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Technology news and Jobs 
Fuzzy Logic Whereis Everyone: Telstra’s DIY “big brother”
Fuzzy Logic Whereis Everyone: Telstra’s DIY “big brother” | Whereis Everyone: Telstra’s DIY “big brother” |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Wednesday, 02 July 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 If you’re not a Telstra customer but want the same service, Mapmates is an alternative. Mapmates is also supposed to work with phone tower triangulation in a less precise manner if the phone in question doesn’t have a GPS receiver. Mapmates says that it uses your phone’s GPRS/Internet access “to send your location over encrypted channels to the Mapmates. Your location and status are then available for your selected mates to locate you.” Like Whereis Everyone, Mapmaptes also says it is an opt-in application and we at Mapmates respect your privacy at all times” and that it offers “several ways for you to control who can see you and when.” According to the Mapmates FAQ, it costs “AUD $25 per annum or 2,000 finds whichever occurs first. That equates to $2.00 per month for five finds per day.” Mapmates also strongly recommends that “you speak with your telephone carrier and purchase a data plan as you need the internet to download mapmates, the map and some data between the phone and server,” saying the maps are “the main download and they are small in size, generally 30kb”. Mapmates says you won’t “need a large data plan. At least 5 to 10 megabytes would be sufficient unless you are using Mapmates extensively.” Mapmates can be used with any carrier including Telstra, so it will be fascinating to see these two services battle it out, and whether or not other carriers will offer something similar. Telstra’s service appears to be more expensive but offers more flexibility in alerting users via SMS or email, and thus could be more useful to “mums and dads” who might not be as technically minded. Either way, competition is good, and if you want to know where your friends, family, colleagues or workers are, here are two ways to do it with technology you already have, while giving a nod to George Orwell, the man whom we can thank for the term... Big Brother.
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