps, in many cases, became more accurate than those of paid map suppliers, as editors would note road closures and new infrastructure long before a mapping vehicle’s next pass. Telenav made a fascinating video of Coast talking about the early days OSM and the mapping parties that generated its first datasets.

With Waze, though, collaborative cartography really hit its stride. Waze maps are proprietary, not open, but they’re most definitely crowdsourced. Millions of Wazers drive around every day with their phones in constant communication with the network. Not only do those phone identify new details and problems on its maps (Waze has its own dedicated community of editors), but they also send real-time information about how those roads are being driven. Some of that generated automatically by the app (speed or idle time), some of it come from submitted reports on construction, accidents, and even weather. Wazers are also particularly keen on labeling speed traps and traffic light cameras.

The point is Waze didn’t just create a static navigable map, it created a real-time representation of the current state of roads. The big mapping companies certainly took note. Google bought Waze for $1 billion in June, but it and other digital cartographers had been using crowdsourced data long before then to improve their products.

Before Coast joined Telenav, he worked at Microsoft for three years integrating crowdsourced data into Bing Maps. The fact that Coast left Microsoft would seem to indicate Microsoft has lost interest in crowdsourcing. But Coast’s departure, probably not a coincidentally, coincided with Microsoft’s announced plan to buy Nokia’s device division and license its Here mapping and nav platform.

Here may have old-school roots in Navteq, but it makes extensive use of crowdsourced data from Nokia’s smartphone apps to measure traffic, identify new roads and closures and to perform detailed analysis on how roads are driving.


For instance, in Here’s traffic center in Chicago, Nokia is using that data to determine the optimal points in a road curve to brake and accelerate in different types of weather conditions. That information will eventually go into its Here Auto connected car system, giving drivers ever-more detailed guidance on not just how to drive, but how they can drive more efficiently and safely. Nokia EVP of Here Michael Halbherr will at speak GigaOM’s Mobilize conference in October to discuss how the map is becoming more an integral component of our internet and mobile services.

Telenav is definitely taking a pioneering stance by eschewing paid maps for open-source maps, but it’s safe to say crowdsourcing is delving its way deeply into proprietary maps as well. Every time we switch on Google Maps, Scout or Here we’re making their maps better.

What’s going to particularly interesting to watch is when that crowdsourcing moves out of our phones into the car itself. As vehicles become more connected they’ll not only be able to contribute to the map, they will be able to offer up much more information than our smartphones’ current complement of sensors could ever provide.


Cars are coming equipped with hundreds of sensors, measuring everything form tire traction to the distance to the car in front of you. Eventually cars will network with each other and the vehicles around them. Our future maps won’t just provide us with general views of real-time traffic conditions. They’ll know the actual position of every car around us.

GPS Navigation Market is Forecast to Increase Despite Decline in Dedicated Sat-Nav Equipment

The market for portable GPS-enabled navigation devices is forecast to grow from 33.3 million units last year to 36.79 million in 2018, despite an anticipated dip this year. Similarly, total revenue from these device is expected to fluctuate for the next couple of years but will rise to $7.14 billion (£4.5 billion) in 2018.

According to ABI Research, this growth will come from dedicated GPS-equipped head-up displays, eyeware, cycling, health and tracking devices. However, sales of personal navigation ‘sat-nav’ equipment are still declining… and smartphones, smart watches and smart eyewear also threaten the market for dedicated devices.

Dominique Bonte, Vice President and Group Director for Telematics & M2M at ABI Research, said “The markets for cycling computers, health/elderly, and fitness are starting to get interesting. As ASPs decline and smart watches become a more established part of our lives, the addressable market will be eaten up, limiting the growth potential for dedicated fitness devices. 

Looking longer term, ABI Research has forecast very strong growth for HUD/eyewear devices, particularly in the fitness, golf, and cycling categories. It would not be surprising to see an acquisition in this space over the next 12 months.”

The Next Wireless Revolution, in Electricity

A solar engineer cleans a solar array in a rural village of Puttur
in Karnataka state in India.  The solar array powers a school that
now has extra classes for students at night thanks to the
additional power.

As reported by the New York Times: Gaurav Gupta, the director for Asia of the development consulting firm Dalberg, tells a story about the untethered life. “You want to sit next to a beach and have a laptop on your lap, and you want to be connected to the world,” Gaurav says. “But you don’t want any wires.”

