Global Positioning System (GPS) devices and other position-determining devices have become quite prevalent. In addition to stand-alone devices for automobiles, boats and airplanes, they are found in mobile devices such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants, as well as in other consumer electronic devices. These devices are useful for locating geographic locations and in providing route information from a first location to a destination location. The rise of GPS and position information device (PID) technology has resulted in the specialization of computing to account for the location of a computing device; namely, location based computing.
These devices also provide digital information in the form of video, audio, and text data. The data may be stored in files such as word processing files, pdf files, MPEG files, Quicktime files, photo files such as jpg, bmp, tif, and dib files, etc. The data currently provided to a mobile device is generally independent of a location of the mobile device. A need therefore exists to enable a user of a mobile device to access information that is related to the user's location and to notify the user of the availability of such related information.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds