Google, Apple and PayPal vie for Leadership in the IoT approach to Shopper Location and Automated Payment

The iBeacon's capability to send coupons and other offers is
demonstrated by Estimote.

As reported by Mobile World Live: Apple’s launch this week of iOS7 will include a new feature called iBeacon, a location-based service that enables retailers to target shoppers when they enter a store, according to GigaOm.

The new service, which is based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology, follows the similar-sounding Beacon service announced by PayPal last week, which also targets the retail market and also uses BLE technology.

With Apple’s iBeacon, retailers can deploy small wireless sensors that send data, such as personalized offers or coupons, to a user’s iPhone over Bluetooth.

An example of  'proximity marketing' using the iBeacon.

PayPal envisages users making payments via its service. Apple’s intention for iBeacon is less clear - though it appears to more focused initially on 'proximity marketing' rather than payment. The company announced the initiative at WWDC in June but gave no specific details about it (and said nothing about it during last week’s launch for the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C). The service is a potential competitor for Google's NFC, said GigaOm.

A vendor called Estimote has launched a demonstration video for its forthcoming Beacon product (pictured above) which it says is compatible with iBeacon. Its products are designed to be placed around stores and send data to shoppers.

What is BLE?

As the name implies, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is built specifically to consume small amounts of energy and make phone batteries last longer. But there are limitations with BLE when it comes to transferring data. BLE only supports very low data rates and you cannot stream audio using BLE. You can send small files using BLE and it is a good candidate for small data packets sent from wearable computing such as smart watches and fitness trackers. Built-in platform support for BLE was only added in Android 4.3 (some Android OEMs like Samsung and HTC did develop their own SDKs for BLE prior to Google releasing native support), which is why fitness tracker apps won’t work on some old Android phones.

Why it might be a NFC killer?
iBeacon could be a NFC killer because of its range. NFC tags are pretty cheap compared to NFC chips, but NFC tags are required on each product because NFC works only in very close proximity. In theory, NFC range is up to 20cm (7.87 inches), but the actual optimal range is less than 4cm (1.57 inches). Also, mobile devices need to contain a NFC chip that can handle any NFC communications. On the other hand, iBeacons are a little expensive compared to NFC chips, but iBeacons range is up to 50 meters. Not all phones have NFC chips, but almost all have Bluetooth capability.

Why it is so affordable?
The average area occupied by a Macy’s store is 175,000 square feet, which is 16,258 square meters. iBeacon’s range is 50 meters (typical Bluetooth range), or 2,500 square meters. So a typical Macy’s store would need 7 iBeacons.

Estimote, is taking pre-orders at the price of $99 for 3 beacons. The range of Estimote’s beacons is 50 meters, but the recommended range is 10 meters. If you go with the recommendation, you need 1 Estimote beacon for every 100 square meters, which would cost you about $5,000. If Macy’s wanted to add NFC tags (each at 10 cents) to all its products to send information to phones, it would cost $1,000 for 10,000 products, $10,000 for 100,000 products and $100,000 for 1 million products. NFC may not be needed on all products, but this will give a rough idea on how much it could cost.

Google’s focus is on NFC; it just added BLE support to Android
Google has been heavily focused on NFC from the beginning and it didn't add platform support for BLE until the release of version 4.3. Lot of the apps that rely on BLE couldn't release the apps for Android phones. Some Android OEM vendors recognized the need and rolled out their own implementations. Google finally listened to the demand and made it part of Android 4.3. But Google has continued to push on NFC and rolled out the NFC-based Android Beam in Android 4.0.

Knowing Your Exact Location Just Became Easier to Remember - and to Share

The location for iTRAK Corp is currently named
canyons.fosters.snouts, but for a small fee could be converted
to naming that would be even easier to find - like iTRAK.WP.CO.
The words can also be in Spanish and Russian.  The same
location in Spanish is currently: sospechan.escondidos.anotó

As reported by GIS Lounge: Instead of address and postal code, Chris Sheldrick has started a company that has divided the world into 57 trillion 3 meter by 3 meter squares.  Each square has been assigned three randomly generated words to identify its location.  what3words.com is a mapping service that uses those three words to pinpoint any location on earth to within those squares.  Sheldrick conceived the services as an easy and accurate way to identify and remember geographic locations.

Not every geographic point on a map has an address (think of a natural park or a country that doesn't assign addresses to its houses).  As Sheldrick notes:  ”In terms of pinning locations on digital maps — it is very challenging to do this on existing platforms without actually being at the location. Google Maps, for instance, doesn't make it easy to share a location in the middle of, say, Central Park or Hyde Park to organize a meeting point. Extend this into places like Australia or Africa or rural USA with vast open swathes where people live and work and it becomes more than just a fun tool.”

