Thanks to portable devices, like smartphones and tablets, and games on Facebook, men and women alike are squeezing a few minutes of game play into their daily lives, which is actually leading to more social interactions in and out of the living room.

Or at least that’s the conclusion of a new study released this week by Latitude, a research and consulting firm that counts DirecTV, Yahoo, Food Network, ESPN and other major media companies as clients.

The report, which studied 290 smartphone owners, examined the future of gaming and tried to illustrate the portrait of the “new gamer.”

This is not an economic forecast. There are no hockey stick graphs here. Rather, this is a touchy-feely explanation for why more people are gaming than ever before. As a result, it might as well have included a chart that pointed up and to the right, and named companies, like Apple, Zynga or Angry Birds’s Rovio, as major benefactors.

Read the report here, watch a video here, or better yet, take a look at this infographic (click to enlarge).

Photo Credit: Mario Spann.

Many of the major location-based social networks launched in early 2009, including Latitude. But Latitude was different: Instead of asking users to manually check in, it continuously displayed their locations on a map in real time. The specificity of that information meant Latitude was primarily used for location-sharing with close friends and family.

Due in part to Google’s heft, the service is relatively popular; now available on all the big smartphone platforms, it has 10 million users who participate each month, compared with six million registered users for Foursquare.

Still, in the past year, just about every local-social pundit and competitor has announced a desire to go “beyond the check-in.” In that context, Latitude’s move to catch up seems oddly timed.

Ken Norton, senior PM for Latitude, justified today’s change by saying Latitude users have been asking for check-ins. Plus (and this is no small thing), Google is associating check-ins with its Google Places project, which means Latitude now has a business model: Connecting its users to local merchants.

Google is not facilitating Latitude-specific deals yet (as companies like Facebook and Foursquare already do), but Norton said there’s nothing stopping merchants from giving a discount to people who check in frequently.

What’s different about Latitude’s version of check-ins? There are a few innovative tweaks that some users may prefer. Google will automatically detect when users are stationary in a place it considers a business, and send them a notification asking if they want to check in.

Also, (with user permission) Latitude supports automatic check-ins for common venues, as well as supporting “checking out” of a place when the users’ location indicates they’ve left the building.

However, users cannot add locations; so, for instance, they can’t check into their homes (unless their homes are already businesses with Place pages).

And while Latitude is hopping on the trend, how about a sprinkle of gamification! Based on their participation, users can qualify to be a “Regular,” “VIP” or “Guru” of a specific establishment. However, there is no leaderboard or public acknowledgment of such users, yet.

Users can publish their locations to their public-facing Google Profile, if they want to share beyond their Latitude friend network. It’s expected that Google will increasingly include these public profiles in new social product launches.

The capability to check in on Latitude is only available on Android to start (through the new Google Maps 5.1 app), but should be coming to the BlackBerry, Symbian and iPhone, said Norton.

The move is especially interesting because Adams had prepared an influential slide deck about the shortcomings of today’s social networks that was widely circulated online as well as within Facebook. Originally presented at the Voices That Matter Web Design Conference in June, “The Real Life Social Network” has been viewed more than 400,000 times since being posted on SlideShare.

For Adams to join the opposition is obviously not a vote of confidence for Google and its much-maligned plans to offer more social products.

Adams, who had spent four years on the Google user experience team, didn’t specify what his new gig at Facebook will be. At Google he had worked on products such as Gmail, Latitude and YouTube, according to his bio. Adams is also the author of the forthcoming book “Social Circles.”

After seeing Adams’s tweet this afternoon, I took some time to replay his 224-slide presentation.

In the last five months, Facebook released a Groups feature that addresses some of the problems Adams identified in online social networking, but his ideas and principles have not gone stale. Adams’s main thesis is that online social networks have not evolved to accurately portray and extend the offline social networks people have had forever. He compares Facebook friend lists and IM chat contacts to the awkwardness of planning a wedding seating chart, where people from all parts of your life come together.

While tools like email exist to help people communicate with those they are most strongly tied to, and services like Facebook help us keep track of our “weak ties,” Adams speaks of a need for a third model of “temporary ties” that recede after a short-term period, like an eBay transaction. He also talks about the opportunity to capitalize on the high degree of influence that friends have on each other’s purchases.

