It's all about location, location, location

BOSTON - John Fairfield had hit a wall. The senior systems manager at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, Mass., wanted to deploy an 802.11b wireless network in both towers of the 400-room facility, but he knew no single application could justify the $40,000-plus cost. When he learned of Newbury Networks, Fairfield knew he'd not only found his killer application, but more than a half-dozen of them.

The Boston start-up has developed what it calls location-enabled networks (LEN), technology that runs on top of an 802.11b network. LENs adds the ability to push information relevant to a device user, based on his location. As such, LENs knows the location of device and user.

Say you're a business traveler waiting for a flight at Boston's Logan Airport Gate 70. You flip open your notebook, PDA or any 802.11b-enabled device, and LENs automatically connects you to the wireless network and pinpoints your location. It then informs you that your flight is 20 minutes late, that the following restaurants are within two gates, and that this gate's wireless access is sponsored by CNN, which is providing free access to its Web site. Moreover, on this concourse wireless LAN access is available from T-Mobile, iPass and Wayport, so if you're a subscriber to any of these, log on now. If not, you can subscribe to your choice for $9.95. Pick up your stuff and move down to Gate 32, and LENs will provide relevant information for that area.

Newbury's CEO Michael Maggio says the company figured out how to define wireless zones within a building, then built an application server that allows the provisioning of content, information and network access based on the device-user's identity and location, though he won't elaborate. The key piece of the system is the LocaleServer, which has the ability to gather data from multiple access points and feed it into an algorithm. The server can then determine or predict the location of client devices within about ten feet or less.

LocaleServer works with any 802.11b-enabled device. Newbury recommends Hewlett-Packard/Compaq iPaqs because they use the PocketPC operating system and have lots of memory and processing power.

Application windfall

Because Newbury's technology was still in beta testing when Fairfield learned of it, he and hotel Vice President and General Manager John Murtha brainstormed ways to test it out on a noncritical system. Because the hotel boasts more than 60 works of fine art in its lobby and second floor public space, Newbury and Fairfield's team worked to build an art tour application that went live in June.

Visitors are given Compaq iPaqs, and as they pause before each work of art, the locale server feeds the device an image of the work via a Web browser, as well as a text description and background of the artist.

Installation took longer than expected, Murtha says. "The system didn't run smoothly until September. We faced challenges in training it to know where it was vis á vis a particular piece of art."