Another research paper that caught our eyes was "," from researchers at Duke University and the University of South Carolina. The researchers say that while location-based apps have exploded of late, most don't involve indoor localization, which could be used, for example, to orient yourself in a shopping mall or big engineering building on a college campus.

Souvik Sen from Duke describes the research as being about indoor localization using existing Wi-Fi deployments. "The technique requires no painful war driving, but requires the user to spin around once to find her location. As the user spins, we find that her body blocks the incoming WiFi signal. The dip in signal strength is the highest when her body is exactly between the access point and her phone. Thus by finding the minimum signal strength and using the corresponding phone compass value, it is possible to find the direction of the AP from her phone. If we can hear multiple APs (a very general setting), we can triangulate with these directions, and find the user's location. Preliminary work shows a localization accuracy of 5 meters, and we are hoping to reduce that in our future work."

Who knows, maybe WalkSafe and SpinLoc will need to be combined some day to keep people from twirling into oncoming shopping carts.

Bob Brown tracks network research in his Alpha Doggs blog and Facebook Page, as well on Twitter and Google +.