We go off the electrical and phone grids by choice, Gaurav says. We buy cellphones, install Wi-Fi, buy eco-friendly high-end camping stoves and water purifiers. But around the world, billions of people are off-grid by necessity: they live without wired electricity, piped gas and water, or sewers. The two worlds are linked. “What we want, they need,” he said in a TEDx talk in February in Mumbai. “There is huge innovation going on around the world to serve your needs because you want to play Angry Birds longer.”

Tech innovators don’t see the rural poor as a viable market. They don’t put money into inventing better and cheaper ways for very poor people to light their homes, cook or run appliances off the grid. “But because of the things you desire, these things have become reality,” Gaurav said. “LED technology, very efficient batteries and a falling solar panel price have suddenly allowed lights to be delivered to off-grid households at a fraction of the cost. “

In 2009 there were some 300,000 solar lamps in use in Africa. By the end of 2012, there were 4 million, and sales are doubling each year. Gaurav points out that solar lighting is not only a service. It can also come in the form of a product a family can buy at a local store for $10. This shift is useful, as products are rapidly improving; battery hours and brightness are increasing even as prices drop.

One light is often not enough, so there are other models. A family can buy a more ambitious solar lighting system that offers several lights and phone charging.

There are also new products for village entrepreneurs. A set of solar panels and rechargeable lights, for example, creates a business that delivers lanterns to customers every morning and evening, picking up the spent lanterns at the same time.

Or a village entrepreneur can buy a power plant in a box: solar panels and wiring for 20 or so households. That person is now the village power company, but his wiring need only be a few hundred yards of cable, rather than a few hundred miles.

Compared to mobile phones, off-grid power is still in its infancy. The technology is advancing; the bottleneck is the business model. To grow to mobile phone proportions, off-grid power needs solutions to two different financing problems.

The macro problem is how to attract investment to the sector. “Commercial institutions don’t see this as bankable yet,” said Guay. “It’s not true — many business models are quite sustainable — but it’s a question of belief. Bankers are quite conservative and they are not comfortable in these markets, with a new segment of the population and a new business model.”

International banks and development agencies are helping to lower the barriers. The World Bank and its private-sector development arm, the International Finance Corporation, set up Lighting Africa, Lighting Asia and Lighting Global to try to bring down barriers to entry in the market. These organizations provide information about consumers and what they want, set quality standards and certify products that meet them.

Guay argues that it’s not enough: public money is needed to get private investment started. A recent letter from 20 off-grid power entrepreneurs and nongovernmental groups asks the World Bank to use the I.F.C. to create a pool of capital that can be invested at lower rates of return. That capital would “reduce perceived risk and raise awareness of the viability of this sector,” the letter said.

One valuable source of financing for off-grid energy is the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation. Because of a cap on the greenhouse gas emissions of OPIC’s energy investments, a quarter of those investments are now in clean energy — among them, off-grid projects. But in June the House of Representatives passed a bill that could have the effect of shifting OPIC’s energy portfolio towards fossil fuels.The Senate is now considering a more severe version which would remove the cap entirely.

This legislation is brought to you by gas companies. Surely if the United States government should listen to any industry’s special pleading, it should be that of the off-grid entrepreneurs. There is a market failure here, and a temporary pool of loans might solve it.

Anil Raj, the chief executive of OMC Power in Uttar Pradesh, India, signed the letter. But the growth of his own business has convinced him no heroic measures are necessary. “What’s needed for [the sector] to grow is for it to be profitable,” he said. “Then you don’t need any extra stimulus. We’re almost there.”

OMC Power has 11 micropower plants using sun, wind and biogas in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, and is growing so fast it expects to have 100 plants by April, 2014. (That scale, he said, will allow OMC to deliver power next year at the same cost as the grid — and OMC’s cost, Raj predicts, will continue to drop.)

OMC’s plants charge lanterns and power boxes (these can run a few lights and appliances) that are delivered to customers’ homes twice a day. But what sets OMC apart is that each of its plants also has an anchor client — a mobile phone network tower, connected by cable to the micropower plant. These towers would otherwise run on diesel, expensively — fuel and power eat up 40 percent of a mobile network operator’s cost. But OMC has signed 10-year contracts with mobile tower companies — including the giant Bharti Infratel — to supply them with power.

