This is a location dependent service for UMTS. The demo was given by Andreas Ebert.
The idea is to use information like "Where am I?", "What is near me?", "What is happening now?", "Where are my friends?", etc, to provide useful services.
The demo was on the iPAQ, like the Enterprise on Air demo. It showed the use of a map service in a city to find locations of interest.
The architecture consisted of a map server, a web-server, and an SQL database. There is a GPS receiver in the user's end-device. The GPS receiver is actually faked out now.
The map service is based on mapXsite from http://www.mapinfo.com/. It provides a set of tools for accessing and manipulation city and street maps.
The web-server provides the interface to the user's end-device.
The SQL database has the information about the different places of interest.
Possibility of using City-on-Air at Berkeley
There does not seem to be much technical obstacles. The mapXsite software can be used for any location. The web server and the database are easy to setup. It should be probably be 2-3 months of work for an undergraduate to set this up, given the pieces.
There seemed to be some non-technical glitches. The City-on-Air has been given to some other division of Siemens and it is not clear if they can give it at this point. Also, the mapXsite stuff has some licensing issues. Martin said he can look into these if we are clear about what exactly we want.