Peter Duffett-Smith, Cambridge academic turned hi-tech entrepreneur, has a vision. "One day soon your mobile phone, laptop and palm-held computer will all merge into a single personal communicator. It'll tell you everything, from how to get a map to the closest restaurant to finding where your friends are; it could even track your kids and your car," he says. "The key to information when you're mobile is knowing your location - and we know how to find it."
It might sound like an outtake from Star Trek, but Duffett-Smith is staking his future on it. The 50-year-old husband and father of two has abandoned a lectureship at Downing College, and more than 20 years of research in radio astronomy, to pursue the vision of making every mobile phone locatable.
This is no flight of fancy; he's convinced some of the biggest players in the mobile communications business to join him for the ride. Cambridge Positioning Systems has struck deals with both Ericsson and Siemens (which holds a 3% stake in the company) to incorporate its positioning software in future handsets. Deals with Nortel and Lucent are also under negotiation.
The concrete offices of CPS are a stone's throw from the ivory towers of Downing College. In one room a map of the town centre is projected on a wall to demonstrate the CPS positioning technology, called Cursor.
Rogue dot
A yellow dot flashes where CPS HQ should be. Inches away another dot is flashing. The flappable Duffett-Smith points at it and cries: "What's this?"
The rogue dot - supposedly showing the position of the phone I'm holding - indicates we are across the road in a residential building, a hundred metres away.
"Impossible. That shouldn't happen," he says. An aide looks worried and rushes to explain the anomaly. "The Cursor System is accurate to within 50m 67% of the time," she says, "and within 100m the remaining 33%."
Embarrassing, you might think, but the glitch is a mark of a company that is stretched to the limit to keep up with its meteoric growth over the past 20 months.
At the end of 1998 CPS had eight employees. Less than two years, £9m in venture capital invested by 3i and Prelude, and scores of field tests later, the staff has grown to nearly 60. If the chief executive officer, Chris Wade, has his way that number will almost double to 100 employees by the end of the year and is forecast to reach 200 by the end of 2001.
"If the market conditions are right, we'll go for an initial public offering this time next year," he says.
A Washington-based telecoms analysts, Strategis, estimates $81bn in revenues will be generated by location services in Europe by 2005.
CPS wants a chunk of the p-commerce (position-based commerce) action and is fast developing WAP-based services.
"In September we will formally launch the services division of our company," says Wade. "It will be responsible for developing applications and providing infra structure for location-dependent content."
CPS has entered partnerships with online map providers Webraska and directory service Scoot. Soon you'll be able to find your nearest hotel or restaurant, and then get a map showing you how to get there; send out your location in case of a breakdown or emergency; manage your employees remotely; or give your children wrist-watch style transmitters so that they too can be tracked.
But perhaps the biggest market, according to Duffett-Smith, will be the teenage affection for "the trivial and frivolous".
"The 15-to-25-year-old lifestyle market will be huge," he predicts.
"I believe a major market will be these buddy-buddy systems where friends choose to let each other know where they are. Imagine a system where you could let a select group of friends find out where you are at any time, it'd be an instant hit."
As if to back up this prediction, his 17-year-old daughter calls him twice within 30 minutes while we talk. "You have to have teenagers to understand this," he says.
Stretch the idea further and one day we might use our mobiles to find a date. Imagine, you could store a profile of yourself and your heart's desire, and then should that special someone walk by you'd be alerted with a ring.
In the US, CPS is already angling for market domination. Wade and Duffett-Smith have just returned from Houston, Texas, where they demonstrated Cursor to a panel of American mobile phone companies desperate to buy positioning technology.
Scribbled idea
The E911 rules (E stands for Enhanced), adopted by the federal communications commission in 1996, require by 2002 that all US mobile phone operators make their handsets capable of automatically supplying location information accurate to 125m with every emergency call. In October operators must declare which technology they will use.
"VoiceStream, America's biggest mobile phone operator, has unofficially declared it will use Enhanced Observed Time Difference technology to comply with the rules," says Duffett-Smith. "Cursor is the only commercial system in existence based on EOTD."
CPS has no competitors in EOTD because for a time it was thought that the technique didn't work. "We proved them all wrong," says Duffet-Smith.
He has more than a mere clutch of mobile phone experiments to prove Cursor's worth, he stands on 50 years of scientific research.
Cursor began in 1987, inspired by an episode of BBC TV's Tomorrow's World. Duffett-Smith scribbled down an idea and showed it to the university technology transfer office. They were impressed and agreed to pay the £500 fee to register a patent.
In his spare time he began experimenting, first in the lab, where he managed to track a student walking in the garden with an accuracy of 10cm, then using signals from local radio transmitters - accurate to 5m. The latter he affectionately calls "navigation by pop music".
Cursor is based on the same principles Duffett-Smith used to locate radio signals from outer space in his days as a radio astronomer.
"The important difference between our system and other systems is that the mobile phone is in control of sending the location information, so you can't be tracked unawares. There's no Big Brother. If you don't agree to be tracked you won't be."
Cutting-edge technology is crucial to the company. So much so that when Duffett-Smith decided to buy a patent from the Sydney University of Technology spin-off, Insearch, he grabbed two of the patent's inventors into the bargain and added them to his research team.
It's still early days for CPS. When 3G phones begin to appear on the market then the fun really begins.
"With 3G technology Cursor's accuracy will improve ten-fold to a resolution of 5m," says Duffett-Smith. Then the glitch that's blinking behind him on the map might just be a fond memory of his pioneering, start-up days.