Adams proposes that people will increasingly need to have more than one online profile, and that online social products must be designed with privacy and trust at top of mind. He says well-designed social products must communicate to users the consequences of their actions.

These are interesting principles, but they’re hardly a blueprint for Google’s long-awaited social offerings and upgrades. The big difference is that now Facebookers can go straight to the source rather than being a few of the 400,000 people to view Adams’s ideas and research online.

Please note: As disclosed in my ethics statement, my husband is a part-time researcher on the Facebook user experience team.

(Of course, Twitter hasn’t revealed the secret formulas that helped it aggregate, tabulate and rank these topics.)

In the Twitterverse, after the BP oil spill and soccer, the next most popular topic of conversation in 2010 was the movie “Inception,” followed by the Haiti earthquake and the vuvuzela. The iPad, Android, Justin Bieber, Harry Potter and Pulpo Paul round out the top 10. It’s an odd list, indeed.

The person most discussed on Twitter in 2010 was obviously he of the dedicated servers, Mr. Bieber. (It’s somewhat shocking that world events and tech gadgets were able to keep the teen phenom out of the overall top spot.) Beating out her royal highness Lady Gaga, the No. 2 person on Twitter was Brazilian president-elect Dilma Rousseff (pictured).

Here’s the full 2010 list, courtesy of Twitter, followed by 2009′s list for comparison.

2010 Twitter Trends

Overall Top Trends:
1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. FIFA World Cup
3. Inception
4. Haiti Earthquake
5. Vuvuzela
6. Apple iPad
7. Google Android
8. Justin Bieber
9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
10. Pulpo Paul

News Events:
1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. Haiti Earthquake
3. Pakistan Floods
4. Koreas Conflict
5. Chilean Miners Rescue

People:
1. Justin Bieber
2. Dilma Rousseff
3. Lady Gaga
4. Julian Assange
5. Mel Gibson

Movies:
1. Inception
2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
3. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
4. Despicable Me
5. Karate Kid

Television:
1. MTV Video Music Awards
2. Pretty Little Liars
3. True Blood
4. Walking Dead
5. Grammy Awards

Technology:
1. Apple iPad
2. Google Android
3. Apple iOS
4. Apple iPhone
5. Call of Duty: Black Ops

World Cup:
1. FIFA World Cup
2. Vuvuzela
3. Pulpo Paul
4. Dunga
5. Diego Maradona

Sports:
1. LeBron James
2. Wimbledon
3. Manchester United
4. Brock Lesnar
5. Celtics

Hash Tags:
1. #rememberwhen
2. #slapyourself
3. #confessiontime (hash tag started by Usher)
4. #thingsimiss
5. #ohjustlikeme

2009 Twitter Trends

News Events:
1. #iranelection
2. Swine Flu
3. Gaza
4. Iran
5. Tehran
6. #swineflu
7. AIG
8. #uksnow
9. Earth Hour
10. #inaug09

People:
1. Michael Jackson
2. Susan Boyle
3. Adam Lambert
4. Kobe (Bryant)
5. Chris Brown
6. Chuck Norris
7. Joe Wilson
8. Tiger Woods
9. Christian Bale
10. A-Rod (Alex Rodriguez)

Movies:
1. Harry Potter
2. New Moon
3. District 9
4. Paranormal Activity
5. Star Trek
6. True Blood
7. Transformers 2
8. Watchmen
9. Slumdog Millionaire
10. G.I. Joe

TV Shows:
1. American Idol
2. Glee
3. Teen Choice Awards
4. SNL (Saturday Night Live)
5. Dollhouse
6. Grey’s Anatomy
7. VMAS (Video Music Awards)
8. #bsg (Battlestar Galatica)
9. BET Awards
10. Lost

Sports (Teams, Events, Leagues):
1. Super Bowl
2. Lakers
3. Wimbledon
4. Cavs (Cleveland Cavaliers)
5. Superbowl
6. Chelsea
7. NFL
8. UFC 100
9. Yankees
10. Liverpool

Technology:
1. Google Wave
2. Snow Leopard
3. Tweetdeck
4. Windows 7
5. CES
6. Palm Pre
7. Google Latitude
8. #E3
9. #amazonfail
10. Macworld

Hash Tags:
1. #musicmonday
2. #iranelection
3. #sxsw
4. #swineflu
5. #nevertrust
6. #mm
7. #rememberwhen
8. #3drunkwords
9. #unacceptable
10. #iwish

It is an extraordinary market play. And an unsettling one. For it seeks to place Google (GOOG), which already collects vast amounts of data about our Internet use, at the very center of our information experience.

