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MIT's iFind Service: Page 2 of 6

With iFind, an MIT student can see instantly which of his friends are available and where they are. Then he can IM them using the embedded client to arrange a meeting place. If the friend isn't close enough, he doesn't waste time trying to establish a meeting place. In a corporate environment, iFind could be used to locate critical personnel, such as doctors, nurses or security officers.

But there are some pitfalls to iFind, especially as it might be used in a corporate setting. Once you make your whereabouts known to your group, you can't control how they use your location information, for example, or what they choose to communicate to you. And, the use of iFind and other people locators eliminates some privacy.

Integrated Tool

IFind addresses location awareness, social networking and collaboration. Although location-awareness capabilities date back to at least the mid-1990s, they became more popular as cellular companies solved the problem of identifying a user's location for emergency purposes. Most location-awareness systems, including iFind, use some combination of triangulation, signal strength and signal time-in-flight to identify a user's location. These measurements and the unique identifier assigned to endpoints can be used to locate and label that endpoint. Knowing the location, service providers can better handle emergency calls--and they can sell a new service: locating friends. Although GPS systems provide similar functions, they require special equipment and don't work indoors.

Asset tracking is closely related to location awareness. While it focuses primarily on providing the location of any important physical asset using an RFID tag, it also is used to locate important personnel. Problematically, most of these systems are tied to the underlying wireless platform, whether a service provider's or a proprietary implementation. So, if the wireless platform is changed, the location information might no longer be available.