MobHappy

Can You Sense Steve Jobs?

6th Sense is a San Francisco based company running a Beta MoSoSo application and I've been following them for some time.

You download the free application to your phone, which kind of turns you into a web page discoverable by Bluetooth for others to see and find out what you want to tell them. This enables better networking for business, social or sexual reasons.

One of the problems with this type of service is establishing any kind of critical mass. After all, the chances of me downloading the application and being within 10 metres of someone else with the same app at the same time is billions to one against. It's the time factor that often gets overlooked and really stacks up the odds.

So, the critical question is where you start deploying your software. It has to be in a tight geographic area and preferably peopled by geeky folk, who will almost certainly be the early-adopters of this kind of service.

Sixth Sense have answered this admirably with this weekend's forthcoming promotion. Firstly, focus on Silicon Valley, which must have more geeks per square metre than anywhere else on earth - but do they let ever let them out of their cubicles? Then focus even tighter on the flagship Apple stores in the area, whose techno porn products are a magnet for the geek species. Mix in some cheeky hijacking of tech celebs and you have a pretty powerful cocktail to score some converts.

The idea is to launch a game, playable on the Sixth Sense application. You download the app to your phone and head down to an Apple store and start scanning for other users. You score 50 points for finding ordinary folk, 100 points for some faux celebs (Jobs, Yang, Lucas etc) and a grand total of 300 points for mobile uber blogger and my near-namesake, Russell Beattie.

Winners get Nanos, with some runners-up prizes. The question is, will the Sixth Sense team still be around to hand out the prizes or will they get buried under lawyers' letters from some of the famously touchy celebs (Russell excepted, obviously).

Worst Technology for Girls

Nicolas at Pasta & Vinegar has a great posting, about a paper written by Wendy March (Intel Research) and Constance Fleuriot (Bristol University). Their research has been looking at privacy issues raised by new technologies and the reaction of some of the kids who might be on the "receiving end".

They explored the concept by inviting the girls in the study to imagineer their nightmare technologies, although I think boys would share the conclusions. Their horrors included:

Family Video: A small video camera attached to a flotation device acts as a personal CCTV which sends back a constant video stream to home.

Constant Connection provides a continuous open communication channel for parents and children ( the home audio device, which is ideally suited for a kitchen counter.)

Ticker Text converts all communication from designated cell phones into an easy to read text format. Each text message that is sent or received on the phone is printed out on a paper roll.

Teen Monitor provides a simultaneous broadcast of all your teenager’s conversations through an audio speaker in your home.

Of course, spying on your kids isn't necessarily entirely new. Indeed, some poor lady has left a comment on Nicolas' post saying that when she was 17, she found her Dad had been bugging some of the conversations she'd been having, assuming (naturally enough) that they were private.

While these kinds of imagined devices will probably never happen - well, I hope they won't! - we are beginning to see variants of them already in some of the Kid Tracking software on mobiles, key stroke recorders on PCs, so parents can monitor surfing and IM sessions, and ideas like getting other drivers to monitor and report bad road behaviour by kids.

It's clear from this research that such parental spying, is deeply resented (the commenter on the post called it "betrayal"), no matter how noble the parental motives might be. And if it's hated this much, teens will find a way to subvert it because that's how things happen. Just as there's no such thing as uncrackable DRM, there's no such thing as an unbeatable tracking system and someone, somewhere will find a way to hack any device and quickly spread the word.

Actually, this is already happening with spare decoy phones, dummy email and IM accounts and tinkering with the family computer to get round tracking software - well, at least if our household is anything to go by :-)

Seriously though, wanting to keep an eye on your kids and protect them is deeply ingrained parental behaviour. But spying like this actually can cause more damage, by breaking down trust between the parent and child. The hardest thing about being a parent is letting go at the right time and trusting the child to manage that stage of their life in a responsible way. As spying becomes easier, many parents might be tempted, but just think how much you'd have hated your parents if they'd made a decision not to trust you.

PlaceSite WiFiSoSo

Many successful commercial projects spin out of academia (Google and Netscape spring to mind, but there's loads more), so it's interesting to look at what's happening there, from time to time.

