GPS - Global positioning Systems? Society has a tendency to take the best technologies and make them indispensable then almost invisible. GPS gives the world accurate time to nanoseconds and accurate position to meters without high-cost precision equipment The ultimate applications are difficult to predict. GPS is already the most reliable and cost-efficient method for creating maps, synchronizing telecommunications systems, positioning car navigation systems and reporting locations to tracking and emergency systems. Shrinking in size, weight power and cost-GPS is following the classic electronics trend and with each step, a new set of users find they can profit from the technology. read more

Location-Based Services Market Poised For Growth The market for location-based cellular services that failed to meet the expectations set during the late '90s tech boom is poised to make a comeback, a research firm said Tuesday. Services that would deliver traffic info and store and restaurant locations based on where a cellular subscriber is standing have failed to take off primarily due to technical problems, ABI Research said. Worldwide revenue from location-based services is expected to top $3.6 billion by end of the decade from $500 million today, ABI said. Telematics services revenues is expected to exceed $5 billion by 2009 from $1.5 billion last year. read more

SMS - Short Messaging Service? Short Message Service (SMS) is the transmission of short text messages to and from a mobile phone, fax machine, and/or IP address. Messages must be no longer than 160 alphanumeric characters and contain no images or graphics. SMS is a relatively simple messaging system provided by the mobile phone networks. SMS messages are supported by GSM, TDMA and CDMA based mobile phone networks currently in use. Although services based on SMS have been feasible for many years, the recent mobile phone penetration and large scale adoption of the existing services by users, have made the SMS based services even more attractive to service providers. read more

Wireless M2M (Machine to Machine) The M2M market covers those forms of data communication not covered by normal office-based systems like PC-to-PC, PC-to-server and server-to-server. Its more glamorous cousins can be categorised as Messaging and Information Access, often also referred to as Browsing. Whereas Messaging comprises text, multimedia, instant and unified messaging and e-mail, Information Access is usually associated with Internet/intranet access but also includes streamed audio and video services. In a sense M2M is everything else, although some applications overlap more than one segment. M-commerce, for example, is part of information access in terms of what is being purchased, but part of M2M in terms of the mechanism for paying for it. read more