Inertial Sensors Boost Smartphone GPS Performance

As reported by MIT Technology Review: If you've ever used a smartphone to navigate, you’ll know that one of the biggest problems is running out of juice. GPS sensors are a significant battery drain and so any journey of significant length requires some kind of external power source. Added to that is the difficulty in even getting a GPS signal in city center locations where towering office blocks, bridges and tunnels regularly conspire to block the signal.

So a trick that reduces power consumption while increasing the device’s positioning accuracy would surely be of use.

Today, Cheng Bo at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and a few pals say they've developed just such a program, called SmartLoc, and have tested it extensively while travelling throughout the windy city.

They say that in the city, GPS has a positioning accuracy of about 40 meters. By comparison, their SmartLoc system pinpoints its location to within 20 meters, 90 per cent of the time.

So how have these guys achieved this improvement? The trick that Bo and pals use is to exploit the smartphone’s inertial sensors to determine its position whenever the GPS is off line.

The way this works is straightforward. Imagine a smartphone fixed to the windscreen of a car driving around town. Given a GPS reading to start off with, the smartphone knows where it is on its built-in or online map. It then uses the inertial sensor to measure its acceleration, indicating a move forwards or a turn to the left or right and so on.

By itself, this kind of data is not very useful because it’s hard to tell how far the vehicle has traveled and whether the acceleration was the result of the car speeding up or going over a humpback bridge, for example.

To get around this, the smartphone examines the section of road on the map looking for road layouts and features that might influence the sensors; things like bends in the road, traffic lights, humpback bridges and so on. Each of these has a specific inertial signature that the phone can spot. In this way, it can match the inertial signals to the road features at that point.

The key here is that each road feature has a unique signature. Bo and co have discovered a wide range of inertial signatures, such as the deceleration, waiting and acceleration associated with a set of traffic lights, the forces associated with turnings (and how these differ from the forces generated by changing lanes, for example) and even the change in the force of gravity when going over a bridge.

Note the conspicuously missing GPS positions
in the area of the Eisenhower tunnel on I-70 in
Colorado.

Having gathered this data, the SmartLoc program looks for these signatures while the car is on the move. These guys have tested it using a Galaxy S3 smartphone on the city streets in Chicago and say it works well. They point out that in the city center, the GPS signal can disappear for distances of up to a kilometer, which would leave a conventional navigation system entirely confused.

However, SmartLoc simply fills in the gaps using its inertial signature database and a map of the area. “Our extensive evaluations shows that SmartLoc improves the localization accuracy to less than 20m for more than 90% roads in Chicago downtown, compared with ≥ 50% with raw GPS data,” they say.

That certainly looks handy. And this kind of performance could also help save battery power by allowing a smartphone to periodically switch off the GPS sensor and run only using the inertial sensor.

What Bo and co don’t do is explain their plans for their new system. One obvious idea would be to release it as an app–it clearly already works on the Android platform. Another idea would be to sell the technology to an existing mapping company. Perhaps they’re planning both. Whatever the goal, it seems worth keeping an eye on.

Share of Proprietary RF in Stolen Vehicle Tracking Systems to Drop to 10% by 2018

As reported by Business Wire: While the total number of stolen vehicle tracking solutions in use globally will increase from 35.5 million in 2013 to 143 million in 2018, the share of proprietary RF based systems will decrease from 24% in 2013 to 10% in 2018.

“Stolen vehicle tracking, recovery, slow down or immobilization has been offered by vendors such as GM-OnStar for more than a decade as a factory installed solution. It has also seen success as an aftermarket solution for high-end vehicles with LoJack's RF-based approach positioned as a premium offer providing deep indoor coverage allowing recovery rates of more than 90%. As embedded factory-installed telematics technology and advanced indoor location become more widespread, aftermarket solutions will gradually become less popular, and in its wake, RF will lose overall market share. However, in regions like the US and South Africa RF will continue to be used respectively as a premium technology for high-end vehicles and as a reliable and robust technology to address rampant vehicle theft,” says VP and practice director Dominique Bonte.

This disruptive trend is prompting established RF SVT players to shift their strategies. Market leader LoJack has entered into a partnership with TomTom aimed at jointly selling premium SVT and fleet management services through LoJack’s dealer channels. At the same time LoJack is transitioning to pre-install business and recurring revenue models leveraging its privileged law enforcement relationships as well as its premium brand image as sustainable competitive advantages. DigiCore has started combining the unique characteristics of respectively RF and cellular/GNSS technologies providing continuous, deep-indoor location tracking.

