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Starting in October, about 1,200 elementary school children in Anyang City, south of Seoul, will receive matchbox-sized GPS-embedded beepers. The devices can notify authorities of the kids' location and activate surveillance cameras.

The move comes a month after a 44-year-old habitual sex offender was arrested and accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting an 8-year-old girl. That case, as well as other crimes against children, shocked the country and mobilized the government to declare war on child molesters.

The 8-year-old girl was abducted from her school, and officials have stepped up school security in response. After a trial run, the government might expand the GPS devices to the rest of the country, AFP says.

[AFP]

Waze, the company that’s specialized in providing crowdsourced driving directions, is venturing deeper into the social sphere by integrating Twitter and Facebook into the service.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup, which also has offices in Israel, is building what it calls a geo-community: Users are creating content for the service by leaving the app running, feeding traffic and map information into Waze for other users to access. Now, Waze wants to beef up social navigation with real-time messages and information on friends’ whereabouts.

Twitter has had geo-tags, or location information attached to the tweets users post on the microblogging service, for a while. Waze is utilizing that feature. Tweets that have a geo-tag will be displayed on the Waze map, enabling users to report on traffic congestion, roadside accidents or weather conditions in almost real-time. The system looks for tweets marked with the hashtag code #wazelive, which can then be displayed to other users to show tweets that are relevant to their route. The tweets Waze displays are from users of the app as well as official sources like the Department of Transportation.

According to Waze VP community geographer Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze is trying to make time spent in the car more informative and interactive – while being safe. Tweets can be a driver’s “eyes and ears on the road,” said Eisnor.

“Twitter has taken the geo-community vision and brought it to many more people,” explained Eisnor. “I see Twitter becoming a kind of geo-infrastructure, particularly for cities. I see roads, bridges, landmarks and exits becoming entities that tweet.”

Eisnor pointed out that the real-time relevance and location of tweets are what create “real value” to a service like this.

And Twitter is happy to see people using its technology in novel ways. The more interesting apps are the ones that go beyond just using the Twitter stream and try to create broader experiences, with a Twitter dimension to them, said Othman Laraki, director of geo, the industry’s shorthand term for location-based services, at Twitter.

”Twitter is obviously about user-generated content and community, and I think the ability for users to create interesting content is one of the mechanisms that will have a big impact on geo,” said Laraki. “The community can provide information on things where getting information would previously have been expensive or not viable in other ways.”

While the idea of bridges that tweet are definitely “very interesting” to Laraki, the industry is in the very early stages of seeing fast, real-time communication being merged with geo data.

“Geo is similar to the social networking apps in the sense that it will become a part of the infrastructure in a few years,” said Laraki. “Now, geo is a novel thing that is taking advantage of the fact that mobile phones can easily provide lat-long information, but in the future it will be an assumed part of the infrastructure on top of which people build their apps.”

And the way Waze’s Eisnor sees it, navigation is going from something that’s used once every few weeks to something that’s part of everyday life: “It will be navigation the way you need it and want it: informed, connected, and, yes, social.”

As for the Facebook integration, Waze users can provide their Facebook information to the Waze app and have images of their friends displayed on the map. Users can conceivably see which of their friends are nearby, or maybe driving to the same beach.

“We’re living in a world where we can spontaneously run into our friends and connect with them – the car should be the same,” Eisnor mused.

Crucially, because Waze is designed to passively broadcast a user’s location, it takes advantage of the ability to run in the background on updated iPhones. That feature was already available for Waze’s Android app. And if you’re a fan of drivers keeping both hands on the wheel, Waze’s location-broadcasting model makes a lot more sense than the active check-in process of services like Foursquare.

Waze even has that angle covered, though: The new version also includes integration with the location-based check-in service Foursquare (users can announce their locations to friends with the Waze app and earn badges on Foursquare).

Don’t miss MobileBeat 2010, VentureBeat’s conference on the future of mobile. The theme: “The year of the superphone and who will profit.” Now expanded to two days, MobileBeat 2010 will take place on July 12-13 at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Register now. Tickets are going quickly. For complete conference details, or to apply for the MobileBeat Startup Competition, click here.

Tags: geo-tagging, GPS, location, location based services

Companies: Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Waze

People: Di-Ann Eisnor, Othman Laraki

More speed bumps lie ahead for in-car navigation devices. As maps are becoming a standard feature in smartphones, handheld devices are truly taking over the navigation market for cars, according to a recent report by market research firm iSuppli.

