Practical Lessons from Place Lab

The creators of Place Lab, a location-enhanced mobile computing system, share lessons learned about leading the project and real-world deployment. Place Lab lets a device estimate its location by scanning for fixed radio beacons, such as nearby 802.11 access points and GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) cell towers and referencing the beacons´ positions cached in the mobile device´s database. Place Lab devices can access the wigle.net community Wi-Fi data base, which increases coverage to almost six million beacons worldwide. We also investigated how to bootstrap a beacon database from a partial database and keep it fresh as beacons are added or moved. The Place Lab approach of running on commodity devices, using existing infrastructure, and supporting existing applications resulted in a location technology that is practical for deployment in the real world. The core idea of the beacon-location approach was even commercialized twice during the life of our project, and Place Lab was occasionally criticized as being too practical for good research. We argue, however, that Place Lab is an example of how commercializable ideas can lead to high-impact research projects