There have not been many earth-shaking acquisitions of companies that have location as a big part of their offerings. However, the recent $310 million acquisition of CSR’s handset connectivity and location business by Samsung merits an additional look. CSR, along with Broadcom and Qualcomm, are looking at the indoor location market as a strong one in the next four years. In other news, the Mobile Resource Management market is seeing 20 percent growth—not a market with consumer excitability, but one that makes money.
The recent $310 million acquisition of CSR’s handset connectivity and location business by Samsung has put a number of competitors on notice. One analyst, Liam Quirke, IMS Research, says that because of GPS’ increasing presence on smartphones, and Samsung now being the largest handset manufacturer, it made sense for Samsung to want to own this part of the supply chain.
“This complements its already large manufacturing operations that supply a number of smartphone components, including its own Exynos branded application processor — in addition to manufacturing the Apple-designed Ax range of SoCs,” he said.
The Samsung-CSR transaction refers only to the mobile business (i.e., handsets and tablets). “Samsung’s GPS strategy here is inevitably focused around such devices. The trend within connectivity, particularly in devices with small form factors such as handsets and tablets, has been one of increasing integration,” Quirke said. “Connectivity has been packaged into a single chip with some IC suppliers also including GPS. An example would be Texas Instrument’s WiLink 8 solution. An alternative is to include GPS on the cellular baseband, a route which Qualcomm decided to take and has since begun to integrate into its application processors — and more recently also including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.”
A number of restrictions placed upon CSR by Samsung, as part of the transaction, prevent CSR from selling a GPS product combined with an application processor into the mobile field for 10 years, hinting that this is a direction Samsung may take in terms of integration and subsequently removing additional potential competition, Quirke said.
In addition to the $310 million deal, Samsung will invest $34.4 million in return for 4.9 percent stake in the remaining CSR business. The completion of this acquisition is expected to be in the fourth quarter. Quirke said that as well as picking up the benefit of CSR’s patent portfolio, the acquisition also adds the research and development and marketing support for its Bluetooth and GPS technology for handsets.
The deal follows Samsung’s acquisition in June of Nanoradio, a developer of ultra-low power Wireless LAN for chipsets for devices such as smartphones and tablets, Quirke said. It also provides Samsung with the connectivity technologies with which to make an entrance into the wireless connectivity market.
During former founder Kanwar Chadha’s tenure at SiRF, which merged with CSR in 2009, the company acquired the GPS businesses of Motorola and Conexant as well some smaller companies such as Centrality, Enuvis, Impulsesoft, Kisel, and TrueSpan.
Indoor Location Market Will Be Important to CSR
CSR, along with competitor Broadcom, has become increasingly involved in the indoor location market, with the announcement of its SiRFusion location platform in November. However, Quirke said that the finer details of the transaction between Samsung and CSR indicate that Samsung has only purchased the technology license for GPS, not indoor location. “If correct, this means CSR is free to sell its indoor location technology to other handset OEMs, and in the reverse means that Samsung is not able to do this,” he said.
With that in mind, indoor location is one of the five key growth areas that CSR is targeting, Quirke said. “Indoor location, and the various applications associated with it, is centred around mobile devices and, as such, is why I feel CSR was eager to hold on to this portion of their mobile business. Indoor location remains a nascent market with much potential, particularly when considering the opportunity to provide highly targeted marketing material in commercial venues such as shopping malls — not to mention the opportunity in the enterprise space,” he said.
IMS predicts in its “Indoor Positioning, Mapping, Technology and Services 2012” study that 110,000 supermarkets, shopping malls, or large retail stores will have indoor maps by 2016, making extensive use of indoor location technology.
CSR has struggled in the mobile space in recent years, while Broadcom and Qualcomm have continued to succeed on the back of their strengths in connectivity combining ICs and cellular baseband chips, respectively, Quirke said. “Current indoor location solutions offered by the major IC suppliers reside on the GPS chip itself, making use of a number of wireless technologies and MEMS sensors. In light of this, CSR will need to provide a compelling reason for a handset manufacturer to choose its indoor location solution over one from Broadcom or Qualcomm,” he said. “On a more positive note, early indications suggest that CSR’s solution may be slightly ahead, in terms of providing an accurate working solution — of those from Broadcom and Qualcomm.”
Enterprise Market Strong…
In other industry news, the leading suppliers of GPS fleet management solutions for the local fleet and enterprise markets are continuing to grow at a strong rate, nearly 20 per year, said Clem Driscoll, president of CJ Driscoll Associates.
“FleetMatics, the largest supplier to small fleets, filed an S1 in May and the IPO is expected in the near future. Telogis continues its wave of acquisitions, most recently NavTrak, said Driscoll, who has completed his “2012-2013 Mobile Resource Management Systems Market Study” that profiles 100 MRM suppliers in several markets.
A strong trend in MRM for both local fleets and the trucking sector is monitoring driver behavior, Driscoll said. “Many suppliers monitor speeding, acceleration, deceleration, speed on turns, etc., and generate driver scorecards to identify the best and riskiest drivers,” he said. “This monitoring of driver performance, along with engine idling time and route adherence, also helps fleet operators minimize fuel consumption, which is a major concern these days.”
Chronos Technology, supplier of GNSS (GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo) products and services, welcomes the decision by the UK regulator Ofcom on June 20 to implement a licensing regime for the use of GNSS repeaters in the UK. Chronos Technology has been at the forefront of GNSS repeater technology for many years and is one of the largest suppliers of this technology to the military in Europe.
GNSS repeaters provide coverage for the use and testing of GNSS technology inside buildings where the GNSS signals do not normally reach. Until the recent decision by Ofcom, the use of this repeater technology in the UK was not permitted except in specialized (normally military) situations. Large numbers of consumer and industrial products use GNSS technology for positioning and timing applications including smartphones, telematics equipment, avionics and emergency service applications. GNSS technology can also be used for resource management, civil engineering and military applications.