The report indicates that smartphones have already become the most important platform for maps and navigation, and the number of smartphone-based navigation systems will increase tenfold this year, not to mention hitting numbers nearly forty times bigger by 2014. Last year, smartphone-based navigation systems (ie. phones with navigation systems either preloaded into them, or downloaded after purchase) hovered at 8 million units. This year, the projection is 81 million units, and by 2014 the number of units will explode to 297 million.

While this means declining sales for actual GPS navigation devices (like the ones manufactured by Garmin, TomTom, Magellan, or Nokia), the demand for software will increase. Nokia is including its Ovi Map turn-by-turn navigation software in its smartphones for no revenue, because it owns the map supplier, Navteq. Google offers its navigation for free on phones with its Android operating system such as the Nexus One and Motorola’s Droid. Other handset manufacturers will need access to low-cost maps –- which are increasingly available -– to offer free, preloaded navigation systems on their smartphones.

The iPhone dominates the market currently for aftermarket navigation (iSuppli’s term for navigation systems downloaded into smartphones after purchase) by accounting for nearly half of all sales, estimated at 2.9 million applications in 2009. And Apple makes revenue for the sales of navigation apps as it gets a 30 per cent cut from apps sold in its App Store -– $87 million in Apple’s pocket this year, calculated at 5.8 million units with an average price of $50.

However, the market for preloaded navigation systems will completely overshadow the navigation systems downloaded later on, the study predicts — embedded applications will account for some 250 million units by 2014, leaving downloaded applications at around 40-50 million units.

Even though smartphones are gaining a strong foothold in the navigation systems market, in-car devices still have a few advantages, not least of which is a large screen for easy reading. That being said, the stand-alone devices will have a rough ride in the future as they are squeezed between smartphones and so-called in-dash devices (or pre-installed devices in cars.) And it shows: Garmin’s revenue fell by 15 percent to $221 million in the previous quarter, as reported by Reuters.

Don’t miss MobileBeat 2010, VentureBeat’s conference on the future of mobile. The theme: “The year of the superphone and who will profit.” Now expanded to two days, MobileBeat 2010 will take place on July 12-13 at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Register now. Tickets are going quickly. For complete conference details, or to apply for the MobileBeat Startup Competition, click here.

Tags: GPS, location, location based services, navigation

Companies: Apple, Garmin, Isuppli, Magellan, navteq, nokia, TomTom

The new system, developed by Y. Tony Song and his colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, uses GPS data from NASA's Global Differential GPS (GDGPS) and information about continental slope (where the ocean floor descends from the edge of the continent to the ocean bottom) to estimate the energy transferred to the ocean by an undersea earthquake. After the magnitude-8.8 earthquake in Chile on February 27, 2010, Song's team successfully predicted the size of the resulting tsunami. Just minutes after the earthquake struck, the GDGPS network captured the ground motion data and relayed it to Song, enabling him to calculate the seafloor motions and accurately rank the tsunami's source energy as moderate (4.8 on the system's 10-point scale).

Tsunami waves are most often generated by large undersea earthquakes (greater than magnitude 7 on the Richter scale) that result from the movement of oceanic and continental plates. When dense oceanic plates slide under lighter continental plates, the seafloor moves vertically, which allows a quick transfer of energy from the earth to the ocean. Because every earthquake is unique, each tsunami exhibits different wavelengths, wave heights, and directionality -- making tsunami forecasting a daunting task.

Traditional tsunami warning systems have relied on estimates of an earthquake's location, depth, and magnitude to determine whether a large tsunami would occur. But history has shown that magnitude is not always a reliable indicator of tsunami size. The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake generated a huge tsunami, while the 2005 Indonesia quake did not, even though both had similar magnitudes.

Song says the new system shows that coastal GPS systems can effectively predict the size of tsunamis, which can reduce false alarms that disrupt the lives of coastal residents. Repeated false alarms can also lead to complacency among coastal residents, which may decrease community response to future warnings.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, since 1850 tsunamis have caused the loss of over 420,000 lives and billions of dollars in property damage worldwide.