Google Maps Adds Waze Traffic Data to the Desktop, Brings Back Pegman

As reported by Engadget: The dramatic overhaul of Google Maps on the desktop saw the world lose a good friend. That friend: Pegman. 

The tiny yellow avatar that you could drop almost anywhere to get instant access to Street View disappeared. Instead, the ground level perspective was accessed by first clicking on a point on the map, then selecting Street View from the pop over in the upper left-hand corner. Clearly, that's much less convenient. Thankfully, Pegman is making a grand return with the latest update to Google Maps on the desktop. 

Additionally, that Waze acquisition is continuing to pay dividends. The company's traffic data is finally coming to the desktop site, after being added to the Android and iOS mobile apps back in August. You'll be able to see areas of congestion and even spot incidents like accidents that bring your commute to standstill. Slowly but surely the new Google Maps is reaching feature parity with it's predecessor, thanks to constant updates like these.

Mapping isn't just about navigation, however. Google also sees it as a tool for exploration and education. That's why it's pushing a new feature called Earth Tours, that brings 3D bird's-eye imagery of particular locals to WebGL-enabled browsers. Now you can fly around Boston or the Alps, just like you would in Google Earth, but without the need to install another piece of software.  A video below demonstrates many of these new features:

The Internet Killed Distance. Mobile Computing Brought It Back.

Here’s why location matters again in e-commerce.

As reported by MIT Technology Review: For retailing, the key change produced by the Internet is that shopping online spared consumers the economic costs (in time, grief, and gas money) of visiting a store and locating a product. This has been called the “death of distance.” 

When even isolated individuals can buy anything from a global marketplace, physical location does not confer any commercial advantage, and online merchants might be expected to win every battle.

But an emerging body of economic research shows that there is no independent “online world.” Physical context matters to e-commerce. It shapes our choices and tastes, and it strongly determines what we buy online. With the rise of mobile computing, these local effects matter even more.

Given how easy it is to find and buy books, electronics, and other items online, why do people continue to buy in stores at all? The reason is that online buying generates what economists call disutility: inspecting digital products is difficult, shipping can be slow or expensive, and returning products can be challenging.

Research shows that people weigh these disadvantages against the benefits of buying online. Along with colleagues Chris Forman and Anindya Ghose, I examined what happened to Amazon’s book sales at 1,497 U.S. locations when a Walmart or Barnes & Noble opened nearby. We found that customers who lived near the newly opened stores bought many fewer best-sellers from Amazon.

This means that for mainstream products, local retail options—the offline world—had large economic effects on online business. The physical environment shapes online behavior in other powerful ways. Neighbors tend to like the same music, books, and cars. Social networks are also local. Most e-mail a person receives comes from the same city, often the same building. So even though we speak of the Internet as a “place” where users “visit” websites, this metaphor falls flat when we consider actual behavior. All online behavior has an offline context.

Mobile computing strengthens the links between online and offline life. Before, online activity happened in a specific place, sitting at a desk. Now smartphones mean that wherever consumers happen to be, they can gather information online, compare prices, or buy something. Brick-and-mortar stores worry that customers might be browsing products in their aisles, but buying online (see “It’s All E-Commerce Now”).

Yet the offline environment is actually more important when consumers connect through a mobile device. With colleagues including Sang Pil Han of the City University of Hong Kong, we studied 260 users of a South Korean microblogging service similar to Twitter. What we found was that behavior on the small mobile screen was different from behavior on the PC. Searching became harder to do, meaning that people clicked on the top links more often. The local environment was also more important. Ads for stores in close proximity to a user’s home were more likely to be viewed. For every mile closer a store was, smartphone users were 23 percent more likely to click on an ad. When they were on a PC, they were only 12 percent more likely to click close-by stores.

Thus, the mobile Internet is less “Internet-like” than Web browsing on a PC: search costs are higher and distance matters more. We do not yet know how the growth of the mobile Internet will affect the balance between online and offline retailers. But it appears certain that real-world stores will do better if they can leverage the information available online, and that online retailers will need to understand their customers’ offline environment in order to succeed.

UTA Flight 772 Memorial Viewed From Google Maps

As reported by NY Daily News: Google Maps now allows people to view a memorial commemorating 170 victims of a terrorist attack the way it was intended.