The Ofcom consultation prior to this decision highlighted concerns about potential interference to applications by the use of GNSS repeaters; however, the conclusion was that a properly installed repeater system, conforming to the ETSI harmonized Standard for GNSS repeaters, should have no impact beyond 10 meters. This decision enables the use of GNSS repeaters in many applications and will provide significant benefits and cost savings to organizations wanting to develop, test, integrate and manufacture products and systems that use GNSS technology, Chronos said.
Chronos has installed repeater and other general GNSS infrastructure in more than 50 countries over 15 years.
By Daniel P. Shepard, Todd E. Humphreys, and Aaron A. Fansler
Spoofing tests against phasor measurement units demonstrate their vulnerability to attack. A generator trip in an automatic control scheme could be falsely activated by the GPS spoofing, possibly leading to cascading faults and a large-scale power blackout.
As electric power grids continue to expand throughout the world and as transmission lines are pushed to their operating limits, the dynamic operation of the power system has become a serious concern and increasingly difficult to accurately model. More effective real-time system control is now seen as key to preventing wide-scale cascading outages like the 2003 Northeast Blackout.
For years, electric power control centers have estimated the state of the power system (the positive sequence voltage magnitude and phase angle at each network node) from measurements of power flows. But for improved accuracy in the so-called power system state estimates, it will be necessary to feed existing estimators with a richer measurement ensemble or to measure the grid state directly.
Alternating current (AC) quantities have been analyzed for over 100 years using a construct developed by Charles Proteus Steinmetz in 1893, known as a phasor. In power systems, the phasor construct has commonly been used for analyzing AC quantities, assuming a constant frequency. A relatively new synchronization technique which allows referencing measured current or voltage phasors to absolute time has been developed and is currently being implemented throughout the world. The measurements produced by this technique are known as synchronized phasor measurements or synchrophasors.
Synchrophasors provide a real-time snapshot of current and voltage amplitudes and phases across a power system, and so can give a complete picture of the state of a power system at any instant in time. This makes synchrophasors useful for control, measurement, and analysis of the power system.
A device used to measure synchrophasors is called a phasor measurement unit (PMU). In a typical deployment, PMUs are integrated in protective relays and are sampled from widely dispersed locations in the power system network. They are synchronized with respect to the common time source of a GPS clock. PMUs basically measure AC voltage (or current) and absolute phase angles at selected locations in an electric transmission or distribution system.
GPS Spoofing
GPS spoofing is the act of producing a falsified version of the GPS signal with the goal of taking control of a GPS receiver’s position-velocity-time (PVT) solution. This is most effectively accomplished when the spoofer has knowledge of the GPS signal as seen by the target receiver so that the spoofer can produce a matched, falsified version of the signal. In the case of military signals, this type of attack is nearly impossible because the military signal is encrypted and therefore unpredictable. On the other hand, the civil GPS signal is publicly-known and readily predictable.
In recent years, civil GPS spoofing is becoming recognized as a serious threat to many critical infrastructure applications which rely heavily on the publicly-known civil GPS signal. A number of promising methods are currently being developed to defend against civil GPS spoofing attacks, but it will still take a number of years before these technologies mature and are implemented on a wide scale. Currently, there is a complete absence of any off-the-shelf defense against a GPS spoofing attack.
See “Generation, Transmission” sidebar at the end of this article for background on the following tests.
The Tests. The minimum threshold for success was to show that a GPS spoofer could force a PMU to violate the IEEE C37.118 Standard “Synchrophasors for Power Systems,” which defines accuracy as a vectorial difference between the measured and expected value of the phasor for the measurement at a given instant of time, called the total vector error (TVE). TVE blends three possible sources of error: magnitude, phase angle, and timing. An error in timing appears identical to an error in phase angle. Without timing and magnitude errors, a phase angle error of 0.573o corresponds to a 1 percent TVE, the maximum allowable by the IEEE C37.118 Standard. This phase angle error could be equivalently and indistinguishably caused by a timing error of 26.5 µs, which was chosen as the threshold for success in the spoofing tests.
The Spoofer
The civil GPS spoofer used for these tests is an advanced version of the spoofer reported in “Assessing the Spoofing Threat,” GPS World, January 2009. A block diagram of the spoofer is shown in Figure 1. It is the same spoofer used in the tests described in “Drone Hack” in this issue of the magazine, and a detailed description is given in that article.
The spoofer can carry out a sophisticated spoofing attack in which no obvious clues remain to suggest that an attack is underway. The University of Texas spoofer and attack strategy have been tested against a wide variety of GPS receivers and has always been successful in commandeering the target receiver.
Figure 1. Block diagram of the University of Texas spoofer used to attack the phasor unit.
Test Setup
Figure 2 shows a schematic of the setup used for the open-air tests. The signals received at the roof were routed into the spoofer for use in producing the counterfeit signals and into the RF shielded tent for rebroadcasting. The counterfeit signals were also routed into the tent for broadcasting. In addition to the antennas broadcasting the authentic and counterfeit signals, a third antenna was setup inside the tent to receive the combination of authentic and spoofed signals. This setup is representative of an actual attack scenario where the malefactor does not have physical access to the victim receiver’s antenna input but rather broadcasts the spoofed signals over-the-air. For cable-only tests, the entire setup inside the tent was replaced with a signal combiner that summed the authentic and spoofed signals.
Figure 2. Schematic of the test setup.
The combined authentic and spoofed signals were fed to the victim GPS time reference receiver. The output timing signal from the victim receiver was used as the synchronization reference for one PMU, whereas a second PMU was given timing from a separate GPS time reference receiver that was tracking only authentic GPS signals. Since the PMUs were in the same room and measured the local voltage and carrier phasors, both PMUs would report roughly the same phasor measurements under normal circumstances. Thus, any significant differences in the phase angle measurements between the two PMUs could be attributed to the effects of spoofing.
Test Results
Both the cable-only and the over-the-air spoofing attacks were successful in leading the PMU phase measurements off from the truth. Figure 3 shows the measured phase angle difference between the reference PMU, which was fed the true GPS signal, and the spoofed PMU throughout one entire test. This value would normally be less than a few degrees in the absence of spoofing, since the two PMUs are co-located. After the initial ten minute capture-and-carry-off, which proceeds slowly to avoid detection, the spoofer accelerates its carry-off and the reference and spoofed phase angles quickly diverge.
