Mobile Location Services

Book excerpt: -- Includes case studies based on real world solution deployments with Vicinity, ATX, Ford and Hutchison 3G.-- Insights into differences between solutions for US and European marketplaces.-- Includes a software development kit for building a basic Location Service Solution.Mobile applications must be much smarter than desktop web applications. These applications need to know user's location, surroundings, and provide directions on how to get there. Developers face many challenges, including how to pinpoint the user's location, how to retrieve relevant spatial data from map databases that are often 20 Gigabytes in size, and how to support multiple clients. The mobility provided by the proliferation of wireless devices, such as Palm Pilots and onboard navigation systems presents a new class of opportunities and problems for application developers. This book provides an end-to-end solution guide to understand the issues in location-based services and build solutions that will sell. Complete with software and industry case studies, this book is an essential companion to anyone wanting to build the next killer application. The more than one million auto-based telematics terminals that have been installed by year-end 2001 are ample testimony of the opportunities and attractiveness of the mobile location services market. This large and growing installed base of subscribers also provides multiple implementation examples, which are incorporated into the text