A 'Web service' you can use

If you misplace your cell phone, it's fairly easy to use a different phone to call it and then follow the ring to retrieve it. Even if you've left it beyond the range at which you could hear it, someone might answer it and tell you where it is. Suppose you could do something similar with your car keys, your dog or even your kids?

Former Apple wiz Steve Wozniak thinks people would pay to be able to quickly locate those things they frequently misplace or otherwise lose track of. His Wheels of Zeus start-up hopes to combine the Global Positioning System (GPS) with a low-power, long-range wireless protocol that operates at about 1,200 baud. The company expects the combination GPS monitor and wireless radio to sell for less than $100. It is estimated that this can cover a range of 1 or 2 miles, but Wozniak believes it can be extended by using the Internet - by connecting one radio to another in a global peer-to-peer network you'd be able to search within a couple of miles of every attached wireless device.

You'd need to tag everything you wanted to be able to trace (probably you'd need to imbed one in a teenager, or make it look like a safety pin!) but the tags should be small enough to be unobtrusive.

You could put one on employees' ID cards, and then easily track down the person who was late for (thus holding up) the meeting. (That's a joke; I don't think the system would work well except in the smallest companies.)

Now I'm sure the privacy purists will be up in arms once again, just as they were with Wal-Mart's plan to use radio frequency identification (RFID) tags in its inventory, but there's little danger that this system could be used on any city-, state- or country-wide government tracking system. The beauty is that, given the low-power, low-bandwidth system scaling beyond a few dozen devices would be impractical. The limited range, while perfect for the individual user would be wildly ineffective when attempted on a large scale.

Personal networking, wireless, peer-to-peer, RFID, identity management - if Wozniak could only wrap it up in a "Web services" envelop he would have all of today's hottest buzz words in one small, relatively inexpensive product which, of course, is a pretty good description of Apple computers twenty-some years ago. It worked then, it could work again.

Tip of the Week
The U.S. and many European governments also soon will be embedding machine-readable tags — these containing biometric descriptions. New U.S. laws require machine-readable passports with biometric data to more readily identify people entering the country. Click here for more details.

Kearns, a former network administrator, is a freelance writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. He can be reached at wired@vquill.com.

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