Figure 3. A plot of the phase angle difference between the reference and the spoofed PMUs. Normally the phase angle difference would be nearly zero in the absence of a spoofing attack. Point 1 marks the start of the test. Point 2 marks the point at which the spoofer has completely captured the victim receiver. Point 3 marks the point at which the IEEE C37.118 Standard has been broken. Point 4 marks the point at which the spoofer-induced velocity has reached its maximum value for the test. Point 5 marks the point at which the spoofed signal was removed.
Figure 4 shows pictures of an oscilloscope and the Synchrowave screen at the start of the test. The oscilloscope shows two pulse-per-second (PPS) signals, with the upper yellow pulse coming from a reference clock being fed true GPS and the lower blue pulse coming from the spoofed timing receiver. Both PPS signals are initially aligned with each other. The Synchrowave screen displays the PMU phase angle data in real-time as phasors with the nominal 60 Hz operating frequency subtracted from the phase angle. The red and green phasors show the phase data from the reference and spoofed PMUs respectively. These phasors are within a few degrees of each other at the beginning of the test.
Figure 4. Oscilloscope (left) and Synchrowave (right) screen at the start of the test, which is marked as point 1 in Figure 3.
Figure 5 shows pictures of the Oscilloscope and the Synchrowave screen at about 620 seconds into the test. At this point, the spoofer has moved the victim receiver 2 µs off in time and has completely captured the receiver. The delicate initial capture-and-carry-off is performed at a slow rate to suppress any evidence of the spoofer’s presence. However, this process could be done quicker because the receiver was not looking for such evidence of foul play. At this stage of the test, there is not yet any significant difference between the two phasors on the Synchrowave screen, since the spoofed time offset remains relatively small. The oscilloscope, however, reveals that the PPS output from the victim receiver has moved by about 2 µs relative to the reference PPS. At this point, the spoofer begins to accelerate the victim receiver’s time solution at a distance-equivalent rate of 4 m/s2 until it reaches a final distance-equivalent velocity of 1000 m/s. Distance-equivalent velocity can be converted into the actual time rate of change of time by dividing by the speed of light.
Figure 5. Oscilloscope and Synchrowave screen at about 620 seconds, point 2 in Figure 3.
The acceleration segment of the attack must be tailored to the individual receiver’s ability to track the spoofer-induced dynamics. Otherwise, the spoofer risks losing control of the victim receiver’s tracking loops by moving too quickly for the receiver to track or by raising alarms. Alternatively, a malefactor could survey possible GPS time reference receivers that might be used and tailor the spoofing attack such that any of the receivers would track and believe the spoofed signals. This would place severe limits on the spoofer’s ability to manipulate timing, but would not make the attack impossible or implausible.
Figure 6 shows the oscilloscope and Synchrowave screen at about 680 seconds into the test. At this point, the spoofer has broken the IEEE C37.118 Standard for PMUs, which requires accuracy in the measured phase angle of 0.573o. This demonstrates a significant vulnerability for PMU-based monitoring and control, since these applications leverage the accuracy supposedly guaranteed by the standard. There is yet no noticeable difference on the Synchrowave screen, but the oscilloscope clearly shows that the victim receiver has now been offset in time by about 20 µs.
Figure 6. Oscilloscope and Synchrowave screen at about 680 seconds, point 3 in Figure. 3.
Figure 7 shows pictures of the oscilloscope and the Synchrowave screen at about 870 seconds into the test. At this point, the spoofer has reached its final velocity of 1000 m/s. A phase angle offset of 10o has also been introduced in a matter of minutes. As expected, there is a marked difference in the phasors on the Synchrowave screen. The oscilloscope also shows a time offset of 400 µs has been induced in the victim receiver.
Figure 7. Oscilloscope and Synchrowave screen at about 870 seconds, point 4 in Figure 3.
Figure 8 shows pictures of the oscilloscope and the Synchrowave screen at about 1370 seconds into the test. At this point, the spoofed signal was heavily attenuated and instantly realigned with the authentic signals. This was intended to be the end of the test, but when this particular receiver lost lock on the signal it continued to send out a valid time signal to the PMU while fly-wheeling off its internal clock. This caused an alarm to issue on the front panel of the time reference receiver indicating loss of GPS signal lock. The downstream PMU, however, was oblivious to this loss of lock. This state persisted for about half an hour before the clock finally reacquired the authentic signal and instantly realigned its time output, which caused the phasors to realign. Figure 3 does not show the phase angle data for this entire period, but does show that the phase angle difference exceeds at least 70o before the time reference receiver reacquires the authentic signal.
Figure 8. Oscilloscope and Synchrowave screen at about 1370 seconds, point 5 in Figure 3.
Implications
Synchrophasor data provides a clear picture of the state of the power system in real-time. As the size of the power grid grows and stability margins are reduced (to provide more efficient distribution of power), it will become desirable to use synchrophasors for control purposes. PMU manufacturers are currently selling PMUs capable of implementing automated control schemes that offer response times less than 4 cycles. Such swift response times are seen as necessary to prevent grid instability or damage to equipment.
Control schemes based on synchrophasors rely on phase angle differences between two nodes as an indicator of a fault condition. One example of a currently operational synchrophasor-based control system is the Chicoasen-Angostura transmission link in Mexico. This transmission line links together large hydroelectric generators in Agostura to large loads in Chicoasen through two 400-kV transmission lines and one 115-kV transmission line. If a fault occurs in which both of the 400-kV lines are lost, then the hydroelectric generators may experience angular instability. In order to prevent this, a PMU was set up at each end of the transmission lines with a direct communications link between them. It was found that under nominal and single-fault (only one 400-kV line lost) conditions, the phase angle difference between the two locations was less than 7o, whereas a double-fault (both 400-kV lines lost) produced a phase angle difference of 14o. Based on this finding, the PMUs were configured so that if the phase angle difference exceeded 10o, the hydroelectric generators would be automatically tripped.
