An item on our DeviceForge.com site caught my eye today, as I am very interested in location-based services. It's an Intel-written white paper that introduces an open source toolkit that lets mobile devices determine their locations with the aid of freely accessible, nearby radio sources, such as fixed Bluetooth devices, 802.11 access points, and GSM cell towers.

Basically, the device reads the IDs of these local "radio beacons" (each of which has a unique or semi-unique ID), looks up their positions in a locally-cached database, and performs a computation akin to triangulation. This is a new twist on location determination as most of the time it's the network that does the direction-finding and tells the client where it is located.

Not all Gearlog readers will care about this, but I will err on the side of trying to present the exciting to the excitable among us.