Tag: location based technology

Location based technology is now being used to be able to display the length of time major lines will take.

One of the world’s largest airports – the busiest one in New York – is now using geolocation beacons to be able to provide people with the actual wait times that they will face when they enter into a major lineup.

This new system will be powered by BlipTrack beacons from BLIP Systems, which is based in Denmark.

This geolocation technology beacon installation was put into place by Lockheed Martin. This system has been implemented with the intention of making it easier for passengers to make through Terminal 4 at JFK Airport. Thirteen new screens have been installed in order to display estimated processing times. These large-size screens are prominently displayed and have been installed at the checkpoints for TSA Security and Customers and Border Protection. There is also an indoor taxi lineup display.

The geolocation beacons make it possible for continual updates to be presented to travelers.

According to the JFKAT vice president, Daryl Jameson, “It continuously updates”. JFKIAT is the company behind the operation of Terminal 4. So far, people are responding well to having the information available to them, as they know how long they will have to wait in the lines, and aren’t left wondering. As lineups aren’t an activity that most people enjoy, this “signage helps to manage expectations.”

The beacons work by conducting anonymous tracking of the mobile devices of passengers as they make their way through the airport. This way, while the individuals aren’t identified, the length of time that they spend in certain processing locations can be determined. The BlipTrack solution detects devices running on WiFi or Bluetooth and that are in “discoverable” mode, such as in tablets and smartphones.

Once one of these devices makes its way past one of the geolocation beacons, the beacon records the mobile device’s non-personal unique ID (it’s MAC address), which is then encrypted and time stamped. When that device is identified once again at other beacon locations, patterns among travelers can be established so that wait and travel times can be measured.

This new strategy is a part of a broader effort to greatly reduce the cost associated with data collection.

The federal government of Australia has now announced its intentions to roll out a new national geolocation technology based data framework, beginning in February 2016, which will be a large component of a new strategy to reduce the price tag associated with data collection in the country.

They have determined that duplicate data collection has become an expensive process.

The geolocation program is being called the Foundation Spatial Data Framework (FSDF), and this database will provide a free record of each Australian property in a format that has been standardized. This data will be available to end users for free, regardless of whether they are government or industry. This announcement follows one that had previously been made with regards to the massive amount of spending that the government was doing in order to collect data.

The Department of Communications’ announcement laid the foundation for the launch of this geolocation project.

According to the department’s announcement through Helen Owens, its assistant secretary of data policy, who spoke to a parliamentary committee, the amount currently spent every year on the collection of geospatial data is estimated to be about $200 million.

The reason that the figure is as high as it is, is that there are many duplications across the existing efforts that are in place for data collection. These duplications run across the efforts that are made by the territory, state, and federal governments, meaning that in essence, taxpayers are paying for the same data to be collected in multiple ways, said Owens.

Owens also pointed out that the $200 million spent on data collection does not include defense agencies, and if that total had been factored in, it would be notably higher. She explained that “If we started with a green sheet, and you had $200 million per year to spend on geospatial data, would you do it this way? And the answer is no.”

Now, the hope is that the geolocation based program will streamline the multiple efforts so that they are conducted only once in any given area, as opposed to duplicating themselves in a very expensive way.