If a spoofer were to attack this system in Mexico or a similar implementation elsewhere, then the spoofer could cause a generator trip. In the test described in the previous section, a 10o offset, the threshold for the Chicoasen-Angostura link, was induced by the spoofer about 250 s after capturing the target receiver, as seen in Figures 3 and 7. A malefactor could even lead the phase angle off in the opposite direction (say 7o) before cutting both 400-kV transmission lines. Instead of causing a generator to unnecessarily trip, this would prevent PMUs from tripping the generator when required and potentially cause damage to the generator or remaining transmission lines.
Beyond tripping a single generator, there is potential for the effects of the attack to propagate through the grid and cause cascading faults across the grid. One example of this type of cascading failure is the 2003 Northeast blackout. Although this blackout did not involve PMUs or a spoofing attack, it demonstrates how an appropriately targeted attack against PMUs used for control on the power grid could cause large scale blackouts that originate with a single generator or transmission line trip.
On August 14, 2003, at 3:05 p.m., a 345-kV transmission line in Ohio began to sag from increased flow of electric power. When the line sagged too close to a tree, it caused a short-to-ground and tripped offline. This is something that happens fairly frequently on the massive U.S. electrical grid and is usually easily dealt with. However, the tripping of that line in northern Ohio began a cascade of failures that, in a little more than an hour, led to a near total power loss for more than 50 million people in the northeastern U.S. and parts of Canada.
The blackout is estimated to have cost approximately $6 billion for only four days of power loss. This led the Department of Energy and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) to fund and push for an improved “smart grid” with synchrophasor technology as a major component.
As previously pointed out, PMUs are high-speed, real-time synchronized measurement devices used to diagnose the health of the electricity grid. With synchrophasor data, electric utilities can use existing power more efficiently and push more power through the grid while reducing the likelihood of power disruptions like blackouts. Synchrophasor measurements are being looked at to reduce the likelihood of false and inappropriate triggers of transmission system circuit breakers that protectively shut down electrical flow and contribute to cascading blackouts. However, GPS spoofing poses a significant threat to these objectives for PMUs and can make synchrophasor-based control the cause for these events instead of the cure.
Conclusions
Spoofing poses a threat to the integrity of synchrophasor measurements. A spoofer can introduce a time offset in the time reference receiver that provides the timing signal for a PMU without having physical access to the receiver itself. This produces a corresponding phase offset in the synchrophasor data coming from that PMU. Tests demonstrated that a PMU could be made to violate the IEEE C37.118 Standard for synchrophasors in about 11 minutes from the start of a spoofing attack.
As PMU usage continues to grow throughout the world, PMUs will increasingly be used for automatic control purposes instead of just grid monitoring. The tests described here demonstrate that a spoofer could cause control schemes to falsely trip a generator. In the presence of other exacerbating factors, this could lead to a cascade of faults and a large scale blackout.
Daniel P. Shepard is pursuing M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a member of the Radionavigation Laboratory.
Todd E. Humphreys is an assistant professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin and director of the Radionavigation Laboratory. He received a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from Cornell University.
Aaron A. Fansler serves as cyber critical infrastructure protection (CCIP) program manager for Northrop Grumman Information System. He obtained a Master’s degree from Capitol College in information assurance and is currently working on a Ph.D. in that field.
Generation, Transmission
The generation, transmission, and distribution of electric power make the power grid the most critical of critical infrastructures in the United States. Past events and numerous government demonstrations have shown just how vulnerable the power grid can be, not only to natural disasters, but more importantly to malicious cyber activity, which is on the rise. Past consequences of power disruption were annoyance and some economic cost; future disruptions from intentional malicious activity could cascade into crippling failures. Cyber threats now rival the consequences of physical attacks.
Over the past decade, the power industry has seen an explosion in the use of accurate, synchronized time incorporated into its controlling networks. Accurate timing signals are exploited in power systems from the generation plant down to the distribution substation and now down to individual smart grid component.
The value of time synchronization is best understood by recognizing that the power grid is a single, complex, interconnected, and interdependent network. What happens in one part of the grid affects operation elsewhere, and in other systems reliant on stable power, as was observed in the 2003 Northeast Blackout.
With the transition to smart technologies and a unified, synchronized grid, the potential for catastrophic cascading failures increases if proper control measures are not implemented. Time-synchronized measurements are changing the way electric power systems are controlled to protect against these events. Phasor measurement units (PMUs) have recently emerged as one technology which has the potential to one day anticipate failures, making it possible to take remedial actions before failures spread across the network.
PMUs rely on GPS to provide accurate, synchronized time across the power grid. This reliance creates a vulnerability to a particular type of malicious attack: GPS spoofing. Spoofers generate counterfeit GPS signals that commandeer a victim receiver’s tracking loops and induce spoofer-controlled time or position offsets. The 2001 USDOT Volpe Report noted the absence of any off-the-shelf defense against civilian spoofing. In 2008, researchers demonstrated that an inexpensive portable software-defined GPS spoofer could be built from off-the-shelf components.
Northrop Grumman Information Systems (NGIS) and the University of Texas (UT) conducted a functional test and evaluation of the effects a spoofed GPS timing signal would have on synchrophasors, to determine if adverse effects could be produced on a sensitive timing-signal-dependent network such as a Supervisor Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) network and the network devices such as PMUs. This article describes the test.
UPDATE: Title changed to clarify that GPS signals are not affected, but the transfer of the GPS data to the broadcasters.
GPS is playing a role at the 2012 Olympics in London, through apps for smartphones to transportation issues, and even a clash with social media.
Twitter Disrupts GPS Data from Olympic Cyclists to Broadcasters
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) said that social media prevented broadcasters from getting accurate GPS data about the precise location of Olympic bicycle competitors during the155-mile men’s cycling road race.
According to Reuters, commentators on Saturday’s men’s cycling road race were unable to tell television viewers how far the leaders were ahead of the chasing pack because data could not get through from the GPS satellite navigation system traveling with the cyclists.
IOC spokesman Mark Adams says the Olympic Broadcasting Services service was jammed by “hundreds of thousands” of people sending texts, pictures and updates to social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, the Washington Post reports.
