The Spatial Miscellany

Brady Forest has posted an analysis of some data released by Skyhook wireless, the company that provides the location for the Apple iPhone. Skyhook has shared some details of how iPhone application developers are making use of the device location in their applications.

It’s a small dataset, so we mustn’t place too much significance on the conclusions of any analysis, but it makes for an interesting read.

I often work on the assumption that location adds value to an application, so it was intriguing to discover that a greater percentage of location aware applications are given away for free (40%), in comparison to the larger pool of iPhone applications, of which only a quarter are given away, and the remainder are sold.

Another rainy weekend proved a good excuse to sit down and put some theory into practice…

The theory goes…take a GPS enabled mobile phone; some beta software from Nokia; a handful of HTML, Javascript and PHP goodness; and you have all the components for a dynamic tracking web service and mapping website?

Well, the theory works! I’ve put a demonstration together at the following link:

Mobile Phone Tracking with a Nokia N95 Demonstration

Given all the current hype regarding some telecomunications technology; I’m puzzled by the apparent lack of interest in the mobile web server. Sure, there are a few pieces to still fall into place, but if the mobile web server’s graduation from Nokia research labs, results in widespread deployment, it must have a profound impact on the web?

A couple of weeks back I surfed over to the Nokia website to check out the latest developments for their Series60 device platform (S60); unsuspecting I stumbled upon some software that really got me thinking.

It turns out, a couple of years back Nokia embarked on a project to port the Apache web server to the symbian operating system that underpins their Series60 device platform. The project was subsequently handed over to the open source community and you can get involved here, project raccoon. Interestingly, Nokia have recently wrapped the web server as user friendly software with a supporting website: www.mymobilesite.net.

I installed the application on my N95 and as you might expect it provides complete access to the contents of my mobile phone via the web. I can fire up the web browser on my desktop PC and browse to a web page, and then click a button on the web page to take a photo with the camera on my phone, wherever my phone might be. I can then use my desktop web browser to browse the photos I have taken, or any other information I have on my phone e.g. contact details or calendar events.

This struck me as a unique piece of software, I tried to think of other software that functioned in a similar manner. After roaming the web for some ideas I found an article from Tim O’Reilly that suggested similar behaviour could be observed with Apple iTunes, he’s coined a term to describe such software as…‘software above the level of a single device’.

Installing the mobile web server software on your phone, allows you to use the software on any number of devices…your phone; a desktop client with web browser; a games console; or any other internet enabled device, even someone else’s mobile phone? Software above the level of a single device - just as Tim O’Reilly describes when he observers that you can control your iPod from an iMac.

From a geospatial perspective, couple the GPS enabled N95 mobile phone, with the mobile web server, and we have a tracking service that can be consumed by any internet enabled device, powerful stuff. Perhaps worthy of more consideration, I look across the GI industry, GIS software vendors, the open source community, and other corners, but I don’t see ‘GIS software above the level of a single device’ as an overriding design architecture?

There is a bigger question here…what happens when 3 billion mobile phones run as personal web servers?

This time last year I stumbled across a report from Deloitte, a consulting firm, with telecommunication predictions for 2007, they painted a big roll for location based services (LBS) in driving the mobile industry forward – they were right.

March 2007 saw the release on the GPS enabled Nokia N95, assisted GPS followed shortly after. August saw a national campaign from Vodafone advertising location based services from UK property website Rightmove, and traffic updates from the AA. If in any doubt of the impact LBS would have on the mobile industry in 2007, October saw Nokia stump up $8 billion for mapping data provider Navteq; and only last week, news broke of a location enabled Apple iPhone.

The 2008 report strikes a more bearish note for LBS, at least with regards to GPS enabled mobile phones. Deloitte acknowledge that the convergence of successful technologies in their own right, doesn’t always add value to the converged device…just because we can GPS enable mobile phones, does it add value?

I have sympathy with this view point, and recall with anxiety, last weeks news from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) of the MP3 enabled Stun Gun:

Yep, you can sing along to your favourite tracks while shooting anyone who causes you distress with a 50,000 volt electric charge. What would your song be?

The 2008 Deloitte report can be found here: Deloitte Telecommunications Predictions 2008.

I finally found some time to have a tinker with the Nokia Series 60 SDK, and build a hello world location application for my Nokia N95. Applications for the Series60 platform can be developed in several languages, as a developer you are spoilt for choice.

Having vague recollections of working with Java whilst undertaking my undergrad dissertation at Lancaster way back when, I plumbed for Java and promptly downloaded the Eclipse IDE. Next up, I installed Carbide.j, a suite of mobile development tools from Nokia. It was at this point I encountered my first frustration; it turns out the Carbide tools from Nokia don’t support the latest version of Eclipse, a school boy error of failing to read the doc. A quick uninstall, download, and install later, I’m back on track with an older version of Eclipse (3.1.2).

Nokia have provided a whole host of up-to-date documentation for building LBS applications for the series60 platform, so I downloaded their TouristRoute Java Midlet example and their location API developers guide. The location API is pretty concise, with a handful of important classes:


LocationProvider: represents the source of the location information (in this case the integrated GPS)

LocationListener: receives events associated with a particular LocationProvider.

Coordinates: represents coordinates as latitude-longitude altitude values.

Location: represents the standard set of location information (time-stamped coordinates, speed, accuracy, course, etc.)

Landmark: represents a known location with a name.

LandmarkStore: has some methods for persistent landmark store management (store, delete, and retrieve landmarks).


The sample built fine, generating a Java Archive (JAR) file and Java Application Descriptor (JAD) file. The JAR file is a package of the classes and resources, the JAD file a description of the Midlet. Right clicking on the JAR file (the midlet executable), the Eclipse context menu gives you two deployment options:


1) Deploy by Bluetooth
2) Deploy to Web Server


Unfortunately my laptop doesn’t have Bluetooth, so I went with option two and uploaded the files to my server (they can be downloaded here). I uploaded both files, the JAR and the JAD, I’m not sure if both are required or not? I added corresponding mime types to the .htaccess file on the server (this instructs the server how to handle requests for jar and jad files) and browsed to the jar file with my mobile phone browser. A couple of keypad clicks later, the application had been downloaded and installed on my phone.

Lots of useful documentation and active discussion forums made getting started building mobile app’s a breeze. However, it looks like my experiences may already be somewhat outdated, it appears Nokia have recently abandoned the Carbide.j developer kit in favour of newer tools provided by Eclipse.

I have had the phone for a couple of months now and am very impressed. Nice design, great camera, and a half decent GPS, but it’s the open development platform that sets this phone apart from the crowd, allowing everybody and anybody to develop a whole host of useful (and not so useful) applications. So far I’ve already acquired SportsTracker, which allows me to save my mountain bike routes as KML, some handy software that uploads my photos to my Flickr account, and the ubiquitous Google Maps which syncs nicely with the GPS.