The privacy implications are, of course, horrendous. And while Google will inevitably dismiss such concerns as paranoid and argue that any data the company might collect at the OS level will be used only to improve its services and benefit users, it should still give us all pause. Because when it is finally launched, Chrome OS will be yet one more deep well of consumer data to which Google will have access.

There are already quite a few such wells, including Google Search and Chrome, that profile user interests and surfing habits: Gmail, which gives the company access to our email conversations, and Google Voice, which gives the company access to our spoken ones. Add to this Google Street View and Latitude, a service that tracks the physical location of its users, and mobile and desktop operating systems and, well…that kind of consolidation of Internet-based services around a single dominant company should give us all pause.

Lest we forget, Google is in the behavioral targeting business. Why would people ever use an OS developed by a company whose business is based on meticulously recording and analyzing their online behavior? Because they enjoy using its other services, I suppose. But there is a privacy-vs-ease-of-use tradeoff here. And with Chrome OS, it is unprecedented. Further, while Google might tout its “don’t be evil” motto as reason enough to trust the company with our data, there are other entities that don’t always share that sensibility. Remember, it wasn’t so long ago that the federal government tried to force Google to turn over user search data to the Justice Department…

“Competition in the OS market should always be welcome, but Google is the special case,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Digital Daily. “It has become dominant across many essential Internet services–search, mail, video, online apps, and advertising. Coupled with Google’s growing profiles of American consumers and reluctance to adopt meaningful privacy safeguards, we expect that antitrust authorities in the US and Europe will view Google’s entry into the OS market with enormous skepticism.”

Jeff Chester, executive director of The Center for Digital Democracy, echoed Rotenberg’s concerns. “Google’s new OS has to be placed under the data collection X-Ray by US and EU privacy regulators and advocates,” he said. “Any expansion into the marketplace by either Google or Microsoft should generate intense scrutiny, especially for the privacy implications. These two are engaged in a global data collections digital arms race, which has far-reaching implications for consumers and their information.”

While these location-sharing services have some interesting possibilities, they also raise some disturbing implications for privacy — or maybe it just seems that way if, like me, you’re over 35 years old. Lately I’ve been testing a cellphone location-sharing service that I found simple, useful and non-creepy enough that I can imagine people thirtysomething and older using it.

Send a ‘Glympse’ to share your location

The free service is called Glympse, from a company of the same name that has designed it to share your location with friends and colleagues in small increments of time — glimpses, as the name implies, of your whereabouts. Glympse just released a test version of the service as an application for the G1, a phone offered by T-Mobile that runs Google’s (GOOG) Android operating system.

The company will release versions of Glympse for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, iPhone and Nokia (NOK) phones in the coming weeks. Users can download the Glympse software onto G1 phones through Android Market, the online clearinghouse for applications for Android phones.

I used Glympse on an iPhone and a G1 and, for comparison, tried out a couple of other location-sharing applications, Google Latitude and Loopt. When you start the Glympse application, it identifies where you are on a map using a combination of location technologies in cellphones, including GPS satellites, Wi-Fi hot spots and phone towers.

Your location isn’t shared with others until you “send a Glympse” to someone. The software allowed me to send a Glympse with my location for selected chunks of time lasting anywhere from zero minutes to four hours. Picking zero minutes shared only my location at the moment of sending, while selecting four hours meant the recipients of my Glympse could track me for that period of time, wherever I went.

The sender of a Glympse can address it by entering a recipient’s email address, or a mobile-phone number for a text message. Recipients get a message with a link to a map on a Web page. A nice thing about the service is that it doesn’t require recipients to have the Glympse software, though the experience is richer when they do.

Sending a Glympse can be helpful anytime a friend, family member or colleague is expecting you. You can send a Glympse that lets a friend know you’re stuck in heavy traffic (although it’s wise to do that before you’re on the road to stay safe and, in some states, to avoid breaking the law). Parents can insist that teens send a Glympse when they go out for the evening.

