For some people, location is everything. As a self-confessed GPS geek, Cyril Houri has a thing about knowing his x and y coordinates – the latitude and longitude readings that tell you precisely where you are in the world. But because GPS uses satellite signals to triangulate your position, it works only in places where you can get a signal. Which is why Houri finds himself in his office – a small, cluttered room in midtown Manhattan – looking at a reading of 0.000 degrees latitude, 0.000 degrees longitude. That would put him 350 miles off the southern coast of Ghana, where the equator crosses the prime meridian. So he grabs his smartphone and powers up Navizon, a system he developed that can tri-angulate his position by taking readings from Wi-Fi hot spots or cellular towers. Bingo!
40.7574 lat., –73.9682 long.: This is where Houri really is – a pair of coordinates more commonly known as 226 East 54th Street. A graduate of one of France’s elite technical schools, Houri is known in tech circles as the geo-identification expert who showed that Yahoo was wrong when it claimed in court that it couldn’t identify French users or keep them away from sites selling Nazi memorabilia. He built Navizon last year after becoming frustrated with GPS, threw in some social networking functions like buddy lists to make it more fun, and made the software available for free download. Typing in “friends of Cyril,” he gets a fix on colleagues in Rome and Glasgow – but not his girlfriend, who seems to have activated the Opt-out function. By forming their own buddy lists, Navizon’s several hundred users in New York City (there are about 20,000 worldwide) can keep track of one another and figure out whether it makes more sense to hook up in, say, Williams-burg or the meat-packing district.
40.7390 lat., –73.9799 long.: It’s lunchtime, and as our taxi caroms downtown, Houri uses Navizon to look for nearby Japanese restaurants. Unlike other online locators, Navizon knows where you are, even if you don’t. The search results pop up on the ubiquitous Google map: We choose Yama Sushi, which the Plate of the Day food blog proclaims “yummy.” Then the driver hits more potholes, and we have to stop reading because of car sickness.
40.7369 lat., –73.9854 long.: Apparently the search results are only as good as Google’s data, because when we get to the address for Yama, we find somebody’s house. But Mario Batali’s tapas place, Casa Mono, is right across the street. This offers an opportunity to use Navizon’s Geotagging feature, which enables users to post comments about a particular spot that will then pop up on other users’ handhelds as they pass by. The function is so new that only a few of New York’s estimated 18,000 restaurants have been tagged. But the possibilities are there: Clubgoers could use geotags to trade info on venues. Lovers could tag the spot they met instead of carving their initials into a tree.
Houri isn’t the only person to have thought of all this, of course. In Korea, Japan, and Western Europe, carriers routinely offer similar services. The difference is that Navizon doesn’t restrict you and your buddies to one carrier: You can use it anywhere on the planet. The trade-off is that Navizon works only on smartphones that run Symbian or Windows Mobile, a growing but still minuscule category. Yet it does show what we can expect once US carriers – which have so far ignored such services – catch up with the rest of the world. Oh, and Casa Mono? Great choice – one Houri memorializes by tapping the Create Tag icon on his screen. One down, 17,999 to go.
- Frank Rose
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Lost and Found in Manhattan
