Sportaneous. Take Google Maps Indoors. New Smartphone Chips Will Pinpoint Your Exact Location Down To The Inch, Even Inside Buildings. Precise location tracking inside of buildings may become the norm with the new Broadcom chip. Tired of how useless GPS tracking is inside a building? A new smartphone chip aims to pinpoint your location down to a few centimeters, even indoors. On top of that, it will track your vertical position too, whether you’re on the second floor of a mall or the 20th floor of an office building. According to the press release, the chip accomplishes this feat by integrating information from a bunch of sensors and wireless protocols in addition to using 50% less power, delivering 10 times the performance, and taking up nearly half the size of comparable chips. Not only does this mean that GPS in smartphones could finally break free from Flatland, but it just might be the beginning of location-aware everything. Disregarding Intel’s proclivity to dub their chips with ethereal names, the latest chip offering from Broadcom Corp. is simply called the BCM4752.
[Media: Broadcom, Flickr, YouTube] AirPlay, AirDrop, Apple TV and the future of proximity interactions. Proximity Interactions (PIx) are one of the missing pieces in today's digital world but there are good signs that it's finally coming: a lot of solutions are starting to appear, first of all AirDrop and the whole rumor around the future of television screens, including the Apple TV. Today there was a really well thought article by Joe Hewitt regarding AirPlay and the Apple TV. Here a few excerpts: Not nearly enough of these analyses have talked about AirPlay. It’s clear to me that AirPlay would be so important to the Apple TV, you might as well call it AirPlay TV. If I were an iOS developer, I’d start investing in AirPlay right now. — Joe Hewitt (2011) AirPlay TV Joe did an excellent summary. For me, AirPlay has a huge potential, but let’s make a step back. Think about it: try to send a message to the person near you. Today, we don’t have any good tech to allow discovery and communication with a near device.
Or do we? I don’t know however if the answer is going to be AirPlay + AirDrop. GeoCity Impressions. Media, Marketing and Culture | Studies about japanese media strategies, marketing and culture.