Typing coordinates 16°51'53"N, 11°57'13"E into Google Maps reveals a memorial that was created in 2007 to honor 170 people killed in a terrorist attack in the Tenere Desert on Sept. 19, 1989, according to a French association dedicated to the victims.

The UT flight 772 originated in the Republic of the Congo and was headed to Paris when a bomb was detonated in the luggage area. All 155 passengers and 15 crew members died over the desert in Niger.

A French court convicted six Libyan terrorists for the attack who were convicted in 1999 in absentia because the government would not allow them to be extradited.

The victim's families organization created a memorial at the scene of the wreckage in 2007 to honor all the people who died — using some pieces of the aircraft. It is shaped liked an airplane but the full shape could not be seen at ground level. Now through the website the mosaic style memorial can be seen in its entirety.

The organization is still active and held a tribute to all of the victims ion Sept. 19 — the 24th anniversary of the bombing — in Paris. At the ceremony al of the victims' names were read and people brought flowers and read personal messages to the victims. Eight Americans also died on the plane flight, the group states.

UPS Nets Fuel Savings Using 'Constructive Dissatisfaction'

As reported by Information Week: Constructive dissatisfaction. That's what UPS calls its ongoing quest for process improvement that brought about ORION, an On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation system that will save the shipper 1.5 million gallons of fuel in its first year.

Formally announced last week, ORION entered beta testing at one distribution center in 2009. Eight more distribution centers were added in 2010 and by the end of this year it will be live and in production in 82 distribution centers serving 10,000 routes -- the daily runs traveled by UPS drivers. Getting to all 55,000 routes will take until 2017, but ORION started with rural and suburban routes on which the miles really rack up.

ORION builds on UPS Package Flow technology, which rolled out from 1997 to 2003 and used analytic modeling to determine the precise delivery order for packages along predetermined routes. Package Flow also set the loading plan for each delivery truck so drivers could quickly find each package.

What Package Flow didn't do was give drivers precise, optimized driving directions from point to point calculated to reduce driving distance, time and, thus, fuel consumption and wear and tear on vehicles. Package Flow was also fixed, meaning plans were set each morning and weren't adaptable. But UPS needed to support a MyChoice service introduced in 2011 whereby customers could take control over delivery preferences by setting delivery-time windows, rerouting deliveries to new locations, or asking UPS to hold packages for pickup at a distribution center.

At the heart of ORION is telematics technology, which is geospatial mapping information combined with real-time communications with drivers through their DIAD (Delivery Information Acquisition Device). Drivers now get precise, optimized driving directions on their DIAD each morning, but those directions can change over the course of the day as customers request specific drop-off times, new drop-off destinations and new pickups.

The research behind ORION began in 2003, with the analytic optimization work taking years to figure out. The models had to incorporate the expected measures of time and distance, as well as business rules for service expectations; for instance, favoring high-value commercial customers and meeting MyChoice delivery windows. The model also has to be dynamic because package volumes and delivery addresses change from day to day, so routes have to adapt for maximum efficiency.

As ORION is deployed to specific distribution centers, standard mapping data is refined with up-to-date information reflecting changes to local streets and traffic patterns. ORION also incorporates precise delivery details at each address. UPS knows, for example, when deliveries are taken at the side or back of a building as opposed to the front door.

"We take all this information and we run it against our mathematical models so that every day we can provide to every driver an optimized delivery route," says Juan Perez, UPS' VP of information services. "As the drivers are completing their work throughout the day, they use the manifest displayed on their DIAD to guide them to their stops in an optimized order and route."

UPS says its proprietary ORION algorithm incorporates nearly 1,000 pages of code and evaluates more than 200,000 ways to run a single route. The bottom line, says Perez, is a three-fold payoff in better service for customers and improved operational efficiency and sustainability for UPS. For every one mile of driving that UPS can eliminate for each driver each day, the company figures it can save $50 million each year.

UPS isn't disclosing how many miles it expects ORION to save by the end of the year or by the completion of the rollout in 2017, but Perez said it will certainly surpass one mile per driver per day. As for that 1.5 million gallons of fuel saved this year alone, that translates to 14,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions eliminated -- another step toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The Brief, but Ridiculously Productive Reign of FCC Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn

As reported by the Verge: All too often, Washington, DC is a place defined more by its bureaucracy, pragmatism, and paralyzing partisanship than its ability to move the game ball forward. And frequently, the FCC — responsible broadly for our nation’s radio, telephone, and internet infrastructure — is the poster child for some of Capitol Hill’s deepest problems, torn between the needs of the people and the interests of the hundred billion-dollar corporations it’s chartered to regulate. The result is that things don’t always get done in a timely fashion. And when they do, the decisions made don’t necessarily have citizens foremost in mind.