I read on Cheese Bikini about a new service starting at Berkeley called PlaceSite in the next few weeks. It's a WiFiSoSo (my acronym, I'm afraid) or WiFi Social Software. The idea is when you log onto a participating wireless network, you get a screen looking something like this

which gives you profile info on other people in the same cafe - or more accurately, people using the same node and who have completed their profile. You can hide your profile or aspects of it too, should you feel the need for more privacy.

PlaceSite also allows you to post a message to a forum, exclusive to that node and obviously, read messages too.

The obvious question here is why you need to use technology to facilitate communication, when you're in the same place as these other people anyway. Why don't you just talk to them?

However, most people don't behave like that, most of the time. How do you know the other person is open to an approach? How do you know they won't shout "Piss off, you stalker!!!" at the top of their lungs? How do you know they're not tied up right now, but actually would love a chat in about 10 minutes?

So, the technology allows people to explore an interaction ina low risk, safe way before needing to pop their head above the parapet and perhaps getting it blown off. People use texting and IM the same way - exploring the convenience of going nuclear, which is the communication equivalent of a voice-to-voice call.

In many ways, this kind of system is a pre-cursor how we'll be managing interactions on our phones in the years to come. Our phones will become our gatekeepers for communication and others will be able to check what kind of interaction we're ready for at that time and if there's a better window later in the day. Maybe, they'll be able to find out our moods (you need to be in the right fram of mind for a "luvikins hearts babycakes" after all) and the level of busy-ness and stress we're currently feeling.

I can't see PlaceSite being the next Google (and I'm sure it doesn't aspire to be either). But it could teach some very important lessons to companies aspiring to move into Mobile Social Software and Presence Management, which when you start to think about it, could be the next mega-success story of our times.

New York's SociaLight

Anyone who reads this blog regularly will know that one of the Location Based Services concepts I find both fascinating and indicative of the way of the future is what I've called Digital Graffiti*. In other words, you access digital information when moving about the physical world, with your mobile phone. The availability of this information can itself be physical (like a bar code or the Yellow Arrow project) or virtual - where your phone "sniffs out" the feed to the info (like Siemens' Digital Graffiti).

I believe that the physical marking of the message is an interim technology, until the virtual takes over,as clearly we can't put up swathes of Yellow Arrows or QR codes and the like, all over the place.

So I was pleased to read (in the New York Times) yesterday, that the first of the virtual systems, that I'm aware of, has been launched in New York - also home of Yellow Arrow and Grafedia.

SociaLight has been started by two entrepreneurs and graduates for New York University, Michael Sharon and Dan Melinger. NYU also gave us many other LBS experiments in this space (including some of the companies mentioned above and Dodgeball, acquired by Google earlier this year).

SociaLight simply allows people to leave virtual notes for others to collect when they're passing by that location, which they call StickyShadows. StickyShadows can be programmed to be discoverable by anyone (with the right mobile phone and software), a group of individuals or a private message, for one person's eyes only.

Right now, there's no mention of a business model. Though there's a hint that commercial use will be encouraged with "special tools" available for this part of the community. I take this to mean that at some point, it'll be free for amateur/private users, with commercial users having to pay to leave their marketing messages - this is certainly how I'd play it. However, they'll have to roll this aspect out with care, as if it quickly becomes merely a spamming channel (albeit permission-based), many users will switch off pretty quickly.

The only bad news about SociaLight is that it's currently only available for one mobile phone handset - the Motorola i860, which is the only phone with the right combo of phone and GPS currently available. However, as Directive 911 finally gets deployed in the US, other models will follow.

Directive 911, assuming it doesn't get fudged, will see the US leap ahead with these kind of applications, to enrich society as a whole. I look forward to watching developments with interest.

* Siemens called their project in the same area by the same name, practically simultaneously, so either it's a damn good name or pretty bleeding obvious :-)

Intel's New Location Based Technology Needs Useful Applications

One of the big problems with technology is the prevalent attitude that just because something can be done, people will find it useful. It's best seen in engineering-led cultures where there's a feeling that "all that marketing and usability stuff can be worked out later...man, isn't this damn cool?" In other words, marketing and usiblity is the easy, common sense stuff that you put in place when you have a neat-o piece of tech.

