Next-Generation Inventor: Rycharde Hawkes

It may be freezing cold in Helsinki, but city bus riders don't have to shiver on street corners, thanks to a mobile timetable service developed by Hewlett-Packard Laboratories.

The mobile timetable service lets riders wait inside their homes, offices or even inside a comfortable café until their bus or tram is just around the corner, says Rycharde Hawkes, a researcher at HP Labs in Bristol, UK, who created the service. When their bus or tram approaches the their stop, passengers receive an alert message via cellular phone.

		Hawkes, who is featured in a new ad campaign highlighting the next generation of HP inventors, says Helsinki was an ideal test ground for the service because nearly 80 percent of Finland's population own and use mobile phones.

"It's a very switched-on country," he says.

Mobile e-services research

The system relies on WAP, or Wireless Application Protocol, a standard for providing cellular phones, pagers and other handheld devices with secure access to e-mail and text-based Web pages.

Called LocWAP, this location-based service is an example of HP Labs' mobile e-services research in action. The service was launched as a pilot scheme in Helsinki on January 31, and is ongoing.

LocWAP is one of the results of three-year collaboration between HP, Finnish telecommunications pioneer Elisa Communications and Helsinki city transport (HKL) to provide real-time travel information about the city's trams and buses.

Using a WAP phone, passengers can select an alert for many of central Helsinki's bus stops, choosing one close to home, work, or theater, for instance. The alert can be adjusted to give passengers more or less warning of the approach of public transport - time enough to finish that cup of coffee or find a warm coat, perhaps.

When the bus is, say, five minutes from the stop, the system sends the phone an alert use a text message delivered by Elisa's mobile network. The WAP service covers two of Helsinki's bus and tram lines and approximately 100 of the nearly 2,000 stops in the city. The service can be extended to new lines as HKL installs the necessary equipment. Seven more lines are planned this year.

More than finding a bus

"This project demonstrates the inventiveness of our researchers in HP Labs and also of our partners at HKL and Elisa," says David Dack, Director of HP Labs in Bristol. "Finland is the perfect country to try out a new mobile e-service because it has pioneered so much work making mobile communications technology an integral part of people's daily lives."

In addition to the value of this particular application, however, all the partners will be able to use the technology and ideas created during this project to produce more and more useful e-services.

"This is not just about finding a bus. It's about a new way of communicating, interacting and doing business," Dack says.

In principle, says Hawkes, LocWAP could be introduced to any city's transport system as long as the communications and data requirements are in place. The underlying service platform is applicable to a wide class of mobile services based on event notifications.

by Julian Richards