New IP Biz: Glympse. Monitoreo de Posición de celulares inteligentes, por Web.

Personal Technology.

Tracking Someone Else's Every Move, With Permission .
By BOB TEDESCHI
Published: May 20, 2009

With the Glympse application, a T-Mobile G1/Android smartphone knows all, tells all — but only if the person carrying it says it is O.K.

GLYMPSE™ Debuts Mobile Location-Sharing for everyone.

I'm tracking my wife, Karen. I never know where she goes during the day, and I've had enough.

Using Glympse, a new application that's embedded on two cellphones she's carrying in her purse, I can watch her every movement from my cellphone or desktop computer.

As I write this, a map shows her driving through our neighborhood on the way to make her rounds as a visiting nurse. Wait. She just entered the highway. She's doing 70 miles an hour.

Really? Seventy?

"Now I'm not," she said, via cellphone (hands-free, of course). "I'm getting off the exit."

I checked again. "Right. You're going 37 now."

"Very exciting."

Cellphone companies have for years marketed location-sharing services, where people can track your physical movements whenever you have the device turned on.

If it strikes you as strange that anyone would want to broadcast that information all the time, or even much of the time, you've just touched on a chief reason I've generally avoided these apps, like a lot of other people. And even if you like sharing your location with a viewing audience, your viewers must first sign up for the same service and hope their phones are compatible.

Glympse solves the creepiness issue, and while you still need T-Mobile's G1 to broadcast your whereabouts, any Web-enabled phone or PC can receive and display your location information. The broadcasting app is also coming soon to iPhones, Windows Mobile phones, BlackBerrys and other devices, and it is promising enough that such people should keep it on their radar.

Here's how it works. First, buy a G1 from T-Mobile — which, if you happen to live in an area where T-Mobile's coverage is good, is a fine idea. The phone's selection of add-on applications isn't nearly as big as the iPhone's, but it is decent and growing quickly.

You can find Glympse in the Android Market, the G1's answer to Apple's App Store. After downloading the app, you can send your whereabouts to anyone who can receive SMS messages or e-mail.

When you want someone to know where you are — say, if you're on your way to a meeting or coming home from work — you open the app and enter the phone number or e-mail address of the person with whom you'd like to share that information.

If the creepiness quotient is still too high for you, Glympse takes care of that problem with the next step. Users can select the length of time recipients can track them. The default is 30 minutes, but you can extend that to as long as four hours.

You can include your destination — if, for instance, you're headed somewhere other than the location of the recipient. And you can also add a message or select one of several scripted phrases to include, like "Stuck in traffic," or "I'll meet you in the lobby."

Click "send," and as long as your recipient has Web access on their phone (or whatever device on which they receive your message), they can call up a Glympse Web page showing exactly where you are, and your speed.

This is bad news for people like me, who've grown dependent on the "got stuck in traffic" excuse when I actually just started off late. But otherwise, it's a good way to save multiple phone calls while you're in transit. Send someone a Glympse message, and they can track your progress as often as they like.

To see the VIDEO on You Tube, click here or over image.

The tracking is fairly accurate. As long as the phone's GPS has a line of sight to satellites, Glympse will show your location within a range of 10 yards or less. If you're in a grove of trees or something else that impedes the GPS technology but you're still within reach of a cell tower, Glympse will use the towers to determine your location.

In urban environments with many cell towers you will still do well, but in rural areas the system will have much less accuracy. This is worth remembering when Glympse becomes available on a wider selection of phones — including those without GPS technology.

Of the two phones my wife had in her bag, one was an iPhone that was running a trial version of Glympse. Initially, I had much better luck tracking the iPhone than the G1. When my desktop PC opened the link sent by the iPhone, I saw my wife moving around a building, then crossing to the parking lot to get on the road again. When I clicked over to see the map being transmitted by the G1, it showed my wife was still in our driveway. (She was most definitely not.)

Glympse executives suggested the problem was with the G1's tracking satellite or perhaps a bug in the beta version of the software. Sure enough, when I used the publicly available version, it worked well.

Now, what happens when an intensely suspicious spouse or parent tries to track the phone's location after the time set on the initial entry has expired? Nothing. They can click the old link you sent them as much as they like, but it will divulge no information.

The app is free, but your carrier could charge you and your friends for the message or the e-mails sent, so if you become big fans of the software it might make sense for everyone to have an unlimited data plan.

At least at the start, the app will present a distraction, as you get accustomed to the novelty of watching someone's every move. I had no idea my wife covered so much ground. A bit puzzled, I called her.

"Why are you making a turn there? Are you going to meet a lover?"

"Yes," she said. "At the nursing home."

Just as I suspected. The woman is trouble.

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