A Frog in the Valley

Martin Dufort has an interesting perspective on the Google MyLocation feature on his blog - The Mobile Location-Based Informant :

However I latched onto something very interesting while listening to the demonstration video : “the service gets better the more you use it” @ 1:51.
Why is this of importance ? Why would it get better ? The towers are not moving, the cell ids are very static. Perhaps their database of cells gets better.

So I’m venturing that Google is (perhaps) sending cell id information to their servers when users are enabling their cell-phone GPS chips to augment their cell location information. That is very feasible and was demonstrated early on by the PlaceLab project which folded into Skyhook Wireless somehow.

This way, as more people are using GPSs, they would provide more location information about cells and in return would augment the accuracy of the “My Location” service.

Location-Based Services are being push forward again and thanks to Google for doing it so.

Fred Wilson has a similar insight. With that and Fire Eagle from Yahoo, it’s going to be an exciting year to be working in the local space!