Raj said that OMC expects to earn more from its consumer products than its tower contracts. “But they give stability and confidence to investors,” he said. These anchor clients have allowed OMC to grow with loans from Indian commercial banks. “There are going to be a thousand OMC-like companies in the next two years,” Raj said.

The micro problem is finding ways for the poor to pay. Some will be able to afford single lights or light packages, especially if they see the savings these will bring — many of the world’s very poorest people have found ways to buy mobile phones, after all. But more will need to pay as they go, with the savings from what they’d be spending on kerosene. Simpa Networks in Karnataka, India, uses a progressive purchase model: customers install a solar system and pay for energy in small increments, as they do for phone airtime. When they have paid the full cost of the system, it is theirs — free energy from that point on.

M-KOPA in Kenya uses a similar system — with the twist that it takes advantage of Kenya’s hugely popular mobile banking system, M-PESA. Former M-PESA executives founded M-KOPA, which markets a $200 system made by d.light that provides three bright lights and phone charging, and sells it in stores all over Kenya. Buyers put down an initial deposit and then pay 40 shillings (45 cents) for each day’s light via M-PESA. (They would be paying 50 shillings a day for kerosene.) When they have completed payments, usually within a year, they own the system. M-KOPA has so far sold 25,000 units — 5,000 in the last month.

“When you have villagers who are interested in putting up solar panels on the roof or want a solar lantern, they can go buy it off the shelf and bring it home the very same day,” said Guay. “You see an immediate impact — you can displace kerosene and allow your children to study at night without waiting. It’s no longer about building a huge centralized station and waiting for that power to trickle down to poor. It’s about the time that matters — now.”

Forget Smart Cars, Imagine an Intelligent Highway

As reported by Fox Business: As automakers look into developing a new generation of tech-savvy cars that can drive themselves, others are tackling a seemingly more impossible feat: giving the concrete roads they drive on brains of their own.  

Smart Highways – the brainchild of Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde – would be able to charge electric cars passing over them, paint temporary digital snowflakes over ice patches, illuminate priority lanes and reduce energy waste by using streetlights donned with sensors.

It may sound fantastical, but this is not just some artist’s dream. It’s reality.

Bringing his idea to fruition, Roosegaarde, who has called himself in jest a "hippie with a business plan," has teamed up with an unlikely partner: publicly-traded multinational Heijman, one of Europe’s largest engineers and road manufactures.

The earliest versions of their jointly-developed Smart Highway will appear later this year on a 150-meter stretch of road in the Netherlands province of Brabant. Roosegaarde predicts highways across the world can be transitioned within the next three to five years.

The idea last month won the INDEX: Award 2013 – a highly prestigious prize for “Designs to Improve Life” administered only once every two years. The prize comes with a 100,000-euro reward, which Roosegaarde will inject into the project’s continued development.

“These are all ideas which are not super high-tech, they are basic principles which we can implement to existing roads,” Roosegaarde said in a video posted to CNN, which highlights Index nominations.

Beautiful and Smart

The Index jurors said they were impressed with Smart Highway because it provides an entirely new approach to traditional roads that is “not only beautiful and alluring but also sustainable and cost-effective.”

Using a series of solar technologies, dynamic paint and smart sensors, the road would be designed to come alive at night. Lanes would illuminate, electric cars would be charged, glow-in-the-dark paint would highlight dangerous conditions or traffic patterns and street lights would light up only as a car approached.

"Why can we not connect it to a small, simple sensor so the lights are only on when you drive so you get this beautiful sort-of ghost of light?" Roosegaarde asks.

The Super Highway is designed to be simultaneously beautiful and intelligent, armed with capabilities to spark future innovation around the way people drive and live. 

While vehicles themselves continue to be a major piece of this puzzle as manufacturers like Elon Musk’s Tesla (TSLA) build electric cars and others focus on autonomous ones, roads have barely budged. 

“When we look at highways, why is so much money and time and energy spent on cars but the actual roads themselves are still stuck in the Middle Ages?” Roosegaarde asks. 

The project has a five-step plan for modernizing European roadways, including embedding highways with technology that can visually communicate with the driver using "smart" paint that would be charged by the sun throughout the day. 

Paving existing roads with new technologies could help make electric cars -- even autonomous cars -- more feasible and desirable, with roads evolving as fast as the technologies that power them.