Bryan Trussel, the CEO of Glympse, sent me several Glympses with short messages like “late lunch meeting” and “headed home” to explain where he was going. On the G1, I could see an icon representing Mr. Trussel moving around a map as he drove through the streets of Redmond, Wash., including his speed. I was also able to see traffic conditions, which would have been helpful if he had been running late. Glympse gave me a similar view of his location through a Web browser running on my PC. On the iPhone, the experience was more static, forcing me to reload a Web page to get a fresh view of Mr. Trussel’s whereabouts. Glympse says it will fix this so users of the iPhone can watch someone’s location in real time.

I encountered a bug with the service when I sent a couple Glympses to my own cellphone and that of a colleague — both BlackBerrys and neither of which had Glympse software. Both Glympses linked to high-level maps suggesting I was somewhere in North America, which wasn’t very helpful, even if it was technically accurate. The company couldn’t figure out what the problem was, and it eventually stopped happening for me too.

Once a Glympse expires, the service no longer tracks the sender’s location. It will show the sender’s last known location for 48 hours after the Glympse expires. Glympse may some day use your location information to target advertising to you, but the company isn’t doing that for now.

I’m far more comfortable with this form of finite location-sharing than the approach used by other services. Google Latitude lets you share your location to only a list of friends. It gives you the option of turning location sharing off or, through a “city level” option, it reveals only your general whereabouts. Loopt similarly allows you to set options to show, or hide your location from all or some online friends. A feature called Loopt Mix lists strangers you can send messages to in your general vicinity — many of whom seemed to be looking for romantic partners in my area.

Despite these controls, I easily forgot I was sharing my location with these two services. This might be fine for someone who enjoys being tracked down by friends during a night out on the town or is diligent about changing privacy settings when they want to go stealth.

I’m too lazy to manage my privacy so closely though. I don’t mind giving friends a look at my location, but only if I know the invitation isn’t open-ended.

• Email nick.wingfield@wsj.com.

All four of us have been using an application that, once downloaded onto a mobile device, uses location-based technology to track its users’ movements. The app then displays the user’s location on a map for friends to see, so they can know where the person is at all times.

We used Google Latitude, a new feature in the search giant’s Google Maps mobile application as of today. People can get this if they upgrade their current version of Google Maps or install Maps for the first time. It works on Google’s G1, most color BlackBerrys, most Windows Mobile devices and some other smart phones. Google says it will soon work on the iPhone, iPod touch and Sony Ericsson phones.

Google (GOOG) is arriving late to the party where location-based apps like Loopt (Loopt.com) from Loopt Inc. and Where (where.com) from uLocate Communications are already following people on a variety of mobile devices ranging from basic cellphones to iPhones. These apps rely on GPS satellites, Wi-Fi or cellular towers to locate you and your friends, and then use this data to encourage people to find nearby attractions, local information or social networks.

Latitude is an opt-in-only feature, meaning no one can see your location — or vice versa — without permission. It uses either GPS satellites or cell-tower and Wi-Fi location technology depending on your mobile device’s specifications and what’s most available in certain spots. My trusted testers and I used Google Latitude on three different kinds of BlackBerrys: the Pearl 8130, Curve 8320 and two Curve 8900s. Of these, only the 8900s made use of GPS.

Latitude, a feature in Google Maps, shares someone’s location, status and photo with friends. Location data can update every several minutes when a user is moving.

Along with their locations, friends can share other information on Latitude by updating a status line or changing their picture, which appears as a tiny representative icon on a map. Changes to one’s status or picture will be reflected in Google Talk, Google’s instant-messaging tool, but this doesn’t integrate with other status-related social-networking programs like Facebook or Twitter, and thus may saddle people with another status entry to update.

It’s easy to find fault in Latitude since it often spots people inaccurately, including showing my sister in Boston’s Charles River, rather than in a neighborhood along the river. It’s worth noting that tracking technology in general, including GPS, can be inaccurate. But even with these inaccuracies, my friends and I liked finding one another on our respective maps and used this geographic information to send location-specific messages to each other: I joked with my boyfriend about not leaving his house on time for a dinner and commended my sister on getting up early for church on Sunday.

Usability issues aside, location-based services like Latitude can be just plain creepy, especially when a Big Brother like Google is tracking your whereabouts. So Google incorporated easy-to-change privacy settings so that locations can be automatically detected, manually entered or completely hidden from other people. Or people can sign out of Latitude altogether.

Likewise, users can adjust the level of geographic information they’re willing to share with each person. For example, I might want to share with my boyfriend my best available location information, like a specific spot on a street, and share only city-level location information with my boss.

