Oh caller, where art thou? GloPos knows, GPS or no

Most of today's smart phones use global positioning system technology, which can virtually pinpoint the location of the phone anywhere on the globe. Because of this, many applications on those phones let you know what's in your vicinity, including traffic conditions and businesses you may want to find.

But only about one-quarter of all mobile phones are smart phones, making GPS unavailable to three-quarters of all phones. What about the rest? How can these phones be spotted and customers given the same advantages of those with GPS devices?

Enter GloPos (www.glopos.com), a company that specializes in making all phones "location aware."

"Our whole idea is to use positioning technology based on mobile networks, not using GPS or Wi-Fi," GloPos CEO Mikael Vainio said. "We aren't using a traditional approach. This isn't triangulation.

"We do not need exact location of cell towers (to make the system work). We take information the phone already has when it's connected to the servers," he said. "It's global MPS -- mobile positioning system."

Vainio, speaking from GloPos headquarters in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, said the software resides on the phone, sending small bits of data from mobile tower base stations to the server the phone connects to.

"At the core of the system is the intelligent probability model," Vainio said. "It's doing the calculation on the servers.

"The amount of data sent is less than 100 bytes and in less than 100 milliseconds, it brings the location of the phone to the server (and back to the phone)."

Once the location is known, the information can be used by any location-based app. GloPos software can find phones indoors and underground, which is usually not possible with GPS technology.

Another advantage of GloPos' system is its low drain on the phone's battery.

"Battery life is quite a big challenge for everybody," Vainio said. "Our technology uses power only when it send a query, and that is only a small amount of energy."

GloPos is targeting the mobile carriers and the makers of mobile operating systems.

"There are a billion phones in the world that aren't location-aware," Vainio said. "If we look at bringing this kind of technology to even part of these billion phones, then the whole mobile-search market or mobile advertising market will benefit."

Vainio points to many applications that use location awareness.

"If we talk about Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook and the hundreds of millions of people on social networks without smart phones, and the huge pace that these networks are growing, we can bring them benefits without having Wi-Fi or GPS on their phones," he said.

"We're looking at this market from a global perspective, like China, India, Africa and South America. People there can't get the benefit of location services," he said.

Not yet, anyway.

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