It’s Bike To Work Day 2010 in San Francisco, a city where people take their biking seriously. As famous as San Francisco is for its bicycle-friendly attitude, transportation planning for the city remains a highly contested issue. Bicyclists always want more bike lanes, while the opposition will go to court to prevent painting new “sharrows” on the streets. For city policymakers, proving things like the demand for new bike routes is not as simple as it sounds, which is where mobile location-based technology comes in handy.

The San Francisco Country Transit Authority (SFCTA) launched an app called CycleTracks on the iPhone and Android platforms last November. Designed and developed by Mopimp, the application is used to record a user’s bike trip. Like many other such apps for smartphones (iMapMyRide or CycleMeter, for instance), it collects data on the distance, actual route and time spent on it using the phone’s GPS technology. Users get information on the distance they traveled, the time it took, and their average speed, and they can view their trip by having it projected onto Google Maps on the smartphone. And then they can tag their trip as “Commute”, “Work-related”, “Exercise”, or any other option before uploading the data to SFCTA. As a result, the organization gets valuable data on popular bike routes in the city at certain times of day or week. (Any personally identifiable information, such as gender and email addresses, will be kept confidential, says SFCTA.)

All this is of great use to SFCTA when planning and improving bike routes, and traffic management in general, says executive director José Luis Moscovich (pictured below). Having worked with SFCTA for 18 years, Moscovich is a man on a mission: He wants better design for better living in an urban environment.

Moscovich took me on a bike ride Wednesday morning from the Mission district to Middle Market and all the way up to Patricia’s Green on the corner of Octavia and Hayes Streets. Early on our trip, we stopped under the I-280 overpass, next to the Caltrain tracks on the corner of 16th and 7th Streets. Pausing CycleTracks, Moscovich explained to me that University of California San Francisco’s Mission Bay campus on 16th, for instance, draws great numbers to the area daily using different modes of transportation.

“Now, if we see that a lot of people take 16th Street to make their daily commute on the bike, we can plan for it and improve the experience. Right now, the street doesn’t have a bike lane all the way. If our data shows demand for a bike route, it is far easier to try to make that change with this evidence.”

Since it’s launch, around 6,000 trips have been recorded with the application, which is a significant amount of data, says Moscovich. There are 450-500 registered CycleTracks users in the city of San Francisco, and this number only represents a fraction of all of the city’s bicyclists — according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, there are 120,000 regular bicyclists in the city. Small sample and voluntary use may obviously produce skewed data, as active bikers who are also tech-savvy may be represented disproportionately. Still, this is far better than the traditional way, which is to have people standing on street corners with clickers counting the number of bicyclists they see and handing out questionnaires to bikers. And considering CycleTracks cost the city under $20,000, such an app is a cost-effective way to gather such data for as long as people keep using it. It’s at least a step in the right direction.

Heading up to Market Street on 7th, I forget to resume my recording of the trip, which is something that happens quite often with my trips. Moscovich says the system has ways of disregarding data that is obviously incorrect — say, a three-block trip that took three hours — but for the user this is inconvenient. One way to improve the user experience would be to use the smartphone’s accelerometer so that the phone will automatically register whether or not the user is in motion and pause and resume recording accordingly. (Some applications have this option, such as the Sports Tracker, which is available for Nokia handsets.) Some users have had issues with the battery drain that happens when running GPS on a smartphone, or inaccuracies with the GPS positioning, which can throw off the actual distance traveled. SFCTA has been thinking about these and other improvements, too, such as suggesting popular — and flat — bike routes to bicyclists unfamiliar with San Francisco, maybe co-operating with an existing service like Google Maps, which brought bicycle routes to the mobile version of the application recently.

Still, CycleTracks is a tool designed first and foremost to help city authorities manage traffic. While it is fun to use, at least this version is not heavy-duty enough for people wanting serious data on their exercise (for which there are tons of other applications, such as the RunKeeper, covered earlier on VentureBeat), but lightweight enough to keep everyday commuters engaged. But, while the number of bicyclists in San Francisco is high, says Moscovich, there are many more “latent bikers” who could be encouraged to ride bikes, cutting back on automobile traffic.

“This is all connected, transportation is not an island,” Moscovich says in Patricia’s Green, where our trip has come to its end. Octavia Street is an example of successful traffic planning that revitalized a section of the city after tearing down a freeway. Now, the area has a boulevard that provides space for cars, bikes and pedestrians alike, and the businesses on Hayes Street are bustling with activity.

