GPS Tracking

If a typical person in today’s society were to perform a complete 360-degree look around their immediate surroundings, the majority of them would see at least one form of screened media.  Television, laptop computers, tablets, and other mobile devices saturate our day-to-day lives.  With so much of our free time spent consuming these kinds of high-tech media outlets, it is easy to forget that the generation before us was not nearly as fortunate; books, journals, and other related print media were their main forms of informative and entertaining content, and they were able to fill in the visual gaps with their own imagination and creativity.  While many bibliophiles today continue to claim that the written word is doomed as electronic media replace many of our nation’s fundamental print media sources (e.g. local and national newspapers and the ongoing closure of many retail bookstores across the globe), companies that began their market capitalization on printed entertainment such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble have invested time and capital into integrating the e-book into the public entertainment sphere.  In a time when humans tend to consider a lighted screen as the go-to source for informative and creative content, the implementation of GPS tracking technology into the code of the e-readers that display electronic books can serve to bridge the gap between the tangible and intangible sources of mediated entertainment.

Tablet PCs are undoubtedly the hottest new technological fad, and many already incorporate a GPS tracker into many of their applications to provide confident and efficient navigational information.  However, a single-purpose e-reader such as Amazon’s Kindle or the Barnes & Noble Nook typically lacks an interface to support currently available GPS tracking systems.  Today’s consumer wants to be as involved with their gadgets as possible, and for an e-reader to fully immerse a user in its content, a GPS tracker should be standard in the next generation release of these devices.  Imagine reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, and as you join Leopold Bloom’s journey through Dublin you are able to highlight any piece of electronic text that includes a location in the city and access any stored GPS tracking information regarding the history and current status of that place.  In addition, real-time alerts could be easily programmed into the GPS tracker that would allow for the user to be notified of locations that are mentioned in the popular literature they enjoy as they travel through a city.

While the written word will never be totally replaced, the recent announcement of Borders Bookstore’s bankruptcy and the shaky financial status of many prominent American newspapers are sure signs that readers prefer electronic media now more than ever.  With the continuing emergence of new forms of GPS tracking applications, the wish that many users have of bridging the gap between what the reader pictures in their mind when they read about a location and the ease of obtaining actual factual data about it is a service that a GPS tracker can turn into reality.

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As we have learned, the Global Positioning System is operated by the National Executive Committee for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation & Timing. These three eponymous capabilities have always been the core benefits of GPS in its simplest iteration, but the staggering amount of applications that have proliferated within this past decade have been much more varied, constrained only by the limits of human ingenuity. At the intersection of unprecedented technological innovation and decades of policies that have stimulated the growth of GPS, this simple tool has become an omnipresent and nearly invisible part of our daily lives.

On www.gps.gov, the official federally hosted informational Web site, possible applications run the gamut from roads and highways, rail, marine and aviation to agriculture, public safety and disaster relief. These illustrate the tremendous capacity that GPS has for serving the public interest by making infrastructure more efficient and responsive. Numerous cities have come to rely on geographic information systems, or GIS, which use GPS technology to collect data and synthesize it into useful information used to make important municipal decisions, from drainage plans to emergency vehicle routes. GPS is also a critical component of Intelligent Transportation Systems, communication-based technologies that use real-time data to manage traffic flow. (more…)