Bridge Inspection Robot has Magnetic Wheels, Shuffles up Walls

As reported by Engadget: Most wall-climbing robots rely on advanced forms of suction to keep them adhered to a flat surface, but Japan's latest wall crawler employs a different method: magnets. Hailing from the Osaka City University Graduate School of Engineering, BIREM (which stands for Bridge Inspection Robot Equipping Magnets) is designed to -- as the name suggests -- inspect bridges. Riding four spoked wheels adorned with eight magnets a piece, it can creep across metal girders at a rate of 7.8 inches per second. Its flexible midsection promises to give it an edge over uneven structures, and its creators hope that it will eventually lower infrastructure inspection costs. You won't see it crawling across the Golden Gate any time soon, however -- the team doesn't expect to commercialize it for another three years.

Telematics Evidence Helps Prove Knife Attacker’s Location in Court Case

As reported by Fleet World:  Daniel Paita has been convicted for a knife attack on a man in Glasgow in February last year after the device pinpointed his location despite Paita claiming he was not in the area on the day.  

The evidence collected by the device was passed onto the police by motor anti-fraud team Asset Protection Unit Ltd (APU), which now works closely with Police forces to reduce motor fraud.   

After Paita was sentenced Thursday. the 19th of December at The High Court, Edinburgh, APU’s Neil Thomas was clear about the role telematics can play and the benefits of private anti-fraud teams cooperating with the police.

‘It is extremely pleasing to have been an important cog in convicting an individual like this, it might never have happened at all had the device not been installed in his car. They are able to generate data about the inner workings of a vehicle but also show its location at any time, which is a great help to us, the police and victims if vehicles are used for criminal activity,’ said Thomas.

Nearly Half of All Phones in UAE are Smartphones

As reported by The National: Nearly half of the registered phones in the UAE are smartphones, new data from the telecoms regulator showed.

“During the period between July 1, 2013 and September 30, 2013, 46 per cent of handsets registered on the UAE’s networks were smartphones, a figure that has increased during each quarter in 2013,” the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) said in a statement.

That is up two percentage points from June, when the smartphone penetration rate stood at 44 per cent.  At this rate, smartphones would account for half the phone market sometime around the middle of 2014.

The TRA report also showed that the iPhone 5 was the most popular smartphone in the country during the quarter, with a 2.8 per cent share of all registered handsets. Coming second was the Samsung S3 with 2.5 per cent. The iPhone 4S came third with 2.3 per cent, and tied for fourth were the iPhone4 and BlackBerry 9900 at 1.8 per cent.

Following them were: Samsung S4 at 1.6 per cent; Galaxy S Duos at 1.2 per cent; BlackBerry Bold 9790 at 1.1 per cent; and BlackBerry Bold 9780 at 1 per cent.

Overall, Nokia dominated the market with a 56.2 per cent market share. Samsung came second with 16.4 per cent. Third was BlackBerry with 10.2 per cent, and fourth was Apple with 7.8 per cent, then LG at 1 per cent, Sony at 0.9 per cent, Huawei at 0.5 per cent and HTC at 0.6 per cent.

“Unlike Nokia and Blackberry, Samsung and Apple recorded increases in their market shares in third quarter,” said the report.

Apple’s iTunes was the most popular applications website during the quarter, followed by Nokia OVI; Samsung Apps; BlackBerry App World; and Android Applications, the report says.

Users of smartphones and fixed line phones made a total of 13.7 billion visits to social media sties during the quarter. Facebook topped the list with 91 per cent of the visits. It was followed by Twitter with 8 per cent of the total visits, Maktoob at 0.1 per cent, then LinkedIn and MySpace.

California Bill Would Require 'Kill Switch' For Smartphones

As reported by USA Today: Two California officials have announced plans to introduce legislation requiring smartphones to have a "kill switch" that would render stolen or lost devices inoperable.

State Sen. Mark Leno and San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon announced Thursday that the bill they believe will be the first of its kind in the United States will be formally introduced in January at the start of the 2014 legislative session.

Leno, a San Francisco Democrat, joins Gascon, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and other law enforcement officials nationwide who have been demanding that manufacturers create kill switches to combat surging smartphone theft across the country.

"One of the top catalysts for street crime in many California cities is smartphone theft, and these crimes are becoming increasingly violent," Leno said. "We cannot continue to ignore our ability to utilize existing technology to stop cellphone thieves in their tracks. It is time to act on this serious public safety threat to our communities."

Almost 1 in 3 U.S. robberies involve phone theft, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Lost and stolen mobile devices — mostly smartphones — cost consumers more than $30 billion last year, according to a study cited by Schneiderman in June.

