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August 2007 - Nikkei Electronics Asia,

Spime Targets Mobile Location Intelligence

Spime, a US-based startup with R&D facilities in Chennai, India, is expecting the GPS market to broaden to include complementary location intelligence technologies, offered in a single software platform, which enable consumers to "...identify and track anything - anywhere in the world."

Shankar Narayanan, Spime's founder and CEO, believes that demand for location-based technologies will grow fast, especially with the arrival of smart phones, which have larger screens, higher resolution images, and operate using broadband wireless networks, enabling faster downloads. "We have unique expertise in putting thin applications into portable devices like smart phones."

Spime is architecting its Discovery platform to offer all major technologies for identification and tracking, including GPS, Wi-Fi, RFID and Cellular-ID, on one platform, so that users can seamlessly switch between technologies.

The software is scalable to future identification and positioning technologies. Spime is porting all its software to the baseband chips of major GPS vendors - TI, Global Locate, SiRF and others - and provides its offerings across platforms and systems. Its mobile phone embedded navigation software, NorthStar, is now available for Windows Mobile 5 and Windows Embedded CE 6. A Symbian version will be available by end 2007 followed by Java and BREW implementations.

Wi-Fi Triangulation

Conventional GPS receivers don't work inside buildings, and cellular positioning methods are generally inaccurate. New technologies like massively parallel hardware correlators and software-defined radio are being explored, but it appears that a truly indoors-capable GPS system is still far away. So Wi-Fi positioning is being tried out as a means to enabling better indoor positioning. Spime uses Wi-Fi triangulation, which uses a known set of Wi-Fi access point (AP) fixed locations, with triangulation of the signal strength of several APs determining a location.

"The strength of Wi-Fi triangulation is that it doesn't require logging on to the AP, which may or may not be WEP/WPA encrypted. Instead it uses the AP's signal strength and mathematical formulas to determine location. A company that builds a database of access points doesn't need to notify the AP owner since they are simply looking at the wireless signal itself and not the private data," said Narayanan. Using Wi-Fi to triangulate a position requires fixed APs, and the AP database needs to contain hundreds or even thousands of APs over a wide area for triangulation to work. "It's best suited for high-density AP environments such as metro areas."

Discovery Platform

Spime's Discovery platform has been architected to support RFID based RTLS systems based on ANSI 371.x standards. It supports ANSI 371.3 Common API to implement RTLS using a variety of vendor systems that are standards-based or proprietary. "The Discovery platform also implements a visibility server that can compute locations based on the time difference between the time signals received by the location access points. This kind of architecture provides an immensely useful device abstraction, and can open RFID network services to implementers of business logic. Spime will help customers by developing the needed process layers to help them integrate Discovery into their enterprise systems. Spime hopes this will open up a new class of applications that track products from factories to retail outlets seamlessly."

Narayanan believes the location intelligence domain will go through a convergence phase, the likely convergence candidates being GPS, Cell-ID, Wi-Fi, WiMax, RFID and maybe digital TV signals.