To alleviate the bandwidth issue, the IOC asked users not to tweet, saying unless it’s an “urgent, urgent one, please kind of take it easy.”
The problem arose due to lack of data bandwidth provided by telecom carriers, which did not properly anticipate demand. CNET’s Zack Whittaker reports that users send almost 10 million tweets during the opening ceremonies alone.
The problem appeared to be solved for Sunday’s women’s road race.
Apps Spark User Interaction, Excitement
A number of mobile apps will help spectators at the Games keep tabs on the action.
SoFit Mobile. A Toronto-based mobile development company, SoFit Mobile, has released a free social-gaming app that uses GPS technology to track users’ steps as they compete with friends. Users can donate money to charity or unlock medals and real-life discounts and coupons based on how far they travel. Early participants were eligible to win tickets to the games.
The app is designed to connect users with friends virtually, regardless of geographical and cultural differences, where they can train together and take part in athletic events like the New York Marathon.
“Using the Olympics as a way to inspire more people to get active, SoFit will engage users to take small steps to start living healthier while connecting millions to make the world a better place,” said Olympic figure skater Michelle Kwan in a press release.
The app was developed in partnership with the Walk A Mile campaign, which was inspired by the 2012 London Games. SoFit is available for Apple and Android devices.
Samsung Hope Relay. For every mile run while this app is activated, Samsung donates 1 pound to charities, including Kids Company and International Inspiration. The app uses GPS to track the users’ movements walking, running, or cycling, alone or as part of a team.
TorchTracker. This app used GPS tracking to pinpoint where the Olympic Torch was as it made its way to the games, and helped fans find places to see it go by.
American and Australian Team Buses Get Lost
Before the games began, buses taking Australian and American athletes from Heathrow Airport to Olympic Park experienced a failure of GPS end users, sending the athletes around the city for a long tour before arriving at the Olympic Village.
The bus driver hired by London Olympic organizers had not driven or been shown the route before, and could not operate the GPS navigation system fitted in the vehicle. Also, some of the venues, such as the village, had not been pre-loaded into the devices.
For the Aussies, it turned into a 3½-hour marathon, accidentally taking them past central London landmarks such as Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament.
A separate London 2012 bus carrying American athletes got so badly lost it took four hours to make the 23-mile trip across the capital.
Olympic Lanes and GPS Vehicle Tracking
After there were problems for the athletes getting to events in 1996, every host country has had an Olympic Lane to speed the journey for Olympians. However, residents have grumbled about it and there has been some talk about defying the rule and using the lane for unofficial business.
Blogger Oliver Ortiz posits that the conflicts could have been avoided if organizers had made use of GPS vehicle tracking. “The Olympic Lane is open from 6 a.m. until midnight both ways, and for many this is a folly. There will be certain times of the day when the Olympic Lane will be essential and it almost appears lazy on behalf of the Olympics organisers not to consider the best times for the lane to be open. If only they had thought about using GPS Vehicle Tracking to not only design the opening times, but also to monitor the Olympic Lanes during the games and make changes to when they are open. GPS Vehicle Tracking would have made these two things possible.
“London knew they were having the Olympics way back in 2005, could the Olympic Committee not have thought about levels of traffic and travel times at various points in the day using GPS Vehicle Tracking to put forward a more practical schedule for the Olympic Lane to be open?”
Now GNSS smartphone application developers can benefit from a range of new features from Version 2 the European Commission’s free EGNOS Software Development Kit (SDK), reports the European GNSS Agency (GSA). The SDK helps developers to easily implement EGNOS corrections coming from the signal in space or the Internet, and make use of EGNOS advantages when using location-enabled applications.
The EGNOS SDK is a European Commission project that aims to foster the use of EGNOS in location-based services (LBS) applications for smartphones. It has been designed to allow application developers to take advantage of the benefits of EGNOS, and to use these in software they develop for mobile devices. The EGNOS SDK is the only toolkit — in an open-source library — that implements integrity and EGNOS corrections for a more accurate position than GPS alone can provide.
New EGNOS SDK features and improvements include:
Tracking feature: Allows application developers to choose different options to display their GPS and/or EGNOS and/or R&D position over the smartphone’s map.
Skyplot view: Enables to display the position of the overhead EGNOS and GPS satellites with a time span of +12h or -12h. This feature shows information about the number of EGNOS satellites available, the number of GPS satellites used for the computation of the R&D, EGNOS and GPS positions, and the number of satellites not used.
Advanced Skyplot view: Provides an augmented reality showing a live video streaming of the sky and can identify EGNOS and GPS satellites in real time.
R&D Position Type menu: Displays six features proposing innovative ways of computing a position by deviating from the EGNOS standard EGNOS DO-229D, to get even greater accuracy:
The Increased satellite constellation improving the satellite constellation used by adding GPS satellites not monitored by EGNOS.
The Best satellite constellation selecting the most suitable GPS satellites geometry for the computation of the position.
The 2D Positioning displaying the position even if only 3 GPS satellites are in view (4 satellites are normally the minimum needed to compute a position). This is important in urban situations, where surrounding buildings can obstruct a clear view of the sky, making it difficult to track four satellites or more.
The Fast correction with no RRC improving the positioning by eliminating the jumps that the Range Rate Correction (RRC) might cause in the fast corrections applied to the pseudorange (PR) measurements.
The Best Weight Matrix rating the satellites involved in the position computation on the basis of the most beneficial weight matrix.
The SBAS ranging function enabling SBAS geostationary satellites to be used in the same way GPS satellites are used to compute a position
As far as integrity is concerned, the user can define different levels of integrity to be displayed (Horizontal Protection Level (HPL)): aviation, maritime or 85 percent.
Since its initial release in November 2011, the EGNOS SDK is providing a useful tool to application developers who need the additional accuracy provided by EGNOS accessible in smartphone applications, according to customers:
“I am interested in the toolkit because I started a project that aims at developing an application based on smartphones” – GeoMatica
“I found the toolkit interesting, especially SISNet, in Finland the EGNOS signal is low…the corrections I receive with SISNet are more reliable than those I could receive with the satellite” – VTT
TomTom announces map enhancements around the globe, delivering new coverage and features for automotive, government, enterprise and consumer customers. TomTom maps cover more than 200 countries and territories globally, now with navigable coverage for 112 countries across 36.5 million kilometres of roads.
