GSM Cell ID Spotting with Placelab

Placelab is an interesting open source effort from Intel. Placelab provides technology and research to determine location using WiFi, Bluetooth or GSM Cell ID. I spent some time this weekend working on the GSM part of it. The larger GSM cells appear to be about 1 sq. mile in places I checked. This implies that there is sufficient accuracy for applications that don't require precise location, such as local search. Most of the search applications to date that have used cell ID location have failed because of a poor user experience and not location accuracy.

I also found a couple of small errors in the documentation. In placelab.ini, there is a parameter called "placelab.cellphone" which should be "placelab.btgsmaddress".
In addition, it is also necessary to add ../lib/BlueCove.jar at the end of the classpath directive (-cp) in runany.bat. The second item was identified here.