There is a one very important issue related to adoption of landmarks which is good to understand when utilizing landmarks in map services, visualization, navigation or defining locations: How the center point of a landmark (exact coordinates) is determined and presented in a single point, and what are the most appropriate selection criteria’s and principles to select this point.

If you compare available map services (Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Google Earth, Bing Maps, etc.), you will realize that location of the landmarks and such are not identical at all. Everyone has their own version of where the center points of landmarks are located. Cities, towns and villages are more or less “somewhere there”, POI (Point of Interest) type of landmarks are usually close to, but not exactly where the "real position" is.

This is one of the core issues with landmarks – How to determine and place the center point of the single point which represents city, village or another man-made landmark? Should the selection be based on functional, geographical, administrative principles or just on one person's perception? In geography, mathematics and especially in cartography, this issue/problem have been analyzed extensively, but no straightforward and generally accepted solution has been presented... And never will.

Since the theories and principles never provide the correct and absolute answer, the correct answer depends on the primary use of landmark. In this case, all the criteria’s and principles can affect the location separately or all together with different degree. If we ignore all the mathematical models, scales and map projections, the center of the landmark can be set through four general principles:

Functional

On this basis, the landmark locates in the functional focal point of a city or a village, in the center of the area where the most traffic flows and commercial activities are concentrated. In the case of POI type of landmark, center point locates where people mostly move within the area of landmark, usually in main entrance of the building/premise/area.

Functional location of Juba and Juba Teaching Hospital

Geographical

On this basis, the center of a city or a village is placed into mathematical center of their geographical borderline polygon that determines the operational area (built up area). The center of POI type of landmark is also defined by the center of a polygon that usually is based on a building outline or something similar.

Geographical location of Juba and Juba Teaching Hospital

Administrative

On this basis, the location of the landmark is relatively easy as it is placed in the mathematical center of an administrative city/village limit polygon. This polygon may be the same as the geographical, but often it is not. In case of POI type of landmarks, center point is located according to mathematical center of a property or site, according to the compound boundary polygon.

Administrative location of Juba and Juba Teaching Hospital

Personal Perception

This is “the principle” that confuses and messes up all the other criteria and principles, but is the most important of them all. How can one person define where the center point of a city, village, or a single building should be? There are a lot of studies and tests about this: Approx 90% of the people place the center of the city within one kilometer radius from the functional center. For POI-type of landmark, they place center point as follows: 40% in the middle of the building, 40% in the main entrance and 10% elsewhere.

My location for Juba and Juba Teaching Hospital

So, where is the center of a landmark? If none of these four principles work directly for a particular landmark, it is useful to make an appropriate synthesis of these four. This kind of generalization usually works well and provides good and generally accepted answer.

However this is not a totally definitive response to the question where the center point of a landmark should be located, but it provides the basis for how the center point can be determined.

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Textor started as a proof-of-concept for a very common use case for landmarks - simple sharing of location through SMS. Since then we have been adding new features and streamlining the existing ones. A while ago we finally got to the todo-item “give it a great look and feel”. Making the app look great also makes the application easier to use through more consistent use of colors and other visual clues. And many of the changes that first seem purely visual actually make a big difference in usability.

See the full gallery on Posterous

The new look of Textor

Compose button hot area

Update April 25, 2012: We just released version 1.5.1 which fixes problems with contact names and images on devices with Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0).

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Emerging markets are not going to utilize the same location based services as developed world for many years to come. There are many reasons for this: E.g. maps are not used in education, maps are inaccurate in many parts of the world, and not conveniently available. This needs to be taken into account in social networks.

Limited handset capabilities

One reason for the unavailability of maps is the very marginal penetration of smartphones. Less than 20% of the population in emerging markets have smartphones available based on VisionMobile:

Smartphone and feature phone penetration by region in 2011

Source: VisionMobile, Mobile Platforms: Clash of Ecosystems, November 2011

Smartphone sales is increasing in emerging markets but feature phone sales significantly outpaced smartphone sales in 2011 suggesting that the installed base of feature phones will remain strong for quite a number of years:

Smartphone and feature phone sales in millions by region in 2011

Source: VisionMobile, Mobile Platforms: Clash of Ecosystems, November 2011

Locating users

Landmarks have been proven to overcome the significant limitations in “the map approach” in emerging markets. Landmarks have been very successfully used in tracking applications and recently they have been deployed in mobile social networks that are purely focused on emerging markets. 

