What will be the next great utility?

How do you decide what technology you’re going to use and how much does it factor into the hardware you buy? Sounds simple, but the more I think about it, the less simple it becomes.

Do you think up an application and decide to either go looking for it or have someone develop it for you. Not many of us are in the position to do the latter. Do you see something and think ‘yeah, that’s a neat idea I have the perfect use for that’. Sometimes do you see some hardware or technology and think ‘yes, that’s very clever but come on, when am I ever going to use that, I just don’t need it.

What got me thinking about this was my mobile phone. Despite being an early adopter of mobile technology, much of the newer technology in mobile phones is something I’ve only come to lately as where I was living I just didn’t have much use for it. Thinking about it, some of the things I use most now are the ones I originally thought were a gimmick and something I didn’t need or want. A good example of this is onboard gps. Now I used to do exploration for oil and gas reserves, and the company I used to work for leapt at gps from the start when receivers were the size of a small truck. Our survey receivers when I was offshore were the size of a suitcase and were very heavy. The thought of this being made small enough to fit in a phone seemed ludicrous, even to me. I went to a seminar on gps back in around 1994, where they were calling gps technology the next major utility, something we’d use so ubiquitously in our daily lives that we’d forget a time when it wasn’t there. They were a little off on their time estimates, and the internet got there first, but we’re now seeing the technology being built into so many things that it really is becoming transparent.

One fun trivial pursuit question I’ve asked people in the past was ‘who put the most money into the developement of gps systems after the military.

Before I tell you who it was, let me expand a little on GPS in it’s early incarnations. Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, the american military didn’t let civilian users have access to the full gps data. The idea being that they would want to keep that to themselves for strategic reasons. No point having the world’s most accurate navigation and guidance system if the ‘enemy’ could use it against you. The C/A code (coarse/acquisition) given by the satellites could give your position to within around 10 meters, but the signal was degraded to only give a position within 50-100 meters, using what was called Selective Availability, a deliberately induced error that varied with time. The military could turn this on or off at will, most of the time it was on, degrading the signal unless you had a military unit that could descramble it. Military receivers could also use the second P (precise) code but this was heavily encrypted and the frequency wasn’t made available for civilian use, giving an accuracy of around 50cm.

Now, if you’re surveying, you need better accuracy than 50-100m. Civilian contractors figured out that you could use known points to calculate the error being built into the system at any time and then apply that to a receiver who’s position you weren’t so sure of. A known, fixed point that deosn’t move, would show a gps position that appears to be moving as the varying error was applied to it, subtract the difference and apply that to an unknown point and you have a new known position. This was called Differential GPS and gave unprecedented accuracy at the time. It was a hack if you like, a way to beat the system restrictions.

However, this only works over short distances from the known points, due to atmospheric distortions, phase differences, clock errors etc. So, you’ve got to build a lot of them and put money into making them and the receivers better and better to give you the accuracy you want/need.

We’re getting closer now to who put the big money in. So, who needs really accurate navigation over large areas, where precision makes it worth spending all this money researching and building networks of these stations.

Farmers.

Yep, think about it for a moment. We’re not talking someone in Wales with a hundred acres and a bunch of sheep. We’re talking thousands of acres of wheat and corn fields covering the great plains of America and Canada. Spraying fertiliser is expensive and often wasteful, if you could improve the efficiency of that operation by maybe 1%, your savings would be huge. The machinery used to do the work out in the big fields is built on a similar scale to the land it works on, it’s huge. Guiding these machines across mile long fields is not as simple as keeping to one side of the white line driving to work each day. Harvesting is another high cost area where you want to improve efficiency by not going over the same piece of ground twice. A few meters offline doesn’t sound like much until you start multiplying that by thousands of kilometers that the combines will drive.They use electronic means, lasers, all sorts of things to get more accuracy. When GPS came along, they were quick to realise that here was the answer to their dreams: A box in the cab that gave you accurate positioning seemingly from thin air and the new field of precision farming

However, as I said before, you need differential stations regularly spaced to provide the local variation to your signal to get it sufficiently accurate for your uses. So they built them, hundreds of them, and they funded better and smaller receivers with more channels to get more signals, all to gain those small increases in accuracy. The US Coast Guard built a string of differential stations for their own use (no, I don’t know why they weren’t given military grade receivers) and private industry used them. The great plains are a fair way from the sea and differential signals degrade with distance from the station, so new stations further inland were needed, and the government were going to pay for them. So, who would?

Walmart. If you’re in the US, your local grocery store was one of the biggest funders of differential stations that helped put GPS in your pocket.

Nowadays GPS is well on it’s way to being just another utility, here in the UK a fair proportion of drivers have a gps mapping unit on their windscreen, guiding them and warning them where all the speed cameras are, but in a phone, if I’m walking somewhere I generally already know where I am. What use is it to me? Well, after I got my Nokia N95 8Gb last year, I couldn’t think of much use for it and it sat idle for the first few months until I was getting a bus to visit a friend who’d moved house. I knew there address, knew which road it was on, but I didn’t know the area very well and choosing the right stop was more tricky as I didn’t know how close they were. Turning on the gps and loading google maps gave me a little blue dot with my position. Expand the map a little and I can see where I want to be. Wait for the blue dot to get close to the road I want and push the button to signal the driver to stop.

Magic.

Since then, I’ve found myself using the gps for many things, from finding theatres/restaurants etc to geotagging my photos, to recording the routes I run and cycle. I’m coming up with new things regularly that I’d never envisaged using the capability on my phone for.

What’s got me thinking now is, what will the next big utility to be. I’m tempted to say the data/voip combination, because that will truly change communications, giving us effectively free calls everywhere for the cost of just our data connection. It’s the point at which we become a truly global village, when you can contact anyone who has a phone for the same cost.

Maybe it’ll be something different, something that’s being developed in a lab somewhere. I don’t know, but I’m sure looking forward to finding out and discovering what I can do with it.

Oh, and one last little addendum to the gps story. When the US went into Kuwait during the first gulf war, there weren’t enough military gps units available. The US army requisitioned many civilian units and found that their own troops were buying any they could find on the shelves to take with them. In the first big test of gps under combat conditions, there weren’t enough to go round, and so to give decent accuracy to troops with civilian receivers they turned off Selective Availability. It wouldn’t make a difference to the enemy, because very few people even had a receiver in those days. Who it did make a difference to were those doing exploration work. All of a sudden positioning systems improved by an order of magnitude overnight. Sure did miss it when they turned it back on again later in the campaign. It was to be several years before they agreed to turn it off for good by presidential order in 2000. Technically they could turn it back on but they won’t due to navigation safety issues and in fact the latest generation of satellites won’t even have the capability to do so.