MapPoint Location Server

Last Wednesday, I attended a meeting of the East of Toronto.NET User Group. Attendees included Kate Gregory, Chris Dufour, Jeff Laughlin and many others. It was great meeting everyone. Dwayne Lamb from Visual Byte gave an excellent talk on the MapPoint Location Server. Here are some interesting factoids from the presentation:

- The FCC E911 Bill will make location based services a reality. All major telcos in the U.S. must comply with legislation to allow authorities to track and find anyone dialing a 911 emergency call on a mobile device.

- AGPS (Assisted GPS) uses a combination of cell tower and sattelite tracking to get a localization fix. AGPS requires a smaller chipset, less power and is less expensive than other localization systems.

- Bell Mobility in Canada estimates that 25% of their mobile devices are AGPS compliant. By EOY, they predict that every device they will sell will function using AGPS. Bell is currently the only company offering Location Based Services (LBS) in Canada.

- The only PocketPC device in Canada that supports AGPS is the Audiovox 5050.

- The MapPoint Web Service conducts over 15 Million transactions per day for over 24 countries. The generated maps contain over 200 000 Points of Interest and 16 million listings.

- Microsoft Research estimates that 80% of Enterprise data contains some localization aspect

If you are in the Toronto area, be sure to attend the Toronto Windows Server User Group inaugural meeting on September 15th at Microsoft Canada. We will have a special presentation on Windows XP Service Pack 2. To sign up or learn more, check out our website at: http://www.twsug.com