Global Positioning System (GPS) is a navigation system that determines a device's current location through satellites. International Data Corporation reported total smart phone sales of 300 million units in second quarter of 2014 alone across the globe. According to eMarketer, we expect 2 billion people to own and use smartphones by the end of 2016 and over half of mobile phone users globally will have smartphones in 2018. Combined with the fast growing popularity of the smart phone and its built-in GPS through mobile apps, the location tracking functionality of modern mobile devices provides unprecedented opportunity to individual’s mobility in daily life. Current position locating in map, road navigation, vehicle tracking etc. are the most uses
application using GPS system provided by Google Map and other free GPS service. A free Real Estate Mobile App for smart phone and tablet by Realtor.com®, as an example, provides the real estate listings with simplified real estate search engine and navigation to the location selected. Similar apps were also available for realtors. However, those apps lack an important feature that realtors need: Shortest Path Finder. The biggest portion of realtor’s expense is the gas cost by driving to various real estate locations with customers every day. Most realtors manually pick a route to visit multiple locations and a wrong routing makes the travel time longer and increases the gas expense. Any app that can provide a better route finder that saves even 10% in gas will be a huge financial benefit to the realtors. To resolve this problem, Traveler’s Sidekick, a mobile GPS with shortest path finder, was developed as a mobile web application using HTML5, CSS, and jQuery in .NET environment integrated with SQL database and Google API. A newly developed Two Stage Divide and Conquer Algorithm (TSDC) was utilized to provide the shortest path or to solve Traveling Sales-person Problem (TSP), a well-known Nondeterministic Polynomial-time hard (NP-hard) problem, and integrated with a mobile GPS web application. Initially developed for realtors, Traveler’s Sidekick, a mobile web application with shortest path finder, can be used for any traveler. Section 2 describes the system implementation of the mobile web application in detail. A summary of research in TSP and TSDC routing algorithm used in the Traveler’s Sidekick is described in section 3. Experiments were conducted and results are presented in section 4. Conclusion and future enhancements are discussed followed in section 5.