Birkett Enterprise Ltd

I read an interesting article in the Sunday Times, Beware the traitor in your pocket, which mentioned a couple of services that at first glance appeared to be phonelocator.mobi competitors. The more interesting of the two is sniffu.com. Unlike phonelocator.mobi, which uses GPS to locate the mobile phone, sniffu.com uses a positioning information provided by the mobile operator. The network operator can calculate the approximate location of the phone because it it knows which base stations it is in contact with.

This kind of system works best in metropolitan areas where there are many base stations in close proximity. Even in London however, the system does not appear to be particularly accurate.

I tried out sniffu.com yesterday on a T-mobile handset , and it produced this map:

The actual location of the phone was here, as revealed by phonelocator:

As you can see from the two maps. The phonelocator one is much more detailed. If you compare where the river is on both maps you can see that the phone is actually located in the outer extremities of the circle on the sniffu.com map.
















I’ll now attempt to compare the features of the two products:

A new web application has been deployed at phonelocator.mobi. There is a new style public map with a floating user selection window.

A new trail page with a colour coded trail has been added. (The most recent part of the trail is red and becomes blacker as it gets older) Small red markers have been added that, when clicked, show when the user was at a particular location.

Floating windows have been added to show trail information and provide a trail navigation link. It is now possible to load the previous trail by clicking a link.