The city-level information would be helpful for my parents, who often wish they had a better idea of when I’m traveling for work and where I’ll be. But my parents aren’t likely to download Google Latitude onto their mobile devices anytime soon. For them, a special Latitude widget in iGoogle — Google’s personalized home page feature on a PC — might be best. This widget is also useful for people who may have Latitude on a mobile device but are sitting at their desks and want to see where their friends are.

As expected, Latitude worked differently between me and the people who live in the same area, compared with how it worked between me and people who live hundreds of miles away, like my sister in Boston. For example, my boyfriend and I are more likely to use our respective locations to plan where we’ll meet for dinner, while my sister’s current location is just fun to see. Still, my sister and I know one another’s neighborhoods well enough to have an idea of where the other was, and we felt a little more plugged in with each other’s lives when we saw one another on our maps.

People who live in urban settings will likely use Latitude differently than those who live in the suburbs. One of my testers noted that it could be fun using Latitude to see where friends are out in a city on any given night. But because Latitude sometimes pegs people’s locations as a lot farther away than they are — one test spotted a friend 1.5 miles away from his real location — this might be tough data to go on.

After using Latitude for a while, I grew to recognize familiar location mistakes like home or work, and knew where my friends actually were. But it’s unfortunate that locations aren’t more accurately marked.

Latitude returned the most precise location results when determining where the two GPS-using BlackBerry Curve 8900s were at any given time, though these spots still weren’t perfect. If a mobile device doesn’t have GPS or if GPS simply isn’t available in the area, cellular towers and Wi-Fi will help a determine location. These alternate methods use less battery than GPS, so they will work instead of GPS when Google Maps isn’t running in the foreground of a device.

Latitude users can opt to allow their location to automatically update every several minutes while they’re moving. A Friends List that appears with the map lists people in order of who is moving starting with who moved most recently. Users can send text messages or call friends directly from this list, or find nearby spots like bars or movie theaters by typing into a search box; restaurant information includes ratings and reviews. Directions to and from friends’ locations are also available, and you can plan your route via car, mass transit or walking.

Location-based services like Latitude are great for keeping tabs on friends and could even come in handy in other situations — such as when parents want to know where their kids are or when elderly relatives want to let someone always know their whereabouts. But I wouldn’t want to depend on them in an emergency.

• Google Latitude Web Site

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090203/tracking-friends-the-google-way/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080819/mapping-your-digital-photo-world/ http://allthingsd.com/20080819/mapping-your-digital-photo-world/#comments Wed, 20 Aug 2008 01:02:02 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20080819/mapping-your-digital-photo-world/ After spending summer vacation shooting the sights, many people face the same chore: labeling and organizing digital photos before forgetting what they are and where they were taken.

Now there’s a way to upload photos that are already labeled with their exact latitude and longitude using geotagging, the fancy name for labeling data with information on its geographic origin. Photos with “geotags” have coordinates embedded invisibly in them. Some programs or online photo services use these tags to generate maps showing just where each photo was taken, or to label or organize the images. Not long ago, this capability was mostly done through manual labeling or with costly equipment.

The $129 Eye-Fi Explore Card from Eye-Fi Inc. gives people the ability to wirelessly send geotagged photos from a digital camera.

This week, I tested the $129 Eye-Fi Explore Card (EyeFi.com), a special two-gigabyte memory card from Eye-Fi Inc. that adds a photo geotagging feature to Eye-Fi’s original functionality: the automatic wireless uploading of photos, straight from a digital camera to a home computer or photo-sharing service. If all goes well, users can capture and upload what are essentially geographically prelabeled batches of digital photos — with minimal effort and time.

But after days of testing, I found myself more frustrated as I used this wireless memory card in various places and situations, and found the tagging to be unreliable in one scenario. (Eye-Fi Inc. said my experiences weren’t typical.) At home in Washington, D.C., and while on a business trip to California, I tried it using a two-year-old Kodak digital camera and two different Vista laptops, though it also works on Macs.

Eye-Fi introduced the Explore Card as a follow-up to the company’s original wireless memory card, which it introduced last fall. Once set up, the first Eye-Fi card initiated the transferring of photos to a computer or Web site whenever the digital camera was turned on and as long as it was near a pre-associated wireless network.