Some of the enhancements include:
Addition of nearly 2.5 million Address Points in the United States to enable premium geocoding and navigation;
Upgraded 17,000 kilometres of AutoVias in Spain to motorway classification to improve routing and display functionality;
Increased street network coverage in Latvia to 100%, supporting street level navigation applications throughout the whole country;
Voice Maps reaches 20 million names and more than 30 million voice transcriptions;
Addition of lane and signpost information on freeways and inner city lanes in Thailand, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Qatar enables easier, more efficient and safer routing;
Introduction of new 3D landmarks for advanced visualization in India and South East Asia.
Visit TomTom at the Esri User Conference booth #1217 to learn more about global map products.
Spirent Communications has launched its SimSENSOR MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) sensor simulation software. SimSENSOR is targeted at the R&D environment and enables performance testing of sensor fusion algorithms in navigation systems that include MEMS inertial sensors and multi-GNSS.
SimSENSOR works in tandem with Spirent’s multi-GNSS constellation simulators by simulating MEMS sensor outputs on a common trajectory with the simulated GNSS signals. Trajectories that include representative human motion gestures, such as arm movements, are included with SimSENSOR. The ability to test fusion algorithms that take inputs from a wide variety of sensors is supported, including accelerometers, gyroscope, magnetometer, digital compass, and barometric height sensors. Representative MEMS noise models and errors such as bias and drift are also included and are available under user control.
“SimSENSOR is designed for customers who want to optimize sensor fusion architectures,” said Rahul Gupta, product manager with Spirent’s Positioning Technology business. “Sensor fusion is increasingly being used to enable a wide range of applications including indoor positioning. SimSENSOR is a unique tool for accelerated, lab-based R&D in support of this ground-breaking work. It will also help to extend Spirent’s leadership in testing hybrid positioning technologies in mobile devices.”
In 2007 Spirent launched SimINERTIAL to test inertial navigation systems involving high-grade GPS/inertial units suitable for military applications. SimSENSOR benefits from the experience gained by Spirent, in particular in relation to ensuring coherency and stability between GNSS and simulated sensor output streams.
Everyone wants a piece of the pie, the upcoming indoor location pie. Big companies and start-ups are engaged, some in research, others having launched solutions. While Wi-Fi is the most common technology, many companies are pursuing alternate methods, including GPS, audio, Bluetooth, small cell/cellular, distributed antenna systems (DAS), near field communication (NFC), white band, sensors, movement tracking, beacons, and more. Of the large players who are making a play for the indoor market, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Qualcomm, RIM, and TCS are the furthest along, reports Grizzly Analytics.
At a minimum, indoor technology will do what we do outside and enable GPS-style mapping, navigation, local search, check-ins, location-sharing, and other location-based services. An explosion of other uses will evolve, enabling search for items on store shelves, sending deals, and contextual advertising. This newsletter issue is devoted to looking at smaller companies, those not listed above, many start-ups competing for their piece of the pie.
A pool of smaller indoor companies is focused on creating positioning technology, many ripe for acquisition. Navizon, sensewhere, and SkyHook are betting on unique approaches to determining indoor location position. No longer solely focused on driving the streets to map Wi-Fi signals, Skyhook has adopted a comprehensive approach to indoor location, integrating multiple technologies (GPS, Wi-Fi, cell, and sensor-based) to ascertain location, a solution that offers the advantage of flexibility. Navizon is focused on Wi-Fi signals, currently the most popular solution for indoor location. There are sometimes existing Wi-Fi nodes, but added nodes can usually be fairly easy to install. From a business standpoint, the downside of Wi-Fi positioning is the large number of competitors focused on solutions. sensewhere is pursuing an entirely crowd-based software offering that locates and cross-references publically broadcast information, including MAC addresses, from consumer devices. It is the easiest solution. No infrastructure is required, but it requires a certain density of devices.
I’ve asked Navizon, sensewhere, and Skyhook to write, in their words, about their company, technology and perspective on the industry:
Navizon – InTheir Own Words. “Navizon Indoor Triangulation System (I.T.S.) uses Wi-Fi signals to provide indoor location throughout a building or campus. Navizon designed this system to locate users of smartphones, tablets and laptops, all of whom rely heavily on Wi-Fi. This real-time locating system’s infrastructure uses small, easily deployable nodes connected through a mesh network. No wiring or software installation, and only minimal configuration, are required. The administration dashboard is an online interface to Navizon’s cloud. Integration is through a web services API. This design delivers an affordable indoor location platform, with room and floor-level accuracy, up and running in a single day.” Cyril Houri, Navizon
sensewhere – In Their Own Words. “sensewhere technology automatically locates and cross-references RF access points via user devices to create an almost limitless proprietary, reliable, live, global RF location database. The solution does not require additional infrastructure installation nor calibration or re-calibration when the venue’s RF infrastructure changes. sensewhere technology is powered by patented algorithms that dynamically adapt to indoor environments to optimize the use of mobile device resources. Commercial benefits have been demonstrated in the largest shopping malls around the world where more than half of RF infrastructure can change within a few months.” Rob Palfreyman, sensewhere
SkyHook – In Their Own Words. “Location technology company Skyhook, provides seamless operation of indoor and outdoor mobile device positioning using integrated GPS, Wi-Fi, cell, and sensor-based positioning technologies. Venues have been hesitant to get involved with indoor location due to concerns over control of their data, cost of initial deployment, cost of maintenance, accuracy and consistency of the technology, and availability to deploy on a large variety of devices. Skyhook is involved in industry efforts to provide venue owners the ability to manage their infrastructure data in a consistent, standardized way that addresses both the technical and business needs.” Ronda Billings, Skyhook
Positioning technology is of limited use without indoor venue maps, which might include shopping malls, arenas, convention centers, and hospitals. Retail is very interested in being able to direct people into their stores, to a particular aisle, or even shelf location. Meridian, Micello, and Point Inside have distinct approaches. Micello creates indoor maps by using data found in public domain; their customers are not the venues, but the developer community. Meridian creates indoor maps based on maps drawn by customers and adds navigation and points of interest. At its start, Point Inside had a similar focus, indoor map creation, but has since integrated positioning data and added an ad network to its solution. Point Inside is targeted to retailers.