Sheldrick explained what inspired him to conceive the service to the BBC:  ”When I was in the music event business I kept telling people where a gig was but a number of people would always get lost”, he says. “The postcode system just wasn't accurate enough, particularly in rural areas.”

An application for what3words is available
for both Android and iPhones.

While many people are in the habit of using a specific existing mapping service such as Google Maps, Sheldrick envisions that What3Word’s mapping service being of most value to those where traditional street number and street names don’t apply.  ”We see our service being most useful where current methods of describing location (e.g. postcodes or ZIP codes) don’t do the job well enough or don’t do the job at all — but of course it has applications as a preferred alternative even where the existing solutions do a decent job, but perhaps less precise/customised than w3w.”

Layered on top of the three word geographic locator is a product service where users can lease one word customized locations.  Each customized location starts with an asterix (*) and starts at $1.50 for a one year’s lease.  Leased one word locations can be purchased for as long as one year.  One word locations area accurate to within one meter.  Users can take reassign their one word locations when they move.

The What3Words setup only works within the company’s mapping service and apps (available for both iOS and Android devices). The base map used is Google Maps which means users have access to all of Google’s underlying geographic data and Street View imagery.

UAV Provides Colorado Flooding Assistance Until FEMA Shuts it Down

As reported by IEEE Spectrum: There's been some terrible, terrible flooding going on in Colorado. Rain which ended earlier in the week, made it difficult (or impossible) for airplanes and helicopters to get in and out of the area. Drones can fly, though, and while they're not able to pick up people or drop off supplies, they are able to make damage assessment maps to help relief agencies coordinate their efforts. Or at least, they were, until the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) showed up and grounded them.

Falcon UAV is a Colorado company that makes a fixed-wing UAV (called a Falcon) that uses GPS and cameras to autonomously generate (among other things) highly accurate maps of the ground. The UAV is hand-launched, with an endurance of about an hour, and generally operates between 300 and 1,500 feet above the ground. It has public safety flight approvals from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly in some parts of Colorado. Basically, the point here is that we're not talking about some random dude with a quadrotor flying around taking pictures: the Falcons are designed for (and governmentally approved for) mapping missions in public airspace.

For the last three or four days, Falcon UAV has been volunteering with the Boulder County EOC (Emergency Operations Center) to coordinate mapping flights around the towns of Longmont and Lyons, just northeast of Boulder. This is the kind of thing they end up with, with a turnaround time of just a few hours from launching the drone to delivering a high resolution, georeferenced map:

It's tiny, I know, but you can see a subset *.gif here and download a full version for Google Earth here.

So, it seems like that would be handy to have, especially since the UAVs can fly even when manned aircraft are grounded by weather, like last Thursday afternoon when the Falcon was the only aircraft that managed to get into the air at all.
And then, over the weekend, FEMA showed up. Falcon UAV tells the story on their blog:

Early Saturday morning Falcon UAV was heading up to Lyons to complete a damage assessment mapping flight when we received a call from our Boulder EOC point of contact who notified us that FEMA had taken over operations and our request to fly drones was not only denied but more specifically we were told by FEMA that anyone flying drones would be arrested.  Not being one to bow to federal bureaucrats we still went up to Lyons to do a site survey for how we can conduct a mission in the near future to provide an adequate damage assessment to this storm ravaged community.
While we were up there we noticed that Civil Air Patrol and private aircraft were authorized to fly over the small town tucked into the base of Rockies.  Unfortunately due to the high terrain around Lyons and large turn radius of manned aircraft they were flying well out of a useful visual range and didn't employ cameras or live video feed to support the recovery effort.  Meanwhile we were grounded on the Lyons high school football field with two Falcons that could have mapped the entire town in less than 30 minutes with another few hours to process the data providing a near real time map of the entire town.
[...] We are very disappointed in FEMAs response to actively prevent the use of UAVs and drone technology when these services were offered for free and at a time when manned helicopters could be used for more critical missions such as evacuations and high mountain search and rescues in inaccessible communities.

It's unfortunate that the government seems more than willing to employ UAVs when it comes to military, police, and security operations, but when drones have a chance to go some tangible public good, the reaction is all of a sudden there's this panicked "new technology is scary and bad" response. This is part of the reason why drones have such a bad rap: it's not that they can't be used for helpful things (much as they were used for in the Yosemite fire by California), it's just that in this social and political climate, it's much much harder.

We should stress that we don't have FEMA's side of the story on this, and it's entirely possible (even likely) that there's more going on that we know about. But it's also hard to dispute the facts, which are that Falcon UAV was actively assisting Boulder EOC with valuable information until FEMA showed up and told them to stop. Honestly, I hope that somehow there's more going on, because if not, then the only thing we have to blame is bureaucratic inertia, which is small comfort to the people in Colorado who Falcon UAV could be helping right now.

