FIND THAT PHONE
Cellphones that use GPS satellite signals to give users access to location-based services will be cheaper and far less power-hungry in future, according to CEVA, a firm in San Jose, California.
The company鈥檚 software engineers have developed 鈥淴pertGPS鈥�, a program that can allow phones to decode GPS signals via the same digital signal processing (DSP) chip that phones already use to convert analogue voice signals into digital form for transmission over the network. It only costs around $3 per phone, whereas separate GPS decoder chips currently add around $40 to a phone鈥檚 cost.
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XpertGPS works by breaking GPS signals into chunks that the cellphone鈥檚 DSP chip can process in parallel. This also means it processes the data four times faster than dedicated GPS chips 鈥� and uses a lot less power doing so, says spokesman Barry Nolan.
The software has been licensed to major phone chip makers, including Samsung of Korea. Such technologies are going to become increasingly important in the US, where the Federal Communications Commission has ordered that, from 2005, any new cellphone design should be traceable by emergency services when the user dials 911.
TAKE-AWAY WEB ADDRESSES
Anyone with a web-enabled PDA or mobile phone with a built-in camera will be able to grab web addresses while walking around in the city if a technology from Canadian firm Semacode takes off.
The company has developed a variant of the barcode, called a data matrix, that encodes a standard web URL in a 2D array of dots (see ). Semacode鈥檚 software decodes a photo of the data matrix and injects the URL into the browser. The idea is to print the matrix on event posters, say, to spare people the hassle of painstakingly keying in a URL on a phone鈥檚 keypad 鈥� so they would be more likely to use web-based services while out and about.
Semacode hopes event organisers will use the matrix on posters to give people quick access to a ticket sales site. Or they could be printed on street furniture such as street lamps, allowing people to access web-based maps to find out where they are.
