Back in 2004, the UK-based cellphone operator Vodafone released a concept video showing what life for Londoners would be like in “the future.” In one scene three club-hopping women pick up a videocall on a paper-thin, wireless device. The caller, Michael, tells them he’s at Bar One that’s “just around the corner from you.” He invites them to join him. A moment later an ad for Bar One appears on the device’s screen.

So, how did Michael know the trio was nearby? And how did Bar One know to send them an ad? Both took advantage of the fact that the women’s device was location-aware. It knew where it was, and in the case of Michael and Bar One, let that location be known. It was a future in which where a device is, is just as important as who’s holding it.

Late last month that future pulled closer to reality.

First, Polymer Vision (a spin-off of Philips) introduced the Readius, acellphone-sized unit that features a foldable electronic ink screen which unfurls into a five-inch panel. It’s slated for release by the middle of this year.

Second, during his recent Macworld keynote, Steve Jobs announced a “location” upgrade to the Google Maps feature on the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Pull up a Google map, tap a little “crosshairs” icon and the hand-held devices draw a blue circle that encompasses an area in which the device is located. Location-enabled Google maps are also available on a number of other cellphones.

However, the iPhone and most other mobiles don’t have a GPS chip built into them. So how do they figure out where they are? A couple of ways, actually.

First, in order for cellphones to operate, carriers need to pepper their radio towers across the country, with higher densities in urban areas. Turns out, not surprisingly, the carriers know exactly where all of those towers are, know their unique IDs and know their transmitting power. So, fire up a cellphone in an urban area and chances are you’re in range of two or three towers. Mix the signal strength from those towers, do some fancy math, and you can draw a small circle on a map with a pretty good likelihood the cellphone is within the circle. The more towers, the smaller the circle. It’s pretty slick.

On a recent GO bus ride from Toronto to Hamilton I watched as Google Maps, on my Blackberry Pearl, nailed the bus’s route with fluctuating but pretty good accuracy the whole way. But the iPod Touch not only doesn’t have GPS, it’s not even a phone. It’s just WiFi-enabled. So how does it pull the location trick off?

Well, it turns out a company called Skyhook has been driving vans around North America mapping the location of not cell towers, but WiFi hotspots. And, it turns out that using triangulation on those hotspots with or without additional data from cellphone towers, you can do a decent job of getting a fix on any device in range of the hotspots – even if the device isn’t logged into it. How? Every 100 milliseconds, every wireless base station in North America sends out a unique ID code, and that’s what Skyhook grabs on to.

Again, this is pretty slick. When I’m at home, Google Maps on my iPod Touch draws a pale blue circle that neatly encompasses my house. Out and about it’s less accurate but still pretty impressive.

So, this means that all sorts of cellphones, MP3 players, portable game machines like the Nintendo DS or Sony’s PSP can be location-aware. At a bare minimum, they just need to pick up a wireless Internet signal. When they do, they can know, give or take a city block, where they are in the world, especially the urban world. This will open up a whole new world of dating, club-hopping, instant messaging and location-aware shopping applications âe” the world of Vodafone’s Londoners. A world in which where is the new who, where demographics and geographics merge.

Within the next year we’ll be asked by instant message applications, by facebook apps, by maps and by advertisers to allow our location to be discretely released in return for the benefit of hooking up with friends, getting a coupon or getting an interactive map of a Home Depot store.

It’s happening already. Just yesterday cellphone provider Helio announced a partnership with a location-based entertainment service called Buzzd that will deliver real-time, location-based bar, club and restaurant reviews and ratings directly to U.S.-based Helio phone users.

The upside, right now, is that Skyhook doesn’t give up your location data unless you actively give permission. So, it’s an opt-in relationship. I suspect, given the consumer revolt over facebook’s Beacon ad program, that application developers are going to be squeaky clean about opt-in.

The downside? Lots of teens, and adults, will opt-in willingly without really thinking what they’re giving up. We’ve already seen this happen with personal data on facebook. So, yes, a lot of us could allow ourselves to be located, but we’d be a coalition of the willing.

For the nonprofit and activist community the technology can be as useful as it might seem alarming. It makes it possible to send people targeted hyper-local news about events, rallies or issues in their neighbourhoods. It could allow your organization to keep track of event organizers or participants, map a demonstration route in real time, create interactive location-based fundraising games or even create conscience-raising environmental installations.

It would be easy to ignore, protest and despise location-aware devices. That would be a mistake. They’re here now. The applications that will make use of them are about to explode. We can choose to be ignorant of them, and therefore fear them. Or, we can understand how they work, and imagine how they can work for us as good tools for good causes. That’s a simple choice, no matter where you are.

wayne

Wayne MacPhail

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years. He was the managing editor of Hamilton Magazine and was a reporter and editor at The Hamilton Spectator until he founded Southam InfoLab,...