The GPS III satellite armada will eventually make our GPS technology more accurate, but we’re not quite there yet. Just three satellites have been launched thus far, and only one of them is operational at the moment. Elon Musk recently tweeted that our ‘GPS just got slightly better,’ but that isn’t entirely true. We tend …
The US government’s National Institutes of Standards and Technology recently decided to sponsor what appears to be the most comprehensive look to date at the value of GPS technology relative to the US economy as a whole. The results also shed some pretty interesting light on how much of a financial blow would result from …
Former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff once said during a conversation with me that he uses a fitness tracker to monitor his regular runs, but he doesn’t connect it to the cloud. One of the top security officials in the country, in other words, implied that he thinks such devices are too tempting a target …
It doesn’t matter how hard of a worker you are or how much you adore your job, sometimes we all just need a day off. A 60-year-old electrician in Australia doesn’t seem to have liked his job all that much, and time off seemed like a great idea. But he still needed those pesky paychecks, …
Google Maps is the undisputed champion of mobile navigation and it’s an extremely powerful tool for helping you find locations, but what about people? The search giant wants that to be just as easy and, as long as you’re cool with it, you can now use Google Maps to share your real-time location with whoever you …
We’ve seen the “GPS directions gone awry” scenario play out on TV shows any number of times, but perhaps the most well-known example comes from an old episode of The Office where Michael and Dwight both ignore their common-sense instincts and instead blindly drive a car into a lake. Recently, and rather unfortunately, a Canadian woman on the road …
Google Maps is one of the most useful apps you can install on your smartphone, as it’s ready to give you handy turn-by-turn navigation instructions as soon as you need them. The same goes for standalone GPS devices that don’t require an Internet connection as it’s the case with Google Maps, to get you to your …
A recent Apple acquisition may soon make Apple Maps the most accurate mobile mapping software on the market. Originally spotted by MacRumors, and subsequently confirmed via The New York Times, Apple recently acquired Coherent Navigation, a mapping company founded in 2008 that specializes in incredibly accurate and precise GPS software and systems. The report notes that Coherent Navigation …
A troubling lawsuit coming out of California alleges that a woman was fired from her job after she uninstalled an app that her employer requested all employees had to download. The troubling aspect of the story is that the app in question was capable of tracking employee location data even when employees weren’t on the …
Last week, I drove for 11 hours in a vehicle during a single calendar day. I decided to take such an endeavor the evening before, and all told, it took around five minutes to scope out the plan. The morning of, I settled into the adequately posh driver’s seat of a trusty rental car, tossed …
