As I cleaned out my basement this weekend, I happened upon some notes from graduate school. After I got over the shock of barely comprehending work I did almost twenty years ago, I sat down to go through some of the papers.  Back then, and for my first few years in industry, I was a digital signal processing guy – in particular, I worked on digital modem design – and the papers were from some work I was doing for a meteor burst modem my team was designing. A meteor burst modem uses the ionized trail that’s left as the meteor enters the atmosphere as a medium to propogate radio waves.  This trail can stick around for nearly a minute, and every minute of the day, one or two trails will appear in the sky . I know it might sound “out there”, but it turns out that if you explode an nuclear device, all communication devices and techniques in the area sort of stops for quite a while, and meteors tend to come back first.  We cared about that twenty years ago.  (As a side story, I also worked on an atmospheric propogation simulator, continuously blowing up a particular Western European city time and time again. Sorry about that.)

Anyways, my work was around trying to figure out just how accurate the analog to digital converters (ADCs) had to be for the problem at hand.  An ADC simply estimates the amplitude of an electrical signal at any particular time, and if you “sample” a signal at regular intervals, and you sample at least twice as fast as the fastest part of the signal, you could recreate the signal. Well, almost, as the ADC only takes an estimate of the amplitude – measured in the number of bits of resolution. Think of weighing yourself on a scale: it’s an estimate.  You don’t actually weigh 170 lbs, but it’s a good estimate. The same thing with an ADC. You design with an 8, 10, 12 bit ADC – the higher the number of bits, the more accurate your estimate (and the higher the price and slower the operation).  It’s silly to overdesign it, but once the information’s gone… it’s gone, so you have to think.

I walked upstairs to write my presentation for the Telco 2.0 show where I’m dealing with this very issue, but instead of making the world safe for democracy (boy, does that sound like a bad joke now), I’m dealing with next generation telco APIs (making the carriers safe for developers, which I hope isn’t as bad of a joke).  In particular, I’m tracking the evolution of the API, and for my talk, I’m looking at what happens when you add a service like location an application.  Location is obviously a fantastic addition, as it adds so much context to decisions and operations, but I was wondering exactly how  much location you needed to know.  Can it be enough to say that I’m in a town? How about within ten yards, like GPS can do.  How much accuracy do we really need before there’s incredible value?  I have an answer: one bit.

As an example of the ridiculous value that APIs can offer to the application designer, I want to put forward that if I just had an API that would answer a one bit question about a user’s location, I could code some seriously cool applications.  I want an API that will tell me if the subscriber’s at work. That’s it. It’s all I need to know, and all I need is one bit for that. Yes or no, black or white, on or off.  If I knew if the subscriber was at work, what could I do with that?

• I could trigger his timecard.
• I could send his cell phone calls to desktop phone.
• I could send his personal calls to voice mail when he’s in the office, and the work calls to voicemail when he leaves.
• I could deliver him lunch coupons from the cafeteria.
• I could populate his information in an emergency response roster.
• I could flag fraudulent credit card transactions when he’s at work, and his credit card is not.

And just imagine what you could do with 12 bits… but that’s not the point.  Every so often, it feels like there’s a massive amount of complexity and work we bring upon ourselves where if we just stuck to simple things, we’d be more productive and effective.  Perhaps the real LBS service isn’t about your lattitude and longnitude, it’s about “I’m at work” and “I’m at home”.  Ok… that’s two bits.  But you get the point.