In San Francisco alone, more than 50 percent of all robberies involve the theft of a mobile device, and in Los Angeles mobile phone thefts are up almost 12 percent in the last year, the San Francisco DA's office said.

Samsung Electronics, the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer, earlier this year proposed installing a kill switch in its devices. But the company told Gascon's office the nation's biggest carriers rejected the idea.

But the CTIA-The Wireless Association, a trade group for wireless providers, says a permanent kill switch has serious risks, including potential vulnerability to hackers who could disable mobile devices and lock out not only individuals' phones but also phones used by entities such as the Department of Defense, Homeland Security and law enforcement agencies.

The CTIA has been working with the FCC, law enforcement agencies and elected officials on a national stolen phone database that debuted last month.

Gascon and Schneiderman have given manufacturers a June 2014 deadline to come up with solutions to curb the theft of stolen smartphones.

"I appreciate the efforts that many of the manufacturers are making, but the deadline we agreed upon is rapidly approaching and most do not have a technological solution in place," Gascon said. "Californians continue to be victimized at an alarming rate, and this legislation will compel the industry to make the safety of their customers a priority."

Placing an Economic Value on GPS/GNSS Spectrum

"With other industries fighting for the finite raw material of
spectrum, the GPS industry must continue to generate and
update its economic valuation work or risk being marginalized
in policy debates." Bartlett Cleland

As reported by Inside GNSS:  The nation’s leading GPS experts are struggling to quantify how the world’s premier navigation and timing system affects the U.S. economy, an effort critical to building a political firewall around GPS spectrum in the face of ballooning demand for broadband capacity.

“It is an impossible question,” said James Schlesinger, chairman of the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) Advisory Board. “It’s methodologically harder than evaluating the Gross Domestic Product. What we are being asked to do is calculate something that is incalculable.”

The research challenge was highlighted in comments by Jules McNeff, vice-president at Overlook Systems Technologies, in the current issue of Inside GNSS: "In the case of GNSS services, these [benefits] are more difficult to quantify because they are both direct and indirect, include second- and third-order benefits, and are not simply revenue streams from direct subscription services. They are spread across all economic sectors and represent revenues from increased efficiencies in logistics and related economies of operation, improved safety, reductions in personnel costs and exposure to hazards, and others."

Alternative data from a similar market report.

The PNT advisory board, which agreed to look at economic impacts last year at the request of the National Executive Committee for Space-Based PNT (ExCom), spent part of its December meeting weighing reports from three researchers it had commissioned to find and assess data on GPS benefits and spectrum valuation that others had already gathered. One of the most recent studies discussed was Issue 3 of the GNSS Market Report, a study released by the European GNSS Agency (GSA) a few months ago.

GSA found that the annual shipment of GNSS devices worldwide jumped from 125 million in 2006 to roughly 850 million in 2012, said Nam Pham of ADP Analytics. By 2022 that is expected to grow to 2.5 billion units a year, bringing the total number of GNSS devices in circulation to around 7 billion — enough for every person on the planet to have one. The total global revenue for GNSS devices was forecast to grow to $143.9 billion by 2022 from $59.4 billion in 2012.

According to the GSA study, the GNSS market is dominated by location-based services (LBS), said Pham, a category that includes GNSS-enabled consumer products such as smart phones, tablets and digital cameras. The GSA found that though such devices make up the vast majority of the GNSS devices, they likely will be responsible for only 47 percent of the revenue from 2012 to 2022 — a scant lead over the 46.3 percent generated by rail and road applications. Surveying and mapping is expected to produce 4.1 percent of revenue for the period followed by agriculture and aviation/marine uses at 1.4 and 1.3 percent respectively,

Of the global activity in 2012, North America generated more than 70 percent of the aviation revenue and nearly 60 percent of that from agriculture. Thirty percent of LBS revenue was from North America, while surveying and road applications came in at around 25 percent each, rail at roughly 15 percent, and maritime applications at around 10 percent.

Direct revenue is only one of the economic factors for any given industry, said Pham. Companies buy raw materials and hire workers who in turn use their wages to buy homes and other goods. Pham estimated that GNSS manufacturers contributed $32 billion in output and $6.8 billion in earnings to the U.S. economy, generating more than 105,000 total jobs in the process. He based his figures on the 2011 U.S. Census Bureau Annual Survey of Manufacturers.

Work with the Data You Have, Not the Data You Want
The European study, however, appeared incomplete to at least one member of the board — an assessment with which Pham agreed.

“There is something missing there,” said board member James Geringer, a former governor of Wyoming. “I think of all the other downstream applications . . . any of the aerial imagery that uses GPS. It is a meaningless service without the GPS or other coordinate references,” Geringer said. The geospatial information system (GIS) firm ESRI, where he serves as director of policy and public sector strategies does $1 billion in annual business by itself, he said, adding, “You’ve got a great big hole in there somewhere, it seems to me.”

