I operate a free GPS tracking service (http://www.instamapper.com), so I know a thing or two about this topic.
This is an interesting idea, but it won't catch on for a few more years. The problem is that only a tiny fraction of cell phones (I would estimate less than 1%) are capable of GPS tracking now. Of those people who have a compatible phone, most won't bother to install the app and remember to start it whenever they go out. Typical battery life when GPS is turned on is about 8 hours. So this is not an app that can run in the background 24/7.
In the end, you will have something like 10 people in San Francisco who send data to their system. It is enough data to make sense of what's happening in the city? Not hardly.
Give it another 5-10 years, and perhaps most phones will have GPSs in them. Perhaps battery life will improve enough to make continuous GPS tracking possible. Until then, this service, and other similar services, will have little value.
Humans could add and subtract numbers for millennia, yet it wasn't until a few hundred years ago that calculus was disovered. True AI can be as far from what we can do today (e.g. speech recognition) as arithmetics is from calculus. I strongly doubt that anything exciting will happen in 20 years. We might have the next iteration of facebook, but machines that think like humans? Not very likely.
I am not convinced it's all that useful to have a videocamera on a bus (hours and hours of boring video that someone has to watch), but I think it would be beneficial to have a real-time GPS tracker on every bus, train, and other public transport. If you are waiting for a bus and it's late, you could pull out your cell phone and figure out exactly where it is.
I've tried to use SSH a few times on several phones over the last couple of years, and it never worked right. The big problem is latency. You hit a key on a keyboard and have to wait a second or two before it's echoed. This may be ok if all you want to do is restart a server, but for any serious work cell phones just don't cut it.
This is pretty cool. The website claims accuracy of 1-2 meters. If they indeed use triangulation, their equipment has to be able to measure time down to ~1/300 millionth of a second.
BTW, chances are that tracking is anonymous. I don't believe phones transmit phone numbers or other private information unencrypted.
Since this article is about cell phone tracking, I thought I would mention a free GPS tracking service that we recently launched. It's called InstaMapper. There is a DIY that explains how to track a car in real-time using a $40 prepaid cell phone:
Slashdot Mirror
If anyone is interested in GPS tracking, there is a free service that works with inexpensive cell phones: http://www.instamapper.com/diy.html
I operate a free GPS tracking service (http://www.instamapper.com), so I know a thing or two about this topic.
This is an interesting idea, but it won't catch on for a few more years. The problem is that only a tiny fraction of cell phones (I would estimate less than 1%) are capable of GPS tracking now. Of those people who have a compatible phone, most won't bother to install the app and remember to start it whenever they go out. Typical battery life when GPS is turned on is about 8 hours. So this is not an app that can run in the background 24/7.
In the end, you will have something like 10 people in San Francisco who send data to their system. It is enough data to make sense of what's happening in the city? Not hardly.
Give it another 5-10 years, and perhaps most phones will have GPSs in them. Perhaps battery life will improve enough to make continuous GPS tracking possible. Until then, this service, and other similar services, will have little value.
http://www.maxmind.com/app/contact
To confirm that their database is incorrect, here is a simple frontend to MaxMind's data:
http://mapthisip.com/
Step-by-step guide on how to track your own phone online: http://www.instamapper.com/diytracking.html
Humans could add and subtract numbers for millennia, yet it wasn't until a few hundred years ago that calculus was disovered. True AI can be as far from what we can do today (e.g. speech recognition) as arithmetics is from calculus. I strongly doubt that anything exciting will happen in 20 years. We might have the next iteration of facebook, but machines that think like humans? Not very likely.
The article mentions that electroadhesion doesn't work well on damp surfaces. All you need to defend against these robots is a bucket of water.
I am not convinced it's all that useful to have a videocamera on a bus (hours and hours of boring video that someone has to watch), but I think it would be beneficial to have a real-time GPS tracker on every bus, train, and other public transport. If you are waiting for a bus and it's late, you could pull out your cell phone and figure out exactly where it is.
I've tried to use SSH a few times on several phones over the last couple of years, and it never worked right. The big problem is latency. You hit a key on a keyboard and have to wait a second or two before it's echoed. This may be ok if all you want to do is restart a server, but for any serious work cell phones just don't cut it.
---- My GPS tracking site: http://instamapper.com/
This is pretty cool. The website claims accuracy of 1-2 meters. If they indeed use triangulation, their equipment has to be able to measure time down to ~1/300 millionth of a second. BTW, chances are that tracking is anonymous. I don't believe phones transmit phone numbers or other private information unencrypted.
Since this article is about cell phone tracking, I thought I would mention a free GPS tracking service that we recently launched. It's called InstaMapper. There is a DIY that explains how to track a car in real-time using a $40 prepaid cell phone:
http://www.instamapper.com/diytracking.html