Not long ago, the idea of wearing a wristwatch, or perhaps an item of clothing, that could tell you your position anywhere on earth to within a few metres was pure Dick Tracy science fiction. Not any more. The technology for providing location based services (LBS) is now getting small enough and cheap enough to make such applications perfectly feasible. Many in the industry predict that LBS will become as universal a function of all electronic products as the real time clock has been for the last few decades.
In fact, it is probably fair to say we are already reaching the third wave of LBS: the first was GPS based navigation for the automotive market and personal navigation devices, now dominated by SiRF; the second was the mobile phone market, boosted by the development of assisted GPS (A-GPS); and, now, the newest kind of application, consumer products like watches and cameras.
That is certainly the view taken by one of the latest entrants to the LBS market, Air Semiconductor, based in Swindon, which announced its technology in January and is targeting ‘geotagging’ for the digital camera market as its first application. Such cameras will automatically tag every photograph taken and thereby enable various functions, like geographic sorting – already, services like Google Earth and Flickr are tagging more than 2million images a month, Air says.
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