Geringer’s point illustrated the shortcomings in the available data at the heart of a wide-ranging discussion within the board, which was weighing how to approach the question and at what point it should present numbers — even preliminary numbers — to the ExCom.

It is like trying to measure the value of energy, Schlesinger said.

Even so, the European study appears to be one of the best available in that it is recent — it was released in October of this year — and broad in scope.
Most of the economic studies on GPS tend to be very narrowly cast and 5 to 15 years old — so old they fail to capture the benefits of new applications and rapid shifts in technology, said spectrum expert Bartlett Cleland,

Cleland presented the result of a literature review on the market research. Among those new applications, he said, are GPS-enabled clothing, including shoes that help you find your destination, and GPS-based sports analytics that teams can use to assess and improve their play against a specific opponent.

Moore’s law that computing power doubles and costs are halved every 18 months is “roughly applicable” to the GPS industry, Cleland said, and is a realistic guide for how often you need to do new studies on an industry.

“About every 18 months you have to reshuffle the deck,” he said.

Getting Equipped for the Spectrum Gold Rush
The need for better data on PNT’s economic impact was made clear during the fight over LightSquared’s proposal to repurpose spectrum near the band used by GPS, thereby creating what tests eventually showed would be debilitating interference to GPS receivers. The economic data presented by the wireless broadband industry at the time seemed to give the telecom companies the upper hand in the policy debate, said Geringer.

GPS signal strength is below the normal noise thresholds of
the spectrum.  Additional 'noise' in the form of competing
communication signals make the GPS signal more difficult
'dig out' of the spectrum.

Many studies support the argument that broadband needs more spectrum, said Cleland. The number of studies is partly due to the industry being well organized.

Interest in the subject is global, he said, and some broadband companies have the cash to support economic-benefit research for their industry. For example, he said,  a report from the International Telecommunications Union and the United Nation’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization details the global economic effects of broadband with GDP numbers, penetration to growth rates, and analysis of ancillary benefits such as eradication of poverty or increased educational opportunities. Related reports are also available as well from the Telecommunications Industry Association and even individual companies such as CISCO.

LightSquared's potential interference ended up with the FCC
denying them a license, and a lawsuit against several of
the industry players from Harbinger Capital.

“With other industries fighting for the finite raw material of spectrum,” Cleland said, “the GPS industry must continue to generate and update its economic valuation work or risk being marginalized in policy debates.”

That fight is only going to become more intense as companies scramble to capture consumers who want “everything, everywhere,” said John Kneuer, a former National Telecommunications and Information Administration chief and a spectrum policy expert. Wireless carriers are trying to provide content inside the home, cable companies like Comcast and DISH are devising ways to deliver content outside of the home, and applications providers like Google and Amazon are maneuvering to become content conduits.

The broadband industry is converging on a ‘singularity” where all the companies are competing with each other to control the same customers  — and it all rides on the availability of spectrum, said Kneuer.

The Advisory Board will continue its work into next year, said the board’s vice chairman, Brad Parkinson, while cautioning against the expectation that they could come up with a single number that policy makers could use for an ‘elevator speech.’

The sum of the economic effects of GNSS throughout the world “is certainly many tens of billions of dollars per year, but the analysis to date tends to be based on cost rather than value,” Parkinson said. ‘There is a good reason for that. It is really hard to come up with the total value. Hence, we tend to undervalue the GPS contribution.”

Although Cleland said that he didn’t see why “GPS doesn’t sit right alongside a lot of these technology issues in importance,” he said it was unlikely that the pressure on GPS spectrum will ease.

“The broadband debate and the need for spectrum will never end,” said Cleland. “It will never end.”

Apple Patent Shows Off “Layered” Maps

As reported by GigaOM: Are we looking at iPhone’s map of the future? Today, the U.S. Patent and Trade Office (USPTO) published an application from Apple that details the workings of an “Interactive Map” with many layers, according to Apple Insider.

The map itself is a program that allows users to view different “layers” of content, pulled from the Internet, over the map. In the report, Apple gives the example of a weather layer that could tell users when a storm is approaching. Other sample layers include Shopping, Commuting, and even Tourism.

The map is also designed to take into account these layers when the user searches in the area, to provide further context for searching. For example, someone in the Shopping layer who types in “skateboard” is more likely to get a skate shop than a skate park. The layers would also have some geospatial features — users in the “Tourism” layer could get access to information for all the landmarks in the immediate area.

The patent also discusses the maps’ interactivity. The application describes the ability to tap on specific features or landmarks to get information, like the population of a city or the year a landmark was built. Touching two points on the map would create a route between them, like a more sophisticated pin drop. Pins themselves would also receive an overhaul, with more robust features, instead of being phased out entirely.