There's an example of this that Nicolas at Pasta and Vinegar pointed me to, with Intel's new, undoubtedly, very clever positioning system. The idea is that a device connected to a network can work out where it is in relation to another device on the network. This gets round the main limitation of GPS, which requires line of sight access to a satellite and which is absent in most offices.

It's certainly neat-o and doesn't require a huge investment, as the network is already there. Nice piece of thinking, guys.

But that's where the idea runs out of steam, as there were no compelling ideas about how to use this at the press conference. The examples they give are just rather boring, quite frankly, such as being able to continue a conference call on your tablet PC when you need a cup of coffee and switch it back to your desktop. Or getting an alert if your dog leaves the yard. Hmmm.

There's two ways of inventing technology. Firstly, you to look at user behaviour, identify a problem and then look to invent something that'll solve it. To take an example, when cars were invented, we needed better roads, so the roads were built. No one started building roads in the hope that someone would find a use for them ie that cars would be invented to go on these new smooth, shiny highways.

The other way is to invent something cool and clever and hope there'll be a use for it. That's how, for instance, Post-It Notes came into being. 3M accidentally invented a low-tack adhesive (they were looking for a high-tack one) and one of the engineers started marking his place in his hymn book with notes coated with it. The rest is history, as they say.

There's room for both ways of approaching invention - the planned, marketing led method and the typical skunk works method. But if you do the skunk works approach, you need to go the last mile and work out what the hell it can be used for (assuming anything) and tell people. Otherwise, their reaction is "that's cool, what's next?".

In the same way that marketing and selling needs to translate features into benefits, technology needs to approach things in the same way - and that's to append the phrase "which means that..." to the pitch. Take this example; "So if we have this really cool way of locating a device on a network....which means that you can grab a coffee during a conference call." Is this a compelling application? No - let's try again.

If you're coming up with cool technology, why not give it a try? "...which means that" is a powerful little phrase.

BT Launches a Whole Range of Terribly Boring LBS Services

What is it with Location Based Services? Knowing the pretty exact whereabouts of a person (or at least their phone) seems a pretty exciting concept, but no one seems to be able to actually translate this information into something that sounds even vaguely interesting to the user - or works from a conceptual point of view.

BT have launched a whole range of LBS stuff today and frankly, I can't summon up the energy to even yawn about them - unlike young Hayden McNamee pictured here. According to Net4Now, BT will be wholesaling LBS to its mobile operator and ISP customers, for them to sell on to the end user. Included in the range is:

- Child and elderly people tracking
- Traffic and directions
- Find my nearest things like ATM's, supermarkets and Petrol/Gas stations.
- Employee spying (actually they call it "tracking")

Child tracking, as I've written before, is founded on two basically wrong assumptions.

The first is that in the distressing case of an abduction, the kidnapper doesn't know that the phone can be tracked. The first thing they do unfortunately, is dump or switch off the phone. So any peace of mind about that use is false.

The second assumption is that such services track the child. They don't. They track the phone. Therefore, if you're using it to spy on your kids, all you're doing is monitoring where their phone will be - which most kids can work out pretty quickly will be where they are meant to be, even when they themselves are miles away partying and doing drugs.

Old people tracking? For the life of me, I can't see why the elderly might consent to be tracked or why others might want to track them. It's not as if there a major crime wave inpensioner-napping. And if they're the kinds of people who get lost regularly, shouldn't they be cared for in a different way altogether?

Feel free to educate me on this one.

Yes, traffic and direction, if you don't have a nav system in your car can be useful, in extremis. But hardly exciting.

Find my nearest apps have been around for a while now and frankly, there isn't much a demand for them. Most people spend most of their time in an area they know ie where they live and work. And even if they wander out of this zone, do they really need to ask their mobile where the ATM is? In most towns in the UK, you only have to wander about 100 m in any direction to come across about 10 of them.

