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In today’s burgeoning world of technological development, we are always searching for new ways to bring new technologies to the consumer. One of the challenges facing the GPS (Global Positioning System) industry is providing a low cost approach to maximize the use of satellite navigation technology. Nowadays, consumers can find plenty of GPS products such as Personal Navigation Devices (PND) as an add-on to automobiles, GPS-enabled cellphones and handheld GPS units for hikers and geocachers etc.. The challenge is to further minimize the cost and efficiency of GPS receiver technology so that the common consumer can include it in their everyday products and truly take GPS wherever they go. One of the founding fathers of GPS, Dr. Brad Parkinson once said that GPS is “‘the ninth utility’ – after electricity, gas, telephone, water, sewer, garbage collection, TV and radio. It will become ubiquitous… simply because it offers information on demand…”. The problem right now is that GPS receiver solutions can cost up to hundreds of dollars and are not suitable for most consumer applications, therefore restricting the use and market potential for GPS. Why should we be limited to our car when we want to know where we are going when the drive is only half the journey? Commoditizing GPS means introducing a technology that is low-cost, low-power, and small size to common consumer products like digital cameras, cell phones, PDAs, laptops and even MP3 players to provide access to the GPS system, and ensuring that the combination of these end-user products remain affordable and practical. Traditionally, a GPS receiver is hardware-based so it can be bulky, expensive, lacks configurability and, worst of all, power hungry. Conversely the old generation software based GPS receiver design was inefficient and impractical for commercial products. Our company has developed the Deep-R™ technology to replace the hardware with highly efficient software design that comes at a fraction of the cost and power requirements of a traditional hardware receiver. The enabling technology behind the recent growth in Location Based Services technology has been based on hardware-based GPS technology. With the advent of the next generation software based technology such as Deep-R™, one would wonder how large the location based services will become. |