Wising Up

The basic idea is nothing new – in fact, as early as 1991 a professor at Virginia Tech proposed embedding electronic sensors into the pavement that would be able to relay information about road’s conditions via “radio waves to a central computer.” 

In 2010, the research group ACCESS Linnaeus Centre announced a focus on “wireless sensor networks” for roads, saying it would help reduce the environmental impact of the transportation system and improve efficiency.

However, past projects have been hit with high costs and technological roadblocks. 

Dr. Rajit Gadh, director of the UCLA Smart Grid Energy Research Center, which is studying how to better plug electric vehicles (EV) into the smart grid, says mass-scale projects cannot be widely successful without acquiring several minor successes first.

While the technology exists to charge EV cars wirelessly while in motion, he warns of the heavy costs of putting inductive coils underground every few feet on the highway and suggests instead using this still infant technology at high-traffic intersections, bus stops or stop signs where energy can be more efficiently transferred. 

If developers prove through smaller feats the feasibility of their technology, they may be able to garner more investment, which could ultimately help trigger fresh commercial investment and adoption. 

"There’s still a lot of steps needed to be done in research labs before you can have a pretty scalable solution whereby you can charge in an economical manner while you're driving," Gadh said. Though he does see it becoming as ubiquitous as today's EV charging stations -- perhaps even gas stations -- much farther down the road.

Developers of the Smart Highway plan to use resonant magnetic fields stationed under the road to charge moving cars. They are tweaking their technology in partnership with the Dutch government.  

Ever the designer, Roosegaarde is already brainstorming new ideas, including applying some of these same technologies to illuminate bicycle lanes or airport landing tracks.

One day, he might even try to use the bioluminescence of jellyfish and fireflies to illuminate roadside shrubbery, an effort to once-and-for-all get rid of light poles. 

DNA Tracker Wins Asia Contract for Wireless Location Monitoring

DNA Tracker has announced a new contract to install it's Target
Proximity Monitoring System for a South East Asian government.

As reported by Shepard Media: The new contract includes both static and mobile devices, along with a data analysis and visualization capability. Deployment is scheduled to commence before the end of 2013, and be completed by 2014.

The system will be deployed to protect high value government sites throughout the country.

Speaking to Shephard at the DSEI exhibition, Alexander Giles, associate director for DNA Tracker, said the product was ready to be shipped pending the completion of various compliance assessments.

‘The end customer has signed on with an initial order, which is substantial, which we are very confident will lead to further orders. In addition we are running field trials right now for two NATO countries, and we anticipate that by the end of the year we will have another country signed on as a third order,‘ said Giles. 

‘The technology is ours, patented here in the UK. What we have is the capability to pick up most emitting signals you may be carrying with you, for example your mobile phone, including 2G, 3G, WIFI, and blue tooth. We are currently developing solutions for 4G and CDMA. We are confident we will have a system to demonstrate those capabilities by the end of the year.’

The system tracks and records real-time geo-location data for all targets within a defined area. Threat levels can be allocated to individual targets, and subsets of geo-perimeters defined within the monitored area to trigger alerts when specific criteria are met.

‘The software date-stamps each device as it arrives, and allows us to define a geo-fence for blacklisted individuals for whom we have a specific interest in limiting access to a given area. The moment they enter that area, an alert is generated,’ said Giles. 

This capability, combined with the devices capacity to track movements over time within a given area, lends itself to security applications where detection of anomalous behaviors is a requirement, for example airports and prisons. 

‘For example, anyone who enters an airport and lingers for longer than 90 minutes, which is the usual time between check-in and flights, can be flagged up by this device,’ Giles explained.   

The system plugs into an existing phone mast or power supply, and has an effective range of 200 meters. This will extend out to the range of the device the system is coupled to. 

‘There are some environments where you will have a range of up to 1000 meters – for example if you paired the device to a mobile phone mast. So the same restrictions that apply to a mobile phone mast in its ability to be of use to you, exist with this device.’

To deploy remotely, the system requires a battery pack. In very remote areas, the system can be coupled to a SATCOM device.  

According to Giles, the system also has the capability to be integrated into existing security networks.

‘Right now we have a standalone product, which we do not pretend to be the 100% answer to your surveillance requirements, for the simple fact that for obvious reasons it does rely on the fact that your device is on.’