In social networks context, landmarks are close enough to each other so that one can express one's location fairly accurately, but far enough to “hide” exact location. Location will always be in a format that is relevant for the others but simultaneously provides enough privacy and social space if needed. The benefit is that they are known places (e.g. near Plaza de Concordia, Caracas, Venezuela) so one doesn´t need to be accustomed to maps and can instantly understand the location. Location is expressed in text format that is suitable to any type of mobile phone, not just smartphones. One of the concerns when sharing location is privacy. Landmarks alleviate many of these concerns as it is not exactly where one resides but a place that is nearby. 

Providing approximation of the location is one of the reasons why Eskimi chose the landmarks approach for its mobile dating service. Eskimi has over 5 million users in emerging markets and is adding 30,000 new users every day. It is the most popular dating service in Africa and South East Asia. Landmark approach protects the user from expressing one´s location too accurately but enables to be in contact with other users nearby. 

Landmarks will facilitate all social networks to offer relevant location services to the majority of the world population that resides in emerging markets. Landmarks approach mimics how the majority of the world already communicates about location.

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The mankind has used maps for more than 4000 years... But still majority of the world's population does not understand or can’t read maps. Their spatial understanding, navigation and orientation is based solely on local landmarks, especially so in emerging markets.

Every human being on their own territory can instantly identify the most known and biggest landmarks, such as schools, stations, department stores, big buildings, major junctions, and locate themselves and navigate within the area accordingly. This is happening automatically as people's regional understanding and memory is based on the landmarks for which can be seen, named and logically deduced from the surroundings.

Let’s take a couple of simple examples. 

“Where are you”: I am in Barmoi Hotel, it is close to Casino Leone. Every person in Sierra Leone in Freetown instantly understands this.

Or 

“How to go there”: First pass Casino Leone, turn left at Cape Community School and then go straight until you see Hotel Barmoi.

Locals know these landmarks and all necessary information has been successfully delivered and understood. There is no need for a traditional map or more complex coordinates that most of the locals can’t understand and require plenty of education and special knowledge.

Modern navigation and location technologies are based on maps and coordinates. They are still far too difficult for most people and they can’t deliver the information as they understand it without additional interpretation.

The image above illustrates well why the majority of the world's population still does not understand maps and coordinates – these concepts are not based on what they see and what is real in their own surroundings. Coordinates do not turn automatically into Hotel Barmoi - the basic information to be delivered and understood.

If same information will be delivered by using only landmarks, there is no need for complicated technology to get the point immediately and without additional interpretation:

• Pass Casino Leone (OK, I know where it is)
• Turn left on Cape Community School (OK, I know where it is and how to go there)
• Then go straight until you see Hotel Barmoi (I can’t miss it)

In the image below where one can see that landmarks are not too far apart, nor too close. They form a complete basis for personal navigation and orientation.

Of course, landmarks are not an alternative for maps and coordinates, but an additional new form of delivering location and navigation information that really bring location services to where they should be: Everyone’s everyday-tool everywhere!

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Time for an update: Gecko SMS version 1.3.1 is now available from Android Market and other sources. It contains a few improvements:

The main menu of Gecko SMS has a Search item, which allows for searching for a word in the text of all messages. Due to a configuration issue, this functionality was not working in all devices. This has now been fixed. The same functionality is available though the Search-button if your phone has one. So go ahead and dig into your messaging history!

Besides these two bigger changes, there is three smaller improvements:

1. When working on Search I found a bug in the Android system code that causes search suggestions to fail in message containing "odd" characters such as ä or ö. This was corrected to Gecko SMS, and reported to Android bug database.
2. When composing a message: The menu items have been reordered to a more optimal settings. For example: Add subject was moved to the end of the menu.
3. New message: When entering a contact name, the "alphabets to numbers" item was moved to the end of the list, after matching actual contacts. Assumption is that the contacts are more useful than an "GOOGLE = 466432"-item.