“I do believe that the city is the best place for people to live. This park, like the agora of Ancient Greece, is where citizens can meet and communicate with each other. This is where arts and science happens, and it leads to social acceptance, to a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society,” Moscovich muses, gesturing at the park.

The city’s CycleTracks project is funded through the end of June, which means the study SFCTA is conducting with the app is drawing to a close. Some of the things that CycleTracks has provided data on are obvious, such as the fact that Market Street, recently adorned with green bike lanes, has lots of bicycle traffic (no need for an application to point that out). But more complex patterns need more data and more time to completely stand out. As the project wraps up, it’s unclear whether users will be able to go on using CycleTracks to contribute to SFCTA data, but the organization is very happy with the project and may conduct some sort of follow-up.

[Photos by JP Manninen]

[This story is part of a weekly series on location-based services, written by VentureBeat's JP Manninen. If you have an idea for a story you would like to see in this series, drop a line at jp@venturebeat.com]

Don’t miss MobileBeat 2010, VentureBeat’s conference on the future of mobile. The theme: “The year of the superphone and who will profit.” Now expanded to two days, MobileBeat 2010 will take place on July 12-13 at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Early-bird pricing is available until May 15. For complete conference details, or to apply for the MobileBeat Startup Competition, click here.

Tags: bicycle, GPS, location

Companies: cyclemeter, CycleTracks, imapmyride, mopimp, nokia, sfcta

People: José Luis Moscovich

Evasive speed demons may have a harder time avoiding a GPS-enabled speed camera which can capture license plate numbers under any weather condition, 24 hours a day. The new speed cameras in the UK use GPS satellites to help measure cars' average driving speeds over long distances, The Telegraph reports.

The newspaper obtained details on the speed camera trials in a House of Commons report. One system has been set up in Southwark, London, and the other between Antony and Torpoint in Cornwall.

The camera system combines plate-reading technology with a GPS satellite receiver, and would help cover the network of streets such as those found in residential neighborhoods, according to the UK's Automobile Association.

The SpeedSpike system was developed by PIPS Technology Ltd, a U.S. company. Unlike radar enforcement checkpoints where wary drivers slow down, a number of SpeedSpike cameras would cover far greater zones.

SpeedSpike timestamps each camera reading of a license plate, and stores it on a server. The records of the same license plate are then compared to calculate a speed for comparison to the speed limit of that area, and a "violation record" consisting of all the system's data and images gets put together if it turns out the driver was speeding.

Assuming that state and local governments don't just want a bit more revenue from speeding fines, drivers can take some comfort from the PIPS assurance that SpeedSpike always errs "on the side of the driver" when calculating speeds between any two points in the network. Welcome to the next step in high-tech surveillance.

[via The Telegraph]

The upgrade -- which is running upwards of $175 million -- won't remove the pilot from the landing process, but it will make landing an aircraft more precise and efficient. Rather than being guided into an approach by ground-based radio signals, jets will make more exact approaches, which should marginally trim fuel costs (and emissions) and, in theory, lead to faster landing clearances.

GPS-based landing has several advantages of the ground-based systems. For one, radar -- which is what air traffic controllers use to locate incoming planes in the sky -- degrades over distance and can't see too far out into the open ocean. Planes can also make a smooth, straight descent from cruising altitude to runway, rather than the "staircase" descent airliners make now (planes must get clearance each time they move to a lower altitude; this wastes a lot of fuel, not to mention time).

The move by Southwest to GPS is part of a larger vision called NextGen that the FAA is trying to implement by 2020; Delta, United and Alaska Airlines are also phasing in other aspects of NextGen, but Southwest is the first to aggressively start rigging up their rides with GPS.

Anything that can trim cost, time, and congestion at our overcrowded airports seems like a good thing for everyone involved, though it's a bit disconcerting that the military -- which sought GPS tech in the first place -- is actively seeking a replacement for the tech. The Air Force foresees serious security concerns with GPS jamming and third-party interference with GPS signals. And if I'm riding in coach, I certainly don't want anyone to have access to that GPS signal but the pilot and his friendlies on the ground.

Still -- and Southwest is emphasizing this point -- the pilot, not the GPS computer, is the one landing the plane. And since it doesn't look like anyone is working terribly hard to solve for air travel inefficiencies experienced on the ground, it's nice to know someone is taking steps to make the actual flight a bit more efficient.

[Discovery News]