I am always looking for something new that is useful for Broadband Wireless. And mapping technology is a huge part of the business. Well, I stumbled on something fascinating. It is a new type of location specific search technology at its most basic. But that is just part of it. I had seen a blurb about a big WiFi project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that talked about location based mapping of APs. I thought that was kinda neat. Well, this led me to a Thesis that a researcher there (by the name of Napier Fuller) wrote. You have to pay to download the thesis so I started searching for him. It appears he has started a company. Wireless 5th Dimensional Networking is a pretty bare bones site. The Silicon Valley company does not go out of its way to tell you all that much about itself. Fuller is listed as the Founder and President. It has filed at least one patent and that and the Thesis paper is linked on its site.  The website also says it was sold this year to an anonymous buyer. I only got voice mail when I called. Well, now I am starting to wonder why all the secrecy about who bought them out.  Well, I love a mystery. And they were making it just hard enough for me to intrigue me, so I looked up the patent application. Now that turned out to be pretty easy. And guess what? Both the patent and paper are in the filing there. The paper is under the Documents tab. Turns out that this patent heavily references this research Thesis, which is based on something called Context Aware Search. Folks this is no less than an application of Artificial Intelligence to location (and I mean Access Point) specific searching. I won't try to describe it all in this blog. But it impressed the dickens out of me. Basically its a search engine that's designed from the ground up for wireless networks. Imagine a search engine that understands what hotspot you are at and can filter every search query you make based on that. BUT which also takes into account the time of day and day of the week you are searching as well as parsing commonsense knowledge people in the area should have. Driving directions are not take street so and so. They are instead go West two blocks from the Big Dome, turn right and look for Tang Hall. If you type in "shows tonight" it might give you times of nearby shows that are not sold out (if such info is available) and that you have time to get to from your location (at least supposedly). Now if this is not just smoke and mirrors (and the company is going a bit out of its way to not claim anything from what I can tell) this is a radical search innovation. I am going to dig a bit more into this and post more later. I don't know how far along this is or even if it is even close to a product phase, but… I am especially curious who bought them and why it is being kept so quiet. Tim Sanders tim@thefinalmile.net  www.thefinalmile.net  www.wimaxglobalnews.com