...locations throughout much of the U.S. Fleet managers, security managers and the cartographically challenged get a new whereabouts weapon this week, when Skyhook Wireless Inc. in Boston releases a beta version of its Loki mapping service for mobile users. Skyhook CEO Ted Morgan says that by adding the free Loki tool bar to your Web browser, you can register the location of your laptop in the company's database of 5 million Wi-Fi access points in the U.S. Once you've registered, Loki can give you maps of where you are relative to other access points. Commercial users of Skyhook's Wi-Fi Positioning System software can track trucks equipped with laptops, say, and security managers can use the tool to track down missing machines. Morgan says Skyhook has 100 employees who cruise 15 to 20 miles around major urban areas and pinpoint the locations of Wi-Fi access points. By July, he claims, they will have mapped out Wi-Fi coverage in areas where more than 70 percent of the U.S. population lives.
VOIP technology for Wi-Fi on handhelds...
... is on the horizon. Jason Fischel, chief technology officer at CounterPath Solutions Inc. in Vancouver, British Columbia, acknowledges that his company is only in the alpha stage. But CounterPath, which sells its iBeam softphone technology for PCs to voice-over-IP providers such as Vonage Holdings Corp. and Deutsche Telekom AG, has begun testing VOIP software for handhelds used over Wi-Fi networks. One of the sticking points, Fischel says, is Wi-Fi's current inability to hand off calls from one access point to another as users roam. But he thinks that problem can be resolved, probably by next year. You don't have to wait for this week's release of iBeam 1.5 for PCs, which includes improved quality-of-service monitoring and policy enforcement. By June, iBeam users will be able to make calls from their Outlook or Notes address books, Fischel says.
Authenticate yourself via the fingerprint...
... in your pocket. If Colin Hendrick gets his wish, starting in this year's third quarter, large companies will be handing out his SmartMetric biometric cards to employees who store their encrypted fingerprints in the card's in-memory database. If your fingerprint matches the stored one, the card will authorize you to get all the access rights and privileges you deserve for IT systems and corporate facilities. Hendrick, CEO of New York-based SmartMetric Inc., says the credit-card-size device has its own custom CPU, memory, radio frequency transceiver, LEDs and power supply. "The trick was to get the componentry miniaturized," he says. The next trick will be to get people to adopt biometric authentication tools. But Hendrick thinks he has an advantage because there will be no Big Brother database of fingerprints; instead, people will carry around their own biometric data. Pricing has yet to be set for the cards, though Hendrick says SmartMetric will sell biometric readers for less than US$10 apiece.