I’ve asked Meridian, Micello, and Point Inside to write, in their words, about their companies, technology, and perspective on the industry:
Meridian – In Their Own Words. “Meridian is focusing on providing software to allow employees of a location-based business to create an indoor way-finding app for visitors. The system enables a customer to upload maps (CAD, etc.) that are then converted into vector files. Points of interest and turn-by-turn directions can be generated. The turn-by-turn directions can work with any wireless connectivity, from basic 3G to more sophisticated Wi-Fi systems. Indoor venues can achieve a GPS-like experience — that ‘glowing blue dot on the map’ — some are seeking. Meridian is seeing adoption from retailers, hotels and hospitals.” Jeff Hardison, Meridian
Micello – In Their Own Words. “Micello is a provider of indoor venue maps, including shopping malls, airports, college campus buildings, hospitals, retail stores, casinos, and stadiums in over half-a-dozen countries throughout the world. Micello uses proprietary, in-house mapping and navigation tools combined with map-manufacturing tools and dashboards. The technology ingests various sources of data and information about a given venue to create a well-defined, structured set of indoor map data. In the next 36 months, every building will have an app and mapping technology, integrated with positioning technology. Information will be automatically sorted and organized for users based on where they are located inside.” Ankit Agarwel, Micello
Point Inside – In Their Own Words. “Point Inside provides retailers with detailed indoor maps, exact product location, and dynamic shoppers locations to help stores engage with in-store customers. The user’s shopping list, which is entered into the application, enables high-converting, hyper-targeted advertising. With indoor location technologies advancing too quickly to pick a single winner, Point Inside uses proprietary algorithms to combine results from multiple location technologies to determine the most accurate fix. Primary technologies include: proprietary Wi-Fi fingerprinting, motion sensing to determine movement from known locations (such as product locations); partnership with other location providers; and correlation with indoor maps to determine valid locations.” Todd Sherman, Point Inside
How does this shake out? It is too early to tell. In the coming year, I expect the indoor location market will be better formed. Consolidation will occur. Some companies will drop out and others will be purchased. Grizzly Analytics suggests eBay, Local.com, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, GroupOn, TI, Qualcomm, CSR, Google, foursquare, and Google are all shopping or looking for strategic alliances to develop indoor location offerings. Time will tell who eats pie.
The Social Loco conference in San Francisco highlighted brands leveraging social location. However, it seems as if the conference focused more on the social than the location element. As one attendee said, “Location as a topic is almost like electricity as a topic, it’s just there.” In other industry news, veteran location executive Kanwar Chadha is moving on…
SAN FRANCISCO — Most companies and attendees at the recent Social Loco conference here realize that while social is big, and such companies as Home Depot and Kraft are looking hard at it, the location part of it still has detractors who don’t know what to do with it.
The problem with social location advertising is that ad execs and large companies don’t understand it — or know how to spend money against it, said Marc Prioleau, managing director of Prioleau Advisors.
Prioleau said location industry executives would talk to each other on who is going to rule the world, with little effect. “[The problem is] that no one came from brand backgrounds and were hacking around an application, rather than focusing on a brand’s objective. Some of the ideas that were hot two years ago…aren’t so hot now,” he said.
The big impact of location-based services, or social loco marketing, is getting consumers to take specific actions to get into a store, said speakers on a mobile panel. Location is relevant when a company can use it as a signal of intent to bring in a five- to 10-percent conversion [sale] rate. “There still has to be relevant and interesting ads, which will open the floodgates for innovation to come in,” said one panelist.
Proximity marketing may be the key ingredient to making LBS a big part of a brand’s advertising strategy. Panelists believe that a large part of consumer purchasing comes in the proximity of someone’s home. Around 40 percent of mobile searches are local.
The fact that a lot of searches are local is not enough, said Di-Ann Eisnor of Waze. “[Users] say that, ‘I am doing this thing already, what else could I be doing [around this area]?” she said. “Intent becomes very powerful — people sharing that intent.”
A venture capital speaker said that brand managers at Pepsi, Gatorade, Mountain Dew, and others are holding back money to find new ways to have consumers “buy that one more can of Pepsi.” He said that brands are looking at social location as ways to try something they haven’t before. “They will get some air time with some senior leaders because of that,” he said.
Still, hard to convice die-hard VCs that location is the way to go. “Social loco [constitutes] two important elements [of advertising]. But I don’t wake up and say, ‘Let’s do a social loco deal today’ — what is this business going to build over time?” asked John Malloy of BlueRun Ventures.
One VC said that LBS is a technology, not necessarily a business mobile. “Investing in mobile, yes, but that’s like saying we invest in people who walk around on two legs. The challenge with location is that it tells me where I am, but not necessarily tells me what to do,” he said. “We need to see a connection to revenue. That’s a challenge with companies such as foursquare — to get a distribution to a network of merchants. Until you are getting paid, it’s just theoretical.”
Travel May Be LBS Niche Market
Using social location applications helps travel companies, airlines, hotels, and others in that industry find customers, said panel members. “Consumers are starting to look at social commerce and social proofing as a way to intelligently tap into friends. They are looking at five hotels my friends have been to,” said Kevin Fliess, Room 77 general manager and vice president of products. “Location and price is a huge consideration — and reading reviews from friends has more value than reading anonymous reviews.”
“One of the challenges we face — location is sensitive — how they can share their trips [is important]. Clearly, the more options you deliver is confusing to consumers,” Nancy Ramamurthi, TripIt vice president, product management and marketing.