And how often, are you driving along in an area you don't know, do you have sudden urge to hit the supermarket?

Which leaves employee tracking services, that I've written about before too.

So while it's laudable that BT are deploying LBS, they really need to go back to basics and ask why anyone would want to use any of these services, at least on more than an occasional basis. But coming up with answers to this, probably needs a type of creativity that would not typically be found working in a large corporate like BT.

So they should be asking others to help them come up with the applications for LBS, leaving BT's considerable engineering skills to develop and deploy the resulting applications that people might actually want.

Location Based Dating Comes to Town

Korea's leading operator, SK Telecom, has launched what it claims to be the world's first location based dating service, based on an operator's LBS system. It's powered by WaveMarket, for the LBS element and Psynet, who provided the dating platform.

There have been plenty of forays before into MoSoSo (Mobile Social Software) based on Bluetooth, ranging from Nokia's Sensor (no, they haven't gone into the razor blade market) to MobiLuck, that I wrote about yesterday.

The problem with Bluetooth systems is the very limited range means that until real critical mass is achieved, any contact with another device is going to be a rare event. And certainly when you start applying a degree of matching profiles on top of location, you may be in for a very long wait to meet Mr or Mrs Right, or even Mr or Mrs SoSo (no, not another mobile acronym).

There's a further issue that often gets forgotten with short range systems, and that's time. The chances of finding another phone, with a matching profile at the same time is statistically very unlikely, certainly at the beginning. And why would users sign up for something, or recommend that their friends join, if nothing happens when they do?

An operator's LBS system doesn't have the same restrictions and can pair people within the same, say square mile - a distance that can be covered pretty quickly with the right incentive. This means the chances of a successful match increases exponentially.

Admittedly, there's a few downsides to the operator-led approach. Firstly, there's the accuracy question. Even if Assisted GPS is used (the most accurate I'm aware of) this is unlikely to let you make contact with someone in the same bar. If you're out of line-of-site of a satellite, the system falls back onto a less accurate technology like triangulation or cell ID, which is not good enough to pinpoint two phones in the same room. If you know more about the tech, please leave a comment as I'm sure someone knows more than I do about this aspect.

So from that point of view, it seems that the perfect dating application would be based on a hybrid of Assisted GPS and Bluetooth, for shorter distances.

The other problem with some LBS systems is speed. You're not going to want to wait 10 minutes or so to find a match - we're living in a broadband world and that means we want things now.

Perhaps inevitably, the press release touts "killer app", which seems something of an exaggeration - voice is the only killer app of phones for the foreseeable future. But it does have all the hallmarks of being an important sector - youth, sex, communication based, local and I'm sure it'll do very well.

Just one question; why oh why do SK Telecom think it's a good idea to have an annoying sound track playing on their website? Hasn't anyone told them how annoying it is - and soooo last century Darlink? Or is it a bit like BO - everyone's too embarrassed to say something?

PlaceOpedia - Location Based Information

PlaceOpedia (spotted by Carlo at The Guardian) is a way of linking Location to Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia.

It's interesting as it combines a number of different trends (I nearly used the meme word there).

- It's a low-cost mashup of two different, websites/services - Wikipedia and Google Maps.
- Like Wikipedia, content is generated collaboratively by the readers and users.
- It's linking digital information to the real world, which is what Location Based Services is all about, in my view.

Last month I presented the idea to the Wikimania conference of using a location-enabled phone to access Wikipedia information about place where you were physically. Examples might be information on local buildings, residents or even property prices. One of the missing pieces of this puzzle would be to find editors to do the linking - the other being deciding what technology is best suited for it.

It seems to me that PlaceOpedia solves the first problem (assuming enough people contribute). So all we need now is an agreement about the technology - no trivial task admittedly.

The first choice seems to be if the solution is best to be a physical link that you can see (like ShotCode or SemaCode) or a virtual link that your phone sees (like Siemens' Digital Graffiti). Ultimately, the latter type of concept will prevail - we can't put barcode-type stickers all over the planet. But the barcode route does have the double purpose of alerting people to its presence and thus marketing the idea and encouraging the download of the appropriate mobile phone software.

