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PALO ALTO, California -- You're standing on a street corner in San Francisco, and you're craving a gyro. Wouldn't it be nice if you could whip out your PDA or cell phone and have it point you to the nearest Greek joint?
While services like Vindigo make it possible to get that kind of information on a handheld computer, you still have to tell the device where you're located so it can provide directions. This can be a pain, especially on the number keypad of a cell phone.
Hewlett-Packard may one day offer such a solution.
HP researchers demonstrated a service called Websign on Friday. It would allow handheld users to get location-based information by simply pointing their handheld devices in the direction they are headed.
"We are trying to link what you physically see with online resources," said Geoff Lyon, a researcher at HP Labs.
Lyon and his team were on hand at the labs Friday to show off their prototype: a global positioning system chip, bar-code scanner and magnetic compass lumped together inside an HP iPaq handheld computer.
While the device looked big and clunky, Lyon assured his audience that the hardware could be shrunk to fit into any cell phone or handheld device. Any gadget that incorporated this technology would have to run on a wireless network -- either a cellular system or a Wi-Fi local area network -- to allow Internet access.
Thanks to its integrated technologies, the device can serve up more information than just details about nearby businesses.
For example, users could obtain the exact ingredients of a meal by scanning the restaurant's menu or the bar code of a jar in a supermarket.
In another scenario, users could find out where the nearest available parking space is by waving the device in the air. GPS and the compass would communicate the location of the user to the network, which in turn would release the information.
GPS has one drawback, however: It doesn't work inside most buildings. HP scientists also admitted that users need a clean magnetic field for the compass and a strong GPS and cellular signal to get the location-sensitive information.
"It depends on what you call a 'good connection,'" said Cyril Brignone, a member of the Websign team.
As it's built now, Websign subscribers could only view standard HTML websites. But Lyon's team foresees a day in which businesses band together to create Websign sites, or a database of specific websites that makes it easier for a handheld user to order food, save a parking space or get other location-specific information.
"You can have a Websign account," Brignone said.
That is, if anyone chooses to license this technology. HP Labs itself -- which invented the pocket scientific calculator and thermal ink jet that led to the development of HP's line of ink-jet printers -- has no immediate plans to release the Websign service to market.
And market analysts cite reasons the Websign concept may never make it into consumers' hands. For one, people may be reluctant to sign up for the service out of fear that their handsets will become cluttered with advertisements from businesses in the city they are visiting.
"It raises an interesting question of who stands to make money off of this location information," said Joe Laszlo, an analyst with Jupiter Research. "If all that it is good for is targeted advertising to PDAs, then it must have a broader appeal as well."
Seamus McAteer, an analyst with market research and consulting firm Zelos Group, pointed out that companies are already having a difficult time making money off GPS navigation systems in cars.
"People aren't obsessed with continuously finding information," he said. "People want to leave the digital world behind them sometimes."