Through a partnership with Skyhook Wireless, the Explore card can automatically label photos with their latitude and longitude using data from the Skyhook’s Wi-Fi positioning system. As long as a photo is captured within the Skyhook coverage area, which the company says covers 70% of North America, and the geotagging is enabled, each photo will be coded with data identifying where it was captured.

The Explore Card turned otherwise normal photo-sharing sites into mini maps showing where I had traveled while on a business trip in Silicon Valley. I set my account up to work with Flickr, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish, Shutterfly and Picasa Web Albums, though only one will work at a time. Flickr, Picasa Web Albums and Smugmug make use of geotagged photos by tagging shots with their location data, such as “Downtown Palo Alto, California.” I used Flickr and Picasa Web Albums to instantaneously generate a map showing where I was when I took photos.

On Flickr, each image was represented by a pink dot associated with one of several photos displayed in a horizontal bar below the map. This map can be searched for specific tags (photo labels) or locations and can be narrowed to show images from everyone who uses Flickr, just your own photostream, or only photos from friends or contacts. My searches returned results in seconds, finding shots that were geotagged with “Palo Alto” and tagged by me as containing flowers. I enjoyed looking at other Flickr users’ photos when I searched everyone’s images, specifically in cities where I recognized landmarks.

Picasa Web Albums showed each geotagged image on a map by placing tiny versions of each photo on the map. In certain cases, when I had multiple photos taken at the same spot, photos appeared with lines drawn from them to a spot, much like spokes of a wheel. I also looked at my Picasa photos on maps in Google Earth; a quick link to the program is conveniently found at the top of the Picasa Web Albums screen.

Another key feature of the Explore Card is its hotspot connectivity. The card is capable of working in any Wayport location, which includes McDonald’s (MCD) restaurants and certain airports and hotels. Though using Wayport locations normally requires sign-ins and/or payment via a computer screen, the Explore Card works as soon as the camera is turned on in these locations. This service is free for the first year, but after that, it costs $19 annually to continue.

Finally, the Explore Card notifies users via SMS or email messages when photos have either started or finished uploading; or if these uploads are interrupted, which happened to me a few times. This is useful in Wayport wireless zones, where the camera has no real way of signaling when an upload is finished or when a computer isn’t handy.

In a hotel with a flaky Wi-Fi network, the Explore Card was crippled, though I blame the hotel for this inconvenience. But even when I traveled to a local McDonald’s, where Eye-Fi’s maker has a deal for free Wi-Fi for its cards, the Eye-Fi stuttered and couldn’t consistently upload photos. When I plugged the card directly into my laptops, the results weren’t much better.

If you aren’t within Wi-Fi range while taking a photo, it won’t be geotagged. I ran into this issue in one instance: On California’s highway 101, I took a handful of photos, but when I checked my Eye-Fi account later, none of these photos was automatically geotagged.

Some people worry about privacy settings when it comes to uploading geotagged photos directly to a sharing Web site. Settings within the Eye-Fi Manager make it easy to adjust permissions to determine who can see your photos within each of about 25 sharing sites.

Users can opt to share photos only to a home computer through their own Wi-Fi network, and a special card is designed for just that: the $79 Eye-Fi Home. This is meant to serve as a shortcut for transfers.

The original Eye-Fi, which costs $99, was a useful tool as a wireless memory card, but I didn’t have as much luck with the more expensive Eye-Fi Explore. Still, when it did work, I found geotagging to be a great way of automatically labeling and organizing my photos. Instead of just being neatly stored in a folder on your computer, geotagged images are given a spark of life and relevancy when plotted out on a map.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email: mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080819/mapping-your-digital-photo-world/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080130/phoning-home-without-a-phone/ http://allthingsd.com/20080130/phoning-home-without-a-phone/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:01:00 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20080130/phoning-home-without-a-phone/ (See Corrections & Amplifications item below.)

On a chilly day, most folks find it tough to open the front door to retrieve the newspaper — much less climb a 15,000-foot mountain. But plenty of people court danger by rappelling down canyons and camping in remote woodlands. This week, I tested a device that will give thrill seekers a little extra insurance: It lets the folks back home track their progress, and learn when they’re OK or when they’re in trouble.

When activated, the $170 SPOT Satellite Messenger from SPOT Inc., the Milpitas, Calif., unit of Globalstar Inc., emits a signal to GPS satellites, which notify SPOT’s messaging service. The service then sends a message to friends, family or emergency rescue teams about your current status. Because it uses GPS technology, the SPOT will work even when you’re far from cellphone signal range and anywhere in the world.