Apple has been in pursuit of a better Maps program since the Cupertino company had a fall-out with Google in 2012. But the implementation of a proprietary Maps system has been a thorn in the giant’s paw, so to speak — providing the most headaches for users with its bad directions and glitchy behavior.

While necessary updates like transit directions are likely in the works, it’s promising to see that Apple is actually looking further ahead to bring a more enriched experience to the app. It might be a long while before the company has a Maps app worth using, but this patent could be a promising first step.

GPS-Aided Crowdshipping: TwedEx and Deliv

As reported by Inside GNSS: Crowdsourcing has gained some attention in the GNSS community as a means for detecting and mitigating RF interference and signal spoofing.

In the past year, researchers and commercial ventures have developed ways to take advantage of the GNSS-derived knowledge of real-time location of participants to create ad hoc networks of couriers.

Earlier this year, Palo Alto, California–based Deliv announced plans to begin “crowd-shipping” operations using part-time couriers to deliver goods based on their proximity to participating retail outlets and their customers. The company’s cofounder and CEO, Daphne Carmeli, was a founding team member of WebMd and is the former head of Netscape e-commerce.

Last Thursday (December 12, 2013) Deliv announced alliances with three of America's largest mall operators, Simon Property Group, Macerich, and Westfield, to provide the same-day service. Together with a partnership established earlier this year with General Growth Properties (GGP), the second-largest U.S. mall operator, the companies manage more than 660 malls including thousands of retailers across the country.

The operators have begun a rollout of Deliv-powered services across nine malls including GGP's Stonestown Galleria (San Francisco), Eastridge (San Jose), Glendale Galleria (Los Angeles), and Oakbrook Center (Chicago); Macerich's Santa Monica Place (Santa Monica) and Westside Pavilion (Los Angeles); Simon's Stanford Shopping Center (Palo Alto); and Westfield's Century City (Los Angeles) and Valley Fair (Santa Clara).

Backed by $7.85 million in venture capital and partnership with leading mall operators in the country, Deliv draws on a crew of crowdsourced workers — typically part-timers, such as college students and retirees — equipped with GPS-enabled smartphones to provide same-day delivery in their local area.

With typical delivery charges between $5 and $15 — which may be further reduced by retailer subsidies — the business will compete with traditional delivery operations by FedEx, UPS, and Amazon, but without the need for a bricks-and-mortar warehouse infrastructure of the latter.

Deliv’s technology can be integrated directly into retailers’ e-commerce systems enabling customers to select a same-day delivery option during online transactions. The Deliv application programming interface (API) makes extensive use of GPS-derived lat/lon coordinates for routing, estimation of delivery time, and real-time tracking available to customers on online maps.

Customers can order products online for delivery to local stores, which in effect serve as distribution centers for the operation. Growth prospects for the venture are attractive. Of today’s $70 billion delivery market, same-day delivery is estimated to be only about $500 million.

Mobile Delivery En Route
Researchers associated with Microsoft Corporation and Google are trying to extend the crowdshipping capability even further, by predicting the future locations of individuals within a window of time that could allow them to become part of a delivery network.

In a paper presented at the 2012 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, “Far Out: Predicting Long-Term Human Mobility,” Adam Sadilek, a Google data scientist and former visiting researcher at Microsoft, and John Krumm, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, introduced the concept of “TwedEx,” using geotagged Twitter messages to linkages in a potential delivery network.

The authors proposed “an efficient nonparametric method that extracts significant and robust patterns in location data, learns their associations with contextual features (such as day of week), and subsequently leverages this information to predict the most likely location at any given time in the future.”

Using more than 32,000 days worth of data of GPS-tagged “tweets” from 703 Twitter-using participants in a Seattle area field trial indicated that their model predicts the correct location with high accuracy, even years into the future.

In a follow-up paper, “Crowdphysics: Planned and Opportunistic Crowdsourcing for Physical Tasks,” Sadilek and Krumm, joined by another Microsoft researcher, Eric Horvitz, examined whether their technique could support delivery of packages to a moving target — what they referred to as “local opportunistic routing under uncertainty.”

Presented last July at the 7th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, the paper extended the evaluation to New York and invited readers to consider how such a service, currently unavailable, would operate:

“Imagine that you wish to send a gift to a friend. You write only the friends unique identifier on the package and drop it into the crowd substrate. The identifier can be a telephone number, email address, or Twitter handle. Workers then route the package among themselves until one of them meets the target person. Thus, the only constraint in this system is that the package has to be delivered to the recipient as fast as possible. Aside from that, the delivery can occur anywhere, anytime.”