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Smartphones are really amazing devices. They do so many things that many people can't really keep track of all of them. Such is the case with the geotagging of images many smartphones do by default. A new site called "I Can Stalk U" is parsing Twitter in search of geotagged photos. The information then shows up in the stream on the site.

Now that phones have both GPS and cell network location services, it's easy to add geographical information to the EXIF data every time a picture is snapped. Most of the time, users are expected to turn this off if they do not want their location stored. I Can Stalk U is the brainchild of security researchers Ben Jackson and Larry Pesce. They explain that the site is aimed at raising awareness regarding what people are really telling the world at large about their movements.

This site is not unlike the now defunct Please Rob Me, which consisted of an aggregation of everyone that Tweeted they were not at home. In the case of I Can Stalk U however, it's not about the blatant statements people are making, but rather about data they might not know exists. Have you ever posted an image someplace only to realize you'd posted your location?

 

Who needs a dedicated GPS unit when your smartphone can guide you from point A to point B just as easily? That's the question consumers will be faced with when, a little more than one year from now, four out of five cell phones will come with GPS capabilities built in, iSuppli predicts.

By the fourth quarter of 2011, iSuppli reckons some 79.9 percent of cell phones will include GPU functionality, up from 56.1 percent in the first quarter of 2009. That will amount to 318.3 million units.

"The smartphone is the key product driving the technology industry today, and social networking services and applications spurred by GPS-related features are critical elements in the smartphone market today," said Jagdish Rebellow, director and principal analyst for iSuppli. "This is illustrated by Google's decision to make turn-by-turn navigation, LBS, and mobile ads the central features in its bid to take on Apple in the smartphone market, and make up the central pillars of its strategy to increasingly monetize mobile search."

And it's not just smartphones, either. According to iSuppli, GPS functionality will come embedded in a range of devices by 2014, including 18 percent of notebooks and 42 percent of portable handheld videogame players.

Get lost in the woods and a cellphone in your pocket can help camping buddies find you. Drive into a ditch and GPS in your car lets emergency crews pinpoint the crash site. However, when a transcontinental flight is above the middle of the ocean, no one on the ground can see exactly where it is -- in the air, or worse, in the water. The disappearance of Air France Flight 477 and its 228 passengers over the Atlantic Ocean this week has critics of radar-based air traffic control calling on the U.S. and other countries to hasten the move to GPS-based networks.

The business and national security implications of a Global Positioning Satellite system failure would be too enormous to bear, and as a result, the prediction made in a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office report is unlikely to come to pass, a Gartner research analyst who follows the industry told TechNewsWorld on Wednesday. However, businesses that depend on the service would be well-served by taking steps to prepare for an outage anyway, Thilo Koslowski said.

China fired into orbit Wednesday its second satellite in a program to build an alternative to the global positioning system based on U.S. satellites. The geostationary satellite is one of a series being slung into space to form the Beidou, or "Compass," navigation system, the official Xinhua News Agency said, calling the system a "crucial part of the country's space infrastructure." The system is touted by China as an alternative to the U.S. satellite GPS network, the dominant positioning system.

A new company is working to index the real world. Sense Networks officially launched its CitySense and MacroSense activity-tracking services Monday. The services use a combination of cell phone data, WiFi activity and vehicle GPS locations to measure where crowds are -- and then put the information to use in a number of ways. Perhaps the most widely discussed feature is Sense Networks' CitySense service. The program, available so far only in San Francisco, lets you look at real-time maps to discover, for example, which nightclubs are busiest on any given evening.

Microsoft on Thursday unveiled a predictive traffic system that combines historical traffic data with real-time updates from GPS-enabled devices in order to build real-time maps for drivers. The services, which runs on the Live platform, grew out of research by Eric Horvitz, who has been working on the project for four years. The ClearFlow system is the result of Microsoft's application of machine learning and intelligence as it's applied to the daily life of people. The application combines data from 71 cities with contextual information about the area to forecast traffic patterns.

A newly launched global position system service allows its users to access real-time traffic data -- generated by the customers -- in cities around the country. The GPS service, run by Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Dash Navigation, helps drivers find directions; however, the Internet-based service constantly updates driving directions based on information gathered from other area drivers. The database-driven system offers alternate routes if traffic has slowed, according to information culled from other devices.

If you think the Apple iPhone is cool, wait till you see the Nuvifone that Garmin announced Wednesday in New York. It combines GPS, mobile phone, still and video camera, and MP3 and video player functionality with Internet access capability. Or it will, anyway, if Garmin can stick to its announced launch schedule and deliver Nuvifone to the market by the third quarter of this year. Assume for the moment that the Nuvifone is available, so I can speak in the present tense.

To plan an upcoming hike in the Alps, John Higham scoured scores of photos plotted along his route on a digital map for clues to the steepness of trails and the availability of accommodations or camp sites. These images were just like all the other vacation photos shared by travelers and amateur photographers, except they'd been tagged with location information in an emerging practice known as "geotagging." Armed with such data, Higham didn't have to search endless combinations of keywords and guess how photographers would describe images in captions.