Thursday, March 05, 2009
Latitude – how do we stack up?
Artilium has a technology which in some senses is similar to Google’s recently launched and much talked about Latitude. So like many others we decided to give Latitude a go. My own Windows Mobile device was incompatible with Latitude so it was installed on an alternative Windows Mobile device and switched on. It initially showed us at a location in France but eventually corrected itself to a location just over 2 kilometres away. During testing we observed locations with 5 kilometre errors but Latitude suggested the accuracy was 1200 meters! Okay so what can we do with 2 kilometre or so accuracy – meet friends? Unlikely – that is quite a walk! Location errors mean it is not possible to determine if someone is at home, at work, shopping etc. Artilium’s location technology achieves sub 75 meter accuracy and it is this degree of location that is required for compelling social networking solutions.
Of course, Latitude offers the ability to use GPS from the device, which gives great accuracy, unfortunately it also gives poor battery life. Typically running GPS in continual will drain a mobile’s battery in 2-4 hours. This means you won’t even get to lunch time without charging, so regardless of how accurate, it is simply not viable.
Real-time location is another requirement. The information on you and your friends must be real-time and up to date. Our experience with Latitude is that the data is not always up-to-date and really old information can render the application pointless. Artilium’s location client can be set to report periodically and more frequently if changes in location are detected and this provides a much better user experience.
To be useful all of your friends or family must be suitably equipped with Latitude on their mobile phone. The problem is that many devices are incompatible – for example, I had to use an older Windows Mobile device for the test. Artilium has addressed this ubiquity issue by providing a SIM based client which enables any device to become location enabled.
Google claims to be very open but Latitude is an application and has no open API for developers. Artilium’s location server provides a suite of APIs capable of delivering live location, historical location and mobile presence information. This is all achieved via a secure environment that not only authenticates the application, but provides tight security around who requests the data, and who is permitted to receive it. The security around Latitude seems somewhat looser. Will we trust them to “do no evil” and to ensure that others cannot either?
Gordon Povey, VP Research