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LOCATIO AWARE SOCIAL ETWORK
Gurlal Kahlon - gkahlon3@mail.gatech.edu
Ankur Aggarwal - ankuraggarwal@gatech.edu
Shobith Alva - shobith@cc.gatech.edu
Prasun Johari - jprasun@gatech.edu
1. Motivation and Objectives
In our daily lives we face many scenarios arising out of choice/compulsion where we are
surrounded by strangers and are in need of information or make new social connections/bonds; but
because of social inhibitions we are unable to readily approach those strangers.
In our proposed application we aim to fill this void by lubricating communications between
users in the vicinity, either anonymously or openly. Once a user is a part of our location aware social
network he/she can communicate with strangers, trigger location aware searches, share geo-tagged
pictures/videos and local mobile vendors/businesses can advertise themselves to local audiences.
Our proposed application enables a dynamic, real-time, location aware social network as
opposed to the social network models that are prevalent on the internet -- as a result of which the users
can request/gain information about the area in which they are present in real-time.
2. Related work
诲瞔착瞘 瞚 瞚
The core idea of our project is drawn from the concept of Social Network Based Dynamic
Spatial Alarms[1] and the Where Am I service. Our project builds upon these two ideas in a more
deployable / implementable way by designing the system around the existing IMS network[2]. The
ability to get presence information, chat with users and manage groups is provided by the IMS network.
Using this existing infrastructure, we can develop a much richer experience for the user while also
providing commerical openings for local business setups etc.
3. Proposed work
The system operates in hierarchical manner with users exploiting the IMS infrastructure, to
connect to our application using their mobile phones. A Database Server is used to store user records,
location at that time-frame and other information like whiteboard discussions, advertisements, etc. The
Application Server presents this to the User Phone using the IMS Network.
Figure 1. Proposed Architecture
Our technical solution is designed to identify a user based only on the specified
username/password and makes no attempt to obtain the cell phone identity. Thus, even with periodic
location tracking the user’s privacy is protected, as there is no way to link a person’s online identity to
his real one in our system.
The ability to upload photos along with location information allows creation of geo-tagged
pictures that generate a rich source of commercially valuable metadata.
We wish to better explain the proposed operation of our system through the following use cases:
Use Case #1: User interaction on our system (active user)
1) User logs into our service using his username and password. The service matches the username
password in the central database.
2) The service receives the user’s location periodically using the location tracking capabilities of the
phone and this enables it to find the neighboring users and relevant ads.
3) The service interface makes available to the user a list of users online in his vicinity and includes
him into the local social network.
4) The user can now select a set of “service-groups” (like: clothing, food-vendors etc.) and our system
will only push information pertaining to those groups.
5) The user is now fully active in our system and can do multiple things like:
a) Post messages to a whiteboard.
b) Send a private message to a neighboring user.
c) Find a service using a simple search interface.
6) Once a user begins to communicate with his/her neighbor(s), he could add them as a friend and
identify their location (upon mutual agreement).
7) The user is now said to be fully active on our system.
Use Case #2: Mobile vendor advertisement.
1) An active user (ref. Use Case #1) mobile vendor who wishes to advertise his/her service registers
on our system for advertisement privileges (which could garner a fee, ref. section 2.2).
2) The vendor is allowed to put up a brief informational snippet about his/her business.
3) At this point, the vendor’s advertisement is said to be active.
4) Any user who moves into the reachable range of the vendor can see an advertisement of the
establishment. The indication of this establishment is displayed in a non-intrusive way (e.g. a
special icon on a map).
5) A potential interested customer can interact with the icon to obtain more information about the
establishment and a potential sale can be tracked by the system if the customer/user moves closer to
it.
The two primary assets we wish to exploit in our system for revenue are as follows:
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Provide a meaningful and affordable advertisement medium for mobile vendors/small
businesses such as push-cart vendors. It wouldn't make much business sense for a push-cart
vendor to advertise his service in a city-wide newspaper or any fixed medium as the vendor
would be mobile and would be more interested in attracting people in the immediate and
reachable vicinity to the services offered by him/her. Our proposed medium of advertisement
caters to this very need of mobile advertisements, thus enabling efficient marketing of this niche
of vendor-services. A potential means of charging for the advertisement could be similar to the
“pay-per-click” model employed by Google's ad-sense system, albeit it could be “pay-perpotential-sale” – where in, the vendor would have to pay for the advertisement only when a
potential customer on our system approaches the vendor (which can be tracked through our
system); additionally the vendor might have to pay a small, fixed entry fee to bear the cost of
setting up the “space” for the advertisement on our system.
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Expose the deep location metadata information gathered by our system to other businesses as a
paid service. Organizations such as Google, Microsoft etc. would be interested in enhancing
their map services by being able to provide their users with a wide array of information which
couldn't have been obtained otherwise (e.g. best Indian food near: 10th street, Atlanta, GA).
4. Plan of action (what resources, schedule, plan for evaluation)
Resources:
- Software: .Net for windows mobile phones, IMS SDK and IMS infrastructure
- Hardware: HP iPAQ/Nokia N80.
We will follow the steps given below (with deadlines) in order to deliver the final prototype of our
project.
Step 1. Setting up of basic location aware network using existing IMS infrastructure(2 weeks)
Step 2. Constructing the architecture of the Social Network Environment (2 weeks)
Step 3. Incorporating Question - Answer/Chat and Information on-the-go features (1.5 weeks)
Step 4. Adding the ability of location-aware advertisements (1.5 weeks)
Step 5. Enhancing the user-interface for easy browsing (1 week)
5. Evaluation and Testing Method
We would consider our project to be sucessful if a user is able to communicate through our
application using the IMS infrastructure and get information pertaining to his location. This
information would include his position on the map, users that are online in his vicnity using the our
application, advertisements, etc. These online users would be able to communicate with each other
through a number of communication options. These options could include sending a private message,
posting a message on a whiteboard, etc. We plan to organise these whiteboards or public boards
on the basis of kind of questions asked, in our future work. Also, the advertisements shown would be
based on the kind of questions posted or searches made.
6. Bibliography
[1] Alkesh Shah, Chetan Bhadricha, Social etwork Based Dynamic Spatial Alarms
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Multimedia_Subsystem