One of the off-shoots of travel may be photography. David Staas, CEO of jiwire, said that the company surveyed 800 mobile consumers who used smartphones as the primary device to take a photo. “There is a location component to it; 31 percent want to remember where they took the picture,” he said. “Men and women we surveyed had different behaviors. Women want to use location to communicate with a broader network; 91 percent take pictures on the go; 20 percent of them are more likely to location tag.”
Big Names and Big Companies Rarely Say Anything
At such conferences as Social Loco, big-name entities such as Facebook and Google speak, which draw attendees. Sad thing is that none them say anything, most knowledgeable industry vets agree.
Emily White, Facebook’s director of mobile partnerships, was a keynote speaker at Social Loco and fits in this big-company, no-substance conference speak genre. Yet the big media outlets, because it was Facebook speaking, quoted her with the earth-shaking news that mobile is important, and, hold on to your seat, “the web is being rebuilt around people.” Note to these big companies: Cut the PR stuff and ‘I’m so hip and my company owns the world’ talk, particularly when you are talking to a crowd of savvy marketing executives.
Privacy Is Dead: That’s News to Me
Actually, really isn’t news to me. Anytime a conference has a privacy panel, you know that fireworks will ensue and nothing ever gets resolved by the time the panel ends.
Social Loco’s privacy panel was no different. One panel member said privacy is boring. “It’s boring to legislate, like seatbelts and helmets,” he said.
A Qualcomm speaker said the company has a lawyer who does nothing but work privacy issues. Another speaker, in a rather politically incorrect manner, said more people are harmed from the Catholic Church than by Facebook’s location privacy policy.
Chadha Leaving CSR/SiRF after 17 Years
After more than 17 years with SiRF, including three as chief marketing officer following a merger with CSR, Kanwar Chadha is moving on. In a note to colleagues, he said he has “decided to move on and explore new destinations in my journey of adventure and discovery.”
When Chadha co-founded SiRF in 1995, the company wanted to sell GPS for consumers, which was revolutionary as most in the industry were still trying to sell survey equipment.
“Many thought we were pipe dreamers, some felt we were foolish to enter a market dominated by big companies with a technology controlled by the Department of Defense, and others looked at us as another flash-in-the-pan start-up,” he said. “We were technologists and evangelists at the same time. We developed innovative technologies and products to make GPS work in environments that system was never designed for, but are important for consumer usage such as urban canyons and dense foliage; all keeping in mind price points that mainstream consumers could afford.”
Chadha was proud of an idea book he called “Navigations,” which outlined “futuristic, but artistic concept devices and scenarios highlighting potential use cases of GPS in our daily lives,” he said. “Things we may take for granted today but seemed quite far-fetched in 1995. It was expensive collateral, but probably the best I have done in my life, and it became quite popular,” he said.
During his tenure at SiRF, the company acquired the GPS businesses of Motorola and Conexant as well some smaller companies such as Centrality, Enuvis, Impulsesoft, Kisel, and TrueSpan. He was at the company during the 2004 initial public offering and its merger with CSR in 2009.
“Many of the original SiRFers have moved on, and I have focused my last three years on helping transform CSR into a ‘platform-focused company’ from being just a component supplier. There are many interesting challenges ahead, such as making indoor location reliable and meeting consumer expectations with location across a broad range of applications,” Chadha said.
Magellan is partnering with CCI Entertainment, a family programming production and distribution company in Canada. Their first initiative together, in partnership with Groundspeak, Inc. (owners of www.Geocaching.com), is a Canadian geocaching program called GeoFreakZ Geo Trails.
The GeoFreakZ GeoTrails program enables families visiting participating Parks Canada national parks and historic sites through October 13 to use a Magellan eXplorist GC handheld GPS device, designed exclusively for geocaching, to find hidden geocache containers. Rugged and waterproof with a sunlight-readable color screen, the eXplorist GC comes pre-loaded with a worldwide map and the most popular geocaches for a complete paperless geocaching experience, Magellan said. The Magellan eXplorist GC makes geocaching, an outdoor "treasure hunting" game with location-based technology, easy for families and people of all ages, the company said.
Participants who take photos of themselves discovering the caches are entered into a drawing to win a Magellan eXplorist GC device. Participants can also log their finds and communicate with other geocachers through Groundspeak's geocaching website, www.geocaching.com.
Google announced on its official blog that it has released more than twenty popular U.S. museums to its collection of over 10,000 indoor maps that they launched in November: the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Cincinnati Museum Center, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History and 17 Smithsonian museums and a zoo.
American Museum of Natural History, New York City
National Air and Space Museum—Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Google reports that to access the floor plans, simply open Google Maps on your Android phone or tablet and zoom in on the museum of interest. To find the museum, either search for it by name using the magnifying glass icon or, if you’re already there, use the “My location” feature to orient yourself. With the “My location” feature enabled you can even get indoor walking directions.
According to the announcement, more museums are adding their floor plans to Google Maps for Android soon, including the SFMOMA, The Phillips Collection, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. If you’re interested in getting your museum’s floor plan included in Google Maps, visit the Google Maps Floor Plans tool.
Esri announced that GeoIQ, a small geo-location company based in Arlington, Virginia, will be joining their organization. The addition of GeoIQ’s team will strengthen Esri’s capabilities in the areas of user experience design, web development and cloud-based applications.
"We are excited to join the Esri family, integrating our technology and extending the Esri platform,” says Sean Gorman, founder of GeoIQ. “Esri’s approach to ‘GIS for Everyone’ is transformational in the industry and is very closely aligned with GeoIQ’s vision, so we are extremely excited about working together.”
“We believe this will help us supplement our capabilities in delivering simple geospatial solutions for our customers around the world as well as the rapidly growing web developer and content delivery communities,” said Jack Dangermond, president, Esri.
According to the announcement, GeoIQ staff will join Esri at a new software development center located in Washington, D.C. and extend the ArcGIS platform with special emphasis on federal government clients in the areas of self-service mapping, analytics, big data, content streaming and social media. This center will also support web developers that are focusing on geo-enabling their web solutions with Esri’s geospatial platform. Existing GeoIQ users will continue to be supported.
Apps Spark User Interaction, Excitement