But one thing is for sure. This is something that's rapidly moving out of the concept stage into deployment. An idea whose time has come.

Location Based Tourism Study

In my lonely vigil supporting Location Based Services, I came across this interesting, if a little dry, article about LBS, tourism and hotels in Hospitality Net.

The basic idea is that hotels will be in a prime position to promote LBS hotel concierge services to tourists (which includes business travellers in this definition). Therefore, they can also influence what these services might be. The study was conducted among only 323 tourists in Lausanne and Geneva, Switzerland, so we should be careful about extrapolating this to a worldwide audience. But the conclusions are nonetheless interesting, if a little unsurprising.

Here's the main chart.

The two audiences most likely to take up services are traditional business travellers and "techie male travellers", who are more likely to have PDAs or smartphones and are used to getting information online.

But, for me, the most promising element about the study is that no one seems to question IF people want LBS concierge services. It's more of a question of WHAT they want and WHO will use them initially.

I think we can also take what services they think they say they want with a big pinch of salt. The interesting applications have yet to emerge for LBS, so they end up choosing those that they can imagine a use for today.

For instance, anyone who has ever traveled alone on business knows that eating on your own is a pretty boring business. So social/business networking software could really come into their own here. As an aside, I've also always thought that this would be a nice opportunity for airlines and business travellers. If you complete a short online profile, they could seat you next to people you might find interesting to network with - or put you with other people who specifically didn't want to talk.

The other opportunity that seems to be missing in the hotel survey is adult services, but since Carlo is our resident porn specialist (FleshBot just lurve linking to his posts), maybe I'll leave him to explore this another time.

A Mobile Marketing Winner from Lucozade and Return2Sender

One of my bug bears is the lack of creativity in mobile marketing campaigns. About the most exciting it gets is yet another Text and Win promotion. So it's great to see something that gets my marketing heart beating a little faster.

The on-pack mechanic invites people to register for the promotion by sms, sending in the name of their town. Then, within 24 hours they get an sms from Lucozade to get down to their ZONE (a local, named stockist) to win an iPod - first there wins.

If there isn't a local promotion in your area, you also get a chance to go to a virtual ZONE by sms. This involves the quickest answer by sms to a series of questions. I'm sure that the response to this part will be very high.

This reminds me a lot of the promotion we ran for Reebok at ZagMe. They were opening a new store in the mall, so simply wanted to let people know where they were and build store traffic. We sent out an sms saying that the first person to enter the shop and say to the manager "I've been Zagged" got a free pair of Reeboks.

The first time we did this I was watching the shop with the Marketing Director. We sent the message out and waited. And waited for about 3 minutes - this felt like an awfully long time. Then there was the sound of running and about 50 people ran into the store shouting "I've been Zagged!!".

I realized at that moment that, if done well, LBS marketing was a very, very powerful tool. What other mechanic could you use to make people run?

Interestingly, Lucozade are also supporting the initiative with a WAP site - something that we'll see happening more and more.

So congrats to R2S for adding a much-needed spark of creativity, fun and zest into mobile marketing. And to Lucozade for having the vision to do the unusual, rather than the safe and boring.

There's a promotional website here.

The MobZombies are Coming

I've been meaning to post this from We Make Money Not Art for a few days and finally got my act together.

MobZombies is a location based Zombie fleeing game, where virtual zombies chase the real world you. The longer you survive, the more zombies appear and the better they are at chasing you.

But, the game deliberately doesn't take account of the real world, which is where the fun might be. So maybe you have to run through a wedding party to avoid being caught or climb a 10 foot wall.

Another example of the digital world meeting the physical.

Nokia's Mobile Search App, Or, Mobile Search Is Local Search

I had planned to play with the new Nokia/Yahoo mobile search app and share my thoughts today. But I was first stymied by some connectivity problems with my operator, and then by the distinct lack of the most interesting-looking features -- the local search.