Stay tuned for more improvements, join our Facebook group! If you missed our previous release, here's a video demonstrating the new "Say sender's name"-feature:

And one more thing: If you came here from r/android: Hopefully some of the discussed changes will be in the next release, however I am hoping to still get some more ideas and comments out of that community to get some more perspective.

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A new Gecko SMS version, 1.3.0, is available now from Android Market and other sources.

The most visible (or audible, actually) new feature is Say sender's name: Gecko SMS can now use the built-in Android text-to-speech engine to tell you who has sent the message, so that you can know the sender without looking at the phone, or taking it out of your pocket.

But there are lot's of other changes as well: Landmark view got a new button for "Own Location", that takes you back after panning to faraway locations. This functionality used to be available through a double tap. Now double tap works as zoom in, like in other mapping applications.

Much development time was also spent on speed: optimizing the way we handle landmarks and other data in various situations. The tangible improvement is that landmark panning and zooming feel very snappy and changing between screens is fast. Even in lower-end Android devices. Trust me: I am using Gecko SMS on a 79€ Huawei X1. That is 79 euros for an Android phone, without any contracts, not bad! More about that experience in a later blog post.

1. When forwarding a message, landmark is now disabled by default to keep the original message intact.
2. When editing a long message, the text field can now be scrolled normally
3. In New message, the To:-field now shows all contacts regardless of phone number type (Home/Mobile/etc.)
4. When forwarding a multimedia message without a subject, Gecko SMS no longer creates an "Fwd: "-subject. MMS is not used like email and most users do not want a subject to come up like this.
5. Viewing an MMS with a subject had the subject surrounded with ugly <Subject: > -tags, now subject is shown in plain bold text.

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If you are wondering how the last two problems got there in the first place. This is because Gecko SMS is built on the native Android messaging, which serves as a great starting point for Gecko. Builging on a native platform component is possible due to the Open Source licensing of the Android platform. But one has to wonder a bit: Who has specified the Android user interface for these exact cases?

What do you think of these improvements? If there some functionality you are missing in Gecko SMS? If you are not using Gecko SMS yet: What would be the feature that would make you want to use it? Let us know in the comments below, through email or through our Facebook group!

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Last Friday, we released a new version of Gecko SMS with a lot of major improvements. Unfortunately there was a bug in this version, which caused a Force Close -situation for a few of our users. This has now been analyzed and fixed, and a new version is available in the Android Market.

Most of the time, bugs in Android applications are easy to fix as the system has a built in mechanism for reporting the exact situation of the crash. This was the case now as well: Even when the problem only occurred with the user in certain locations, and thus was not caught in our testing rounds, the reports pinpointed it easily.

So I would like to give a big Thank You to all of our users that have reported this problem. And for everyone using and Android phone: When you get the "Force Close Screen of Death", please consider pressing Report and Send. A developer somewhere thanks you for that.

By the way, there is also two landmark related improvements in this new release:

1. "Landmark disabled" state is now stored, which means that if you are not in the mood for using location in the messages, it is enough to press "Disable" once.
2. Landmark adjuncts (At/Near/Going to) are also stored, per landmark, so when you select that you are "¤ At Home", it is enough to do this once and the At-adjunct is automatically used whenever you use the Home -landmark.

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A new version of Gecko SMS is finally ready and available in the Android Market. If you already have Gecko SMS installed in your phone, you can update it easily - see My Apps screen under the Market -application.

This version includes three major improvements:

1. Redesigned layouts with better focus on messaging
2. Improved usability without Internet, improved landmark data caching
3. Global panning: zoom out and use landmarks from anywhere

Redesigned layouts

Before, landmarks were shown visually in both the conversation list and the message composition view. Touching this area made the landmarks show up in full screen. When composing a message, there was a separate landmark menu.

In the new version (1.2.0), the messaging views only show the landmark text, and a button which gives access to the landmark view and landmark options (Disable, ¤ At/Near etc.). This makes the user interface cleaner, and gives better focus on the task at hand - messaging.