Safe Driving: Apple Urged to let iPhone Auto-Reply to Texts

As reported by Geek Wire: If you’ve ever driven anywhere during rush hour, you know that texting while driving turns people into a menace on the road.

OTTER, a Bainbridge Island-based company, aims to alleviate that problem with an eponymous app that allows a user to cede his or her texting to an automated system while driving — alerting people who text the driver that the recipient is behind the wheel — as well as silence notifications and the ringer while the car is in motion.

The company’s app is already available on Android. But, because of restrictions placed on iOS developers, OTTER can’t make the jump over to iOS. To try to get Apple to budge, OTTER has started a petition on Change.org to ask the iPhone maker to open up its platform to apps that prevent texting while driving.
Apple offers a hands-free texting solution in the form of Siri, but a recent study has shown that hands-free texting doesn’t do anything to ease the distraction brought on by texting. OTTER says there’s no speed-activated, texting auto-reply software available on the iPhone today.

“Now, more than ever, it’s time take on this epidemic on a large scale and Apple has the ability to tackle it like few other companies can. Our goal is to give bicyclists, motorcyclists and all drivers an easy way to let Apple know that this is a priority – and it takes less than 30 seconds to sign the petition,” OTTER Co-Founder John Lam said in a press release.

It’s worth noting, however, that OTTER is asking a lot from Apple. Allowing apps to automatically text on a user’s behalf opens up a lot of potential abuse cases for malicious devs to turn unsuspecting iPhone users into text spamming machines. That’s not to say Apple won’t end up doing what OTTER is asking for, especially in light of Tim Cook’s remarks at D11 when he said that he was interested in potentially opening up iOS, but what OTTER wants is a tall order.

If you want to sign the petition, you can find it here. As of press time, 91 people had signed the petition.

Apple to use Fingerprint Recognition Against The Smartphone Black Market

As reported by NPR: Last week, Apple introduced two new iPhones with new features, including fingerprint recognition on one model, and extra password protections. But the new technology is up against a sophisticated black market that has had years to grow and adapt to meet the world's desire for smartphones.

To call smartphone-related crime an epidemic is not an exaggeration. By one estimate, more than 4,000 phones are stolen every day in the United States.

Last year the crime rate in New York City rose after years of declines. The reason? Fifteen thousand people reported a stolen phone.

Jessica Ingle was one; her phone was stolen in a crowded bar. "I didn't even notice it," she says. "They must be experienced or something at doing it without people noticing."

The weird thing, Ingle says, is that the thief actually left her wallet in her handbag. Only the phone was missing; it was never found.

Officers are doing their best to fight crime, says Pat Timlin, a former deputy commissioner in the New York City Police Department. But the odds are against them. Smartphones are easy to grab, he says, and they're almost as liquid as cash.

Tracking The Black Market

An insatiable appetite for smartphones has turned the black market into a global enterprise, efficiently sending ill-gotten gadgets wherever demand is greatest.

But no one has a complete picture of the size or scope of the black market. One can only catch it in glimpses.

In a report for NYPD, Timlin found stolen phones changing hands all over the city. "We saw bodegas, we saw local laundromats, and we saw back-alley sales," he says.

In March, the California attorney general announced the arrests of two individuals who allegedly paid homeless people to buy discounted phones on a two-year contract, and then shipped the devices in bulk to Hong Kong.

There, phones can sell for $2,000 each — 10 times as much as in the states. The accused allegedly took in almost $4 million in less than a year.

Larger Than Thefts

"I hate the guys who do this type of stuff," says Marc Rogers of the online security firm Lookout. He is a hacker who frequents forums where information on the black market for cellphones is exchanged. He says that in the global game of cat and mouse, the mouse is usually faster.

For example, some European authorities created blacklists, where users could report stolen phones and block them from being used again on other networks. But Rogers says criminals quickly realized that by shipping devices to foreign countries, they could sidestep the blacklists and probably sell for close to retail price.

Law enforcement tends to focus on thefts on the street and in subways. But Rogers believes police will only make progress when the black market itself is squeezed.

He says the security features in Apple's new operating system, like fingerprint ID and the requirement that you enter a password before resetting the phone, are a good start.

"Ultimately, it would be fantastic if we could get it set up so once a device is stolen, the only value there is from the parts," he says.

New York police will be on high alert when Apple's new iPhone goes on sale Friday. Since the first iPhone debuted six years ago, they've noticed that every new Apple product comes with a spike in street crime.

