I have been obsessed with maps since I was a kid. I collect maps. I look for old maps in antique shops. My prize find is a map of the proposed competitor to the Panama Canal, the Nicaragua Canal, which was promoted by Wall Street bond offerings that showed Nicaragua to be about two miles wide – by inserting miseleading representations of steam ships to throw the map’s scale off. Way off. Enough to dupe unwary investors. It also shows the east end of the canal at the Atlantic Ocean, as if the Caribbean didn’t exist.
Nice try. The Nicaraguan Canal was actually the financially favored approach until President Teddy Roosevelt picked the Panamanian route instead.
I got the map for $40 fishing through a file in an antiques store in Upstate New York.
Maps don’t lie, but liars map.
From my time in the real estate business, particularly land development, I got interested in geography from a commercial perspective. It dawned on me that there could be ways to create virtual boundaries zones around areas that would enable you to interact with other people inside those areas – and just those areas. That lead me and my lifelong pal, Robert Pierce, Phd. to design the zonal mobile app, which we’ve been fortunate to get three US patents on – with two more in the oven that is the USPTO – it took us 4 years to get the first three . . . and you know what they’re used for – Zones are interactive geo-enclosures associated with physical spaces
Zonal’s patented code enables anyone to access any shaped virtual space that can be created by anyone for any purpose
Zonal’s code can be added to any mobile app and applied to any location, with patents on the following uses:
- Retail
- Social
- Gaming
- Supervision of remote job sites
- Control of machines
Zonal app can be applied to any geo-space at any dimension – from a state boundary down to the next step in a store
Any shaped space can be zoned and mapped, one app can access them all for any purpose
Zonal recruits the phone’s navigation systems, no additional hardware is required and no geo-locating services needed
The boundary tolerance of a zone is currently measured in yards, but headed towards +/- 10 cm in next gen mobile devices – at which time, beacon fields will be obsolete, and you can zone shelf spaces in stores.
Zonal Systems offers a proprietary methodology that can add geo-zoning to any mobile app. Zonal enables anyone the ability to put a virtual geographic zone around any defined space – whether two dimensional, three dimensional as to height or four dimensional as to time. Those zones can be stored in a cloud, located on an online map, then found and accessed by Zonal’s patented phone app. The Zonal code will work in any app on any mobile device. It works seamlessly and transparently to the app’s function.
Zoning does everything geo-locators and geo-fencing does, and more.
Geo-locators are legacy systems built to track pre smart phones (dumb phones) based on their radial proximity to cell towers. Geo-location merely locates the device in relation to the tower, they do not recruit a smart phone’s GPS capabilities. If done with geo-locators, the granularity of the geo-fence is very poor – on the order of hundreds of feet or more. iBeacons are used for geo-location in small spaces, but they require many devices and are not appropriate for large areas.
Geo-fencing creates virtual boundaries between areas. Geo-zoning is an evolved form of geo-fencing that creates geo-enclosures or zones.
Zonal has patented geo-enclosure solutions for mobile gaming, supervisory control, and retail zones. Zonal has patents pending for using zones to control machines and for evidencing interactive zones on maps.
Contact us. Always love to talk about maps
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