That’s what has made Mignon Clyburn’s fleeting moment in the chairperson’s seat such a refreshing change of pace. Tapped to lead the FCC in the gap between Julius Genachowski’s departure and former lobbyist Tom Wheeler’s confirmation, she didn't just sit back and keep the seat warm for Wheeler. Instead, she used the opportunity to launch two hugely important new blocks of wireless spectrum, fix a long-running technical problem between AT&T's network and smaller carriers, and close one of the biggest telecom deals in history — all while dealing with an unprecedented 16-day government shutdown.

It didn't hurt that Clyburn was already a political insider, having been brought on to the FCC's three-person commission by President Obama in 2009. And the South Carolinian is no stranger to navigating bureaucracy both inside and outside the beltway: she’s the daughter of Representative Jim Clyburn (D-SC) and a former chairwoman of her state’s Public Service Commission.

Still, her productivity this year has been a little surprising considering the delicate, pragmatic language she used when she stepped out at CTIA in May, joking that a flight to Vegas (where CTIA was held) isn’t in line with an interim chairperson’s job to avoid risk. Yet in June, Clyburn was already jumping into action at her first commission meeting as boss, announcing licensing for the so-called H Block, 10MHz of precious spectrum in the same PCS range used by all four national carriers. (The auction for the H Block has more recently been set for January of next year.) New spectrum in a frequency range that can be readily employed by wireless carriers for broadband data is a rarity, and when the FCC announces an auction for it, it’s a milestone event. And in July, it laid down a proposal for selling off a bundle of spectrum known as AWS-3, a band that’s been in limbo since former chairman Kevin Martin tried to turn it into a pornography-free, no-cost wireless internet service several years ago.

Just days later, Clyburn’s FCC signed off on an epic three-way transaction transferring control of Clearwire to Sprint and Sprint to Japan’s SoftBank, giving the nation’s third-largest carrier the support (and cash) it needed to bolster flagging operations. That transaction eventually led to the recent announcement of Spark, a multi-band LTE network that Sprint promises could deliver speeds of up to 60Mbps. To be sure, the decision under previous FCC chairman Julius Genachowski to block AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile USA was just as important — if not more so — but he did so in a four-year tenure. For Clyburn, the decision to approve or reject one of the largest deals in telecommunications history fell on her commission less than two months into a six-month lame duck stint.

Clyburn also oversaw the creation of new rules for phone calls that inmates make from prisons, the culmination of a decade-long fight with service providers where monopolies and a captive audience (literally) have led to absurdly high rates — rates that, as the FCC pointed out in an August ruling, prevented some low-income families from staying connected. Clyburn’s commission capped the per-minute rate for long distance from prison phones, tying fees to market rates; previously, many prisoners had been paying multiple dollars simply to make a connection. In the wake of the ruling, some providers are threatening to sue the FCC.

At times, it seemed as though Clyburn was looking to solve virtually every controversy on the FCC’s plate — a tall order for an organization that attracts it almost constantly. She sounded support for wireless customers to be able to legally unlock their phones. Under her charge, the Commission put a pause to Verizon’s controversial plan to discontinue landline service on New York’s Fire Island and replace it entirely with cellular. And, perhaps most incredibly of all, she helped usher in 700MHz interoperability, a sticky issue that has plagued smaller carriers for years.

And with just days to go until Wheeler’s swearing in to office, Clyburn oversaw a set of actions aimed at completely overhauling (and saving) AM radio, and — practically on her way out of the door — a proposal to dump federal sports blackout rules, the bane of TV-watching football and baseball fans everywhere.

Wheeler, of course, has a far longer term ahead of him as he takes over today. But skepticism of his desire to move the Commission swiftly in consumers’ favor as Clyburn did is understandably high: he comes from organizations representing the wireless and cable industries, neither of which have a sterling reputation in the public eye.

While the jury is still out on how Wheeler will shape the country’s telecom policy, Clyburn — much to the delight of many — remains on board as a commissioner until 2017. And her industrious moment at the helm hasn’t been lost on DC insiders. "In her short stint as the chair of the FCC, Clyburn worked to further the public interest and protect consumers," Public Knowledge said in a statement. "We look forward to continuing our work with Clyburn as she resumes her position as a commissioner of the FCC."