So what I've got is an app that's an easier and front end for searching Yahoo or searching for images. If I ever wanted to do that from my mobile phone, it would be great. But -- for me, anyway -- mobile search never involves those things. It's about searches for specific pieces of information that aren't conducive to a normal Yahoo or Google search on a mobile browser: the nearest coffee shop, the phone number of a restaurant, or a random piece of trivia. Mobile search isn't about simply adding a mobile front end to normal search, that's nominally useful. Mobile search is about providing answers and specific information, not links to pages that might possibly have the information you're looking for, or links to pages that won't render in your browser.

So, without the local search (which is currently only available in the UK, Finland and Sweden), file this under "disappointing". It's odd to see Yahoo get its SMS search so right, then get this so wrong, at least where the US is concerned. I guess since none of the models it will run on are officially sold here, there wasn't a reason to include it. But one of the features the app touts is "media roaming" -- ie working in many different countries. I guess that works only if you're in the UK, Finland or Sweden. Making traveling easy, whether it's in the same city or country, or internationally should be at the top of these sorts of things. After all, doesn't local information become more valuable when you're in a place you don't know your way around?

The other missing feature of the Nokia/Yahoo app is the content search, something I find even more useless than general Web search. Is it really that hard to find ringtones and wallpapers?

I guess that leaves me with the nice Yahoo SMS search... except it's not supported on my carrier, so I guess I'm back to GoogleME and Wapedia, a mobile version of Wikipedia. Transcoding pages to XHTML or WML or whatever is great, but is really nominally useful. Limiting search to pages in those languages limits the chances of somebody finding what they're looking for. Search providers like Google and Yahoo have put a lot of resources into building up their local search and mapping functionality on the wired Web, and this information is eminently useful on the mobile Web. All the other stuff is a nice aside, but mobile search is local search.

International Herald Tribune of Location Based Services

The International Herald Tribune had quite a good round up on Monday about the current state of play in the Location Based Services market (via the excellent Pasta and Vinegar) and why wi-fi location might be better, or certainly a compliment to, GPS.

The basic problems with the sector are:

1. Lack of usability

Will we never learn to make mobile applications simple and intuitive? If the average person (not the average technically literate engineer) needs a user manual, they probably won't use the application. This, above all things, is iPod's strength - you can work out how it works in a few minutes.

SMS is easy to learn (though not very user-friendly as an interface). MMS is hard, especially if you expect the user to reconfigure their phone.

LBS technology is hard to use. It must become easier.

2. Compelling Applications

Or lack thereof.

Most people know the area they're in pretty well, most of the time. Therefore, find-my-nearest-ATM/resturant has very limited appeal to most people. And for the tiny minority who might find it useful from time to time, they have to remember how to use the service - back to clumsy usability again.

Besides which, it's far easier to use a Social Navigation Interface (as I recently heard it called - where?) otherwise know as asking someone the way.

What we need is good, relevant applications build with the user in mind. These innovations will almost certainly not come from operators, but from indie developers and they can't get their hands on the API's.

Which brings us onto...

3. Operators

LBS has nose-dived in priority for most operators. They look at early failures and cite them as evidence that LBS doesn't work. Well, that's true if you do the same thing again and again, but why not try a different approach?

I heard a rumour that LBS was about 24 in terms of priority for a large Euro operators and I think that's probably representative.

At the same time, as being low on the corporate development path, they guard the API's from people who might be able to do something with them AND try to charge silly money for any feeds they do give out. Are operators the only industry in the world who don't realise that starting with high prices and eventually being forced to drop them, slows down adoption of their services?

The IHT article finishes with a rather odd quote from Kenneth Hyers, an analyst with ABI Research:

"For any new service to be successful, no matter what it is, it can't require a whole new way of thinking," Hyers said. "MP3 players have become popular because they followed in the footsteps of the Walkman, which for the past 25 years has gotten people used to listening to portable music."

Yes it's true, the iPod was able to stand on the shoulders of the Walkman. But the Walkman was a whole new way of thinking, surely?

As I wrote yesterday, successful technology is governed by Motivation and Opportunity. Is there a compelling reason why people might want to use it? Is there a tool that gives them the Opportunity to realise that Motivation, at an acceptable cost?

