Team Geared Up

LONDON, UK (Team Geared Up) - A UK-based start-up has announced a sim card for mobile devices which incorporates a GPS receiver and antenna, allowing location capability to be added to the device by just changing the sim card.

BlueSky Positioning said it has developed “patent-pending technology and processes to embed assisted global positioning system (A-GPS) capability in the sim card, with minimal impact on signal strength and battery life”.

A-GPS is great technology. I’ll explain briefly - an A-GPS device takes the strength readings as normal from the satellites but sends the 3 or more values via the cellphone network to a central server to work out the coordinates of your position and returns them to the phone. This means all the lat/long calculations - the knowledge of the curves of the earth, the geo-spacial processing is all done external to the A-GPS chip.

End result - tiny tiny tiny GPS units.

Reported by GPSLocationBasedService.com, creators of Mobiles2Go for kids and recent commenter Laurel Papworth.

-Robin-