Below is screen shots from both versions, highlighting the changes:

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*These images also explain the "2 times more" -claim: Earlier version used in average about 29 % of the messaging screens for landmarks, the new version uses only about 12%, 29/12 ≈ 2,36. As an engineer, I just could not post the number without this explanation.

Improved data caching and transfer, global panning

Changes 2. and 3. are both part of a rewrite on how landmark data is handled in Gecko SMS. The old versions gave access just to the 50 closest landmarks, which is a simple approach and worked pretty good for most use cases.

In the new version however, one can pan and zoom to anywhere in the world. All downloaded landmark data is stored locally in the phone, which means that after one use it is instantly available without an Internet connection.

If you pan and zoom around in Gecko SMS, you may notice green or cyan rectangles shown. These mean that Gecko SMS is downloading more detailed landmark data for that particular area. Below is an example of zooming into Buenos Aires, when landmarks are only partially loaded.

So go a head, check it out. And when you do try the new version, please don't hesitate to send us comments at geckosms@geckolandmarks.com, or using the blog comment form below!

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This is the third part of our Friday's Favorire Landmark series.

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Phillip's Sanctuary, Antipolo, National Capital Region, Philippines
Coordinates: 14.66123 °N, 121.19719 °E (Google Maps)
Favorited by: Albert / Datadev Team

Tucked in the mountains of Antipolo, is Phillip's Sanctuary, a 13 hectare property owned by the Pestano family. It's a haven that offers an escape from the confines of city life. With 7 bike trails crisscrossing each other, you will experience the adrenalin rush you’re longing for. We built this Dirt Jump with friends, and riding in Phillip’s Sanctuary has never been the same. We also got free entrance fee for 6 months!

Phillip's Sanctuary in Gecko SMS

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This is the second part of our Friday's Favorire Landmark series.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Anawangin Beach, Pundakit, Zambales, Philippines
Coordinates: 14.87985 °N, 120.07011 °E (Google Maps)
Favorited by: Gilmer Bianzon / Datadev Team

This beach is situated in a cove off the coast of Zambales. I’ve spent most of my vacation in this lovely place. There’s no electricity or cellphone signal, accommodation is by tents only. It’s a perfect place to relax and get drunk all day.

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This if the first part in a series of weekly posts where we show some of our landmarks that are interesting, fun, or just personal favorites.

 Kaitaisten Silta (Kaitainen Bridge), Taivassalo, Southwest Finland
Coordinates: 60.54869 °N, 21.51578 °E (Google Maps)
Favorited by: the undersigned

This is the last and longest bridge when driving to the island of Kustavi. For me it's a special landmark, because my family has a cottage really close to it.

The bridge has a really nice view, and going to the cottage this is the perfect place to check the weather and water conditions to see if it is going to be a good day for wakeboarding, kiteboarding, or what.

There is a separate platform for walking below the surface, and when I was a kid, we would be anventurous and walk across under the bridge. I think they have built fences and locked doors so one does not get to go there anymore.

Kaitaisten Silta in Gecko SMS

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Simplified diagram of the messages passed during a network location lookup
in Gecko SMS. The messages are usually passed purely inside the phone
with cached data, sometimes over the Internet

Gecko SMS and many other applications are dependent on knowing the location of the phone they are running on. The usual way for a device to get its location is using GPS, Global Positioning System, but this can be slow, use a lot of battery, and is sometimes totally unavailable; especially indoors.

But Gecko SMS for Android phones works really well even when GPS is turned off or not available. How is this possible?

The answer is "network location", which is a method based on either the mobile or WLAN networks that the phone can detect. Basically each cell (i.e. tower, base station) in a network has a unique ID*, so it is possible to build a list of all the IDs and their coordinates. Mobile phones are always connected to some network cell**, so to get the location or the phone, one can look it up from this list based on the current cell ID.

