Satellite navigation devices that use the Global Positioning System (GPS) are one of the big consumer success stories of the last few years, with sales growth showing few signs of abating. And as the technology improves, we're seeing it appear in a wider range of products, ranging from GPS-enabled jogging watches to one of this year's new toys, the digital camera with a built-in GPS sensor. The idea is that you can automatically tag your photos with the location data (geo-tagging), enabling you to do all manner of fun things with them, such as adding them to a Google Earth overlay or sorting them by location in a suitable image gallery application.

But one of the problem with standard GPS receivers is the time they take to get a position fix - anything from 30 secs upwards, which isn't very handy when trying to take a geo-tagged quick snap. But as we discovered this week, a company called Geotate says it's cracked the solution with a software-based GPS data capture and processing system. This in essence uses a small radio receiver to record a short (under 0.2 seconds) burst of satellite data that can be processed later on a PC to recover the location information. There's no need for any position processing capabilitity in the device itself, thus reducing the complexity of the built-in electronics. There's a white paper explaining the technology in greater detail at the Geotate website.

If it succeeds, it will mean that adding geo-tagging to cameras - or any other suitable device - should become easier, cheaper and use less battery power. And those three in combination are always good news.


Kelvyn Taylor
Editor, Personal Computer World
www.pcw.co.uk

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