Google Buys Wireless Sharing App 'Bump'

As reported by CBS News: Google has purchased Bump, makers of smartphone apps for wirelessly sharing files, photos, and contacts, for an undisclosed sum. Bump CEO and co-founder David Lieb made the announcement in a blog post and tweet Monday morning. Google confirmed the buy to CNET.

Founded in 2008, Bump raised roughly $20 million in funding from a collection of renowned venture firms including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital before it was picked up by Google. A source told AllThingsD that the deal was valued between $30 million and $60 million.

"We strive to create experiences that feel like magic, enabled behind the scene with innovations in math, data processing, and algorithms," Lieb said. "So we couldn't be more thrilled to join Google, a company that shares our belief that the application of computing to difficult problems can fundamentally change the way that we interact with one another and the world."

The Mountain View, Calif.-based startup developed an early following for its fun technology that lets people exchange content with friends and strangers with the bump of two smartphones. The Bump application seemed to fade from view over the years, however, and more recently the team released Flock, an app for group photo albums. Lieb said that both Bump and Flock will remain operational for the time being.

"The Bump team has demonstrated a strong ability to quickly build and develop products that users love, and we think they'll be a great fit at Google," a Google spokesperson told CNET.

The news comes just ahead of the release of Apple's iOS 7, which comes with a feature called AirDrop for wirelessly sharing content with other iOS users.

Remote Sensing Archeology Using Satellite Imagery

Seventeen lost pyramids are among the buildings
identified in a new satellite survey of Egypt.

Seventeen lost pyramids are among the buildings identified in a new satellite survey of Egypt. More than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements were also revealed by looking at infra-red images which show up underground buildings.

Initial excavations have already confirmed some of the findings, including two suspected pyramids.

The work has been pioneered at the University of Alabama at Birmingham by US Egyptologist Dr Sarah Parcak.

She says she was amazed at how much she and her team has found. 

"We were very intensely doing this research for over a year. I could see the data as it was emerging, but for me the "Aha!" moment was when I could step back and look at everything that we'd found and I couldn't believe we could locate so many sites all over Egypt.

"To excavate a pyramid is the dream of every archaeologist," she said.

The infrared image on the right reveals the ancient
city streets of Tanis near modern-day San El Hagar

The team analysed images from satellites orbiting 700km above the earth, equipped with cameras so powerful they can pin-point objects less than 1m in diameter on the earth's surface.

Infra-red imaging was used to highlight different materials under the surface.

Test excavations

Ancient Egyptians built their houses and structures out of mud brick, which is much denser than the soil that surrounds it, so the shapes of houses, temples and tombs can be seen.

"It just shows us how easy it is to underestimate both the size and scale of past human settlements," says Dr Parcak.

And she believes there are more antiquities to be discovered:

"These are just the sites [close to] the surface. There are many thousands of additional sites that the Nile has covered over with silt. This is just the beginning of this kind of work."

BBC cameras followed Dr Parcak on her "nervous" journey when she traveled to Egypt to see if excavations could back up what her technology could see under the surface.

In the BBC documentary Egypt's Lost Cities, they visit an area of Saqqara (Sakkara) where the authorities were not initially interested in her findings.

An infra-red satellite image shows a buried pyramid, 
located in the center of the highlight box.

But after being told by Dr Parcak that she had seen two potential pyramids, they made test excavations, and they now believe it is one of the most important archaeological sites in Egypt.

But Dr Parcak said the most exciting moment was visiting the excavations at Tanis.

"They'd excavated a 3,000-year-old house that the satellite imagery had shown and the outline of the structure matched the satellite imagery almost perfectly. That was real validation of the technology."

The Egyptian authorities plan to use the technology to help - among other things - protect the country's antiquities in the future.

During the recent revolution, looters accessed some well-known archaeological sites.

"We can tell from the imagery a tomb was looted from a particular period of time and we can alert Interpol to watch out for antiquities from that time that may be offered for sale."

She also hopes the new technology will help engage young people in science and will be a major help for archaeologists around the world.

"It allows us to be more focused and selective in the work we do. Faced with a massive site, you don't know where to start.

"It's an important tool to focus where we're excavating. It gives us a much bigger perspective on archaeological sites. We have to think bigger and that's what the satellites allow us to do."

"Indiana Jones is old school, we've moved on from Indy. Sorry, Harrison Ford."

Egypt's Lost Cities is on BBC. It will also be shown on the Discovery channel in the US.

The use of remote sensing in archeology is gaining use as a valuable tool for identifying buried ancient settlements.  NASA has a site outlining its use of remote sensing in archaeology with information about research in the Arenal Region of Costa Rica, and Chaco Canyon, NM.  

NOVA also has a write-up on the use of remote sensing in archaeology: The Sky’s Eyes: Remote Sensing in Archaeology.