The tricky part is getting a list of all the mobile network and WLAN cells in the world, with their coordinates. Mobile operators do not usually publish the locations of their towers, and there is no central list for wireless network routers either. This means that someone must physically go to all possible places and record the IDs using some kind of a device. This is where big companies have great advantage, and for example Google has two major ways for doing this. The first one is by crowd sourcing: Everyone that uses Google Maps on a mobile phone with GPS enabled is also feeding back network data to Google. This is quite brilliant and works well: the phone needs to contact Google servers to get the maps, so there is little overhead for also gathering the network data. It also means that for Google Maps, network location is really reliable in all the areas where they have active users. The second method that Google uses is data collection by their Street View cars that drive around many countries. In Europe, there was some controversy about this as the cars accidentally collected a bit more data from the WLAN networks than just network IDs.

Such a list of ids and locations for each cell in the world is too big to be stored in a phone, and needs to be constantly updated, so the full data is stored on servers. The phone uses normal mobile internet connection to get the relevant locations from the server when it needs them, and stores these for later use.

This whole solution from Google is built into the Android platform, so all Gecko SMS needs to do is use the provided APIs and it can almost always get a location to work with. Pretty neat!

Also other new smartphone platforms have similar functionality built-in, but this has not always been the case. Last year when we built a prototype of Gecko SMS for the older S60 Symbian platform, we had to deal with the cell ID lookups and related database queries in our own code. Simple HTTP requests, but nevertheless tedious to get right especially when network connections and location tables are not 100% reliable.

Network cell IDs are not a foolproof way of getting a location. As networks change, there is a chance that the list of locations for the cells is outdated. I noticed this first hand a few months ago when I moved house: my WLAN router had physically moved, but still had the same ID as before. Thus at my new place, all my test phones were giving the location to my old place. This continued until I renamed the WLAN, so Google picked up the change. These kinds of incidents however are rare enough that it basically "just works".

Another limitation is that especially for GSM networks, a single network cell covers a wide area, so the location defined by it is quite inexact. GSM cell location is accurate to about 200-3000 meters, whereas WLAN and WCDMA (3G) cells can provide an accuracy of 50 meters or even less. This inaccuracy is something that has to be handled on the application level. In the case of Gecko SMS, the application learns the users choices and can automatically single out the exactly correct landmark even from inexact location information.

Google Maps and Gecko SMS show current position with a large circle to indicate that the location is inexact, in these examples detected from a mobile network cell ID.

*) That was a bit simplified: For GSM/3G networks this ID contains Mobile Country Code, Mobile Network Code, Location Area Code, and Cell ID. For CDMA it is System Identification number, Network Identification number, and Base Station ID (SID, NID & BID). For WLAN networks it is the MAC address and network identifier (SSID).

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Hello world, this is the blog for Gecko SMS.

We just released Gecko SMS for Android in the Android Market, and there was some brief discussion about the concept on Hacker News and on reddit.com. This chance to discuss the idea with people outside our little circle of geo-nerds made me see some weaknesses in our message. This blog is one of our ways to improve on that.

As the first post, I'd like to share our thoughts on what a landmark is. This is a fundamental thing for us, that's what we do: develop and maintain global landmark data and applications that utilize it.

But what does the word landmark really mean?

The Wikipedia-page on landmarks, makes a distinction between American and British English usage of the word: In American English the word is usually "used to designate places that might be of interest to tourists due to notable physical features or historical significance" where as "landmarks in the British English sense are often used for casual navigation, such as giving directions".

Without taking any sides on the language of choice, we definitely go with the latter understanding: landmarks are not just places for tourists. They are anything that can be used to define a location in an widely understandable way, for example schools, shopping malls, buildings, corners of main streets, museums. Anything that helps you locate yourself and everybody locally knows.

Here is an example of a landmark that is highly useful for giving directions in Makati, but definitely not a "must see" for tourists visiting Manila:
 

McDonald's H.V. dela Costa, Makati, NCR, Philippines
 Coordinates: 14.56070 °N, 121.01790 °E (Google Maps)

(BTW, today they had very cute girl behind the counter, and the 25 PHP Sundae tasted extra good because of that!)

So that is how we define a landmark.

Check back later on this blog for other examples of cool landmarks, and more information about what we are doing with this data.

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