I tested SPOT in my Washington, D.C., neighborhood (city parks still count as outdoorsy) and on a trip across the California desert and mountains on the way to a conference — though I was scaling mountains in an air-conditioned SUV rather than in a rock-climbing harness.

In my tests, SPOT worked without a problem. Notifications from the device were delivered to my friends via email and text message and included my current latitude and longitude. The service also sent along canned messages that I set up in advance on the company’s Web site at www.findmespot.com and hyperlinks to Google Maps that showed my location.

SPOT charges a $100 annual service fee, which includes an unlimited number of messages that can be sent out from your device using three buttons: OK/Check, Help and 911. An additional $50 per year tracking service called SPOTcasting follows and marks your exact location every 10 minutes for 24 hours each time it’s initiated.

This simple and straightforward device could really help in a dangerous situation. And the company takes its job seriously: A steely message on the SPOT packaging reads, “Opening this box is the first step in making sure you don’t come home in one.” But SPOT could also save the day in less-adventurous situations, such as when your car dies and you’re out of cellphone range.

However, SPOT isn’t perfect. While its three message-sending buttons make it easy to use, they also limit the types of messages it can send. There’s no keyboard, so messages must be brief and set up in advance on the Web site. And the device only sends messages and can’t receive them. Your friends and family have no way of getting back in touch with you on SPOT should you send a Help message from beyond cellphone range.

SPOT is a bright orange device with roughly the same surface measurement as a BlackBerry, though it’s considerably thicker. Its durable casing makes it waterproof and floatable, along with working in extremes like -40 degrees Fahrenheit and up to 21,000 feet above sea level. It runs on two AA lithium batteries, which last for different amounts of time according to the type of message being sent.

Setting up SPOT took only a few minutes on the Web site. A default or personalized message can be set up to go out with OK/Check and Help notifications, and email addresses and cellphone numbers (for SMS text messages) can be entered online as the destinations for these messages. Every message includes the user’s current location in terms of latitude and longitude, along with a hyperlink to access that location via Google Maps.

SPOT sends messages and location information via satellite, including points that can be tracked on a map.

The OK/Check button can be used most casually by owners of this gadget, as it merely serves to assure others that you’re fine. A good example might be two people on a three-month sailing trip who use this button as a means of checking in with family every Sunday night.

If OK/Check is held down for five seconds, it initiates the SPOTcasting tracking service (provided you’ve signed up for it) and locates your device every 10 minutes for a 24-hour period. These tracked points show up on SPOT’s Web site and are displayed as numbered points on Google Maps.

SPOT worked for me while driving through a regional park with a campsite, where cellphone range was faint, and up into boulder-crusted mountains. Just minutes after pressing Help or OK/Check or initiating tracking, friends received word of my location via emails and text messages.

You can’t set SPOT to track a trip for longer than 24 hours or at different intervals, such as every hour for a week. And the only way for others to view your tracked points is if they sign in using your online account’s username and password.

The Help button is used in more urgent situations and uses messages such as “Urgent help needed. Pick me up at campsite.” (The default for Help is “This is a HELP message. Please send for help ASAP.”) But preset messages shouldn’t be made too specific during the online setup because they can’t be changed from the device later.

The 911 and Help automatic notifications will always override less urgent messages like OK/Check or SPOTcasting. In the case of the 911 and Help buttons, one can be pressed after the other and the messages for both will still go out at the same time. The 911 button will send a message every five minutes until power runs out (the company says this will last for up to seven days) or until the message is canceled; Help sends a message every five minutes for an hour or until canceled.

The 911 button is more serious. When pressed, SPOT Inc. automatically notifies a certified 911 company called the GEOS International Emergency Response Center, which contacts your specified emergency contacts first to see if they know anything about your situation before dispatching a rescue squad using your coordinates.

If you can adjust to SPOT’s three-button approach, the device could be helpful for you or someone you know during outdoor adventures. Many people will buy SPOT simply for its 911 button, as an insurance policy on fluky cellphone service.

• Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications:

The SPOT Satellite Messenger uses a global positioning system to determine a user’s location and a second satellite network to send notifications to friends, family and emergency services. This column erroneously stated that GPS satellites send notifications.

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