So far, LBS has suffered from lack of motivation - there's just no reason why people want to use it. So give us some more interesting applications please.

If we don't get this, LBS will never take off, which will be a shame. Or it'll take off in a way that works round the operator network, which would be stupid.

Sprint to Launch Location Based Services

US operator, Sprint have just announced their entry into Location Based Services - hurray! At last a major player is taking LBS more seriously.

The bad news is that the services are about as exciting as their corporate press release - warning, not suitable for staying awake.

The two services are; driving directions and in the event of a breakdown, subscribers being able to ask an operator where they are.

While I think operators should be encouraged to experiment with LBS, I'm not convinced these will be winners for them. I believe that nav systems will be pretty standard in most cars before too long, though I guess it's not too late for the operators to try to reclaim the market, for themselves. There is a logic to be able to remove the nav system from the car at the end of the journey, to be able to navigate the last few streets, in the event of no close parking, as an example.

But anyway, while Sprint are generously not charging a premium over normal Directory Assistance, driving directions are charged at $1.25 plus airtime. So you're hardly going to use this for more than a few minutes.

As for breakdown cover, they really need something that people might use every week, rather than a one-off. Sure, it's a nice-to-have that if you break down with a car full of screaming kids, you don't need to work out exactly where you are. But it's hardly going to set the world on fire.

When are we going to see some innovation in this market, or are we doomed to suffer an endless plethora of boring services that aren't user-driven? Find-my-nearest Chinese restaurant stuff doesn't hack it either, I'm afraid. Although, find my nearest and best Chinese restaurants might have some use.

Well, to answer my rhetorical question, we'll see innovation happen when the operators open up their Location API's to independent developers to play with. With the big proviso that they also price location feeds reasonably. Then, and only then, will we see services that people want and will use.

Via Phone Scoop. Image from Hypno Town

Copenhagen's Mobile Phone Location Based Tours

Near Near Future has an amusing story about a Footsteps of Hans Christian Andersen tour in Copenhagen.

Tourists follow a route marked with 2000 white footsteps on the pavement. Then, at strategic points, they dial in with their mobile phones to listen to an audio narrative about the great man.

A nice idea and an example of many more we'll see cropping up all over the world.

What makes this funny though is that someone has remixed the tour by adding extra footsteps......into gay clubs. The great man was famously gay - a fact that is generally ignored by mainstream society. So the remixing is thought to be the work of the gay movement, showing a nice sense of humour at the same time.

However, it does also point to a potential problem with any physical marker/hyperlink, connecting people to digital information. The physical link can be sabotaged or altered by the unscrupulous or plain mischievous.

Supposing you "click" on Shakespeare's house for more information, but you're taken to say an adult site with Elizabethan wenches doing their stuff? Or even re-directed to a local Shakespeare souvenir shop?

That's why this type of project needs to be self-policing, using Wikipedia principles.

On the road addiction

This one I had to try! I saw on textually.org that pokerroom.com had launched a fully interactive poker client for mobile phones. YAY! That's got to be the best time killer since bejeweled.

I fly off to their website and start looking for the application. After signing up and providing them with all personal information short of my average amount of bathroom visits, I end up with THIS!

So they haven't really launched it yet, well they fooled me. If they keep the mid-april deadline (I don't really trust deadlines with vague
dates) I'll be sure to try out their poker client, for now I'll just try and get unsuspecting fellow travellers into high-stakes poker games.

This promise of on the road poker against real-live players set me on a little, seriously un-scientific "I'm just an end user" kind of quest. I decided to have a look at today's offering of mobile multiplayer games.
I decided not to look at MMORPG's like It's alive but just at simple graphical clients which allow me to play anything from monopoly to chess online.

It turns out to be rather hard to find these kinds of games. I've had a look at some of the leading mobile software distribution sites and none of them had a multiplayer section. I quickly scanned around a bunch of sites and I didn't find anything that caught my attention. This surprises me. Looking at the success of companies such as zylom and popcap, why wouldn't they create simple clients to play the same online games over a mobile phone? By the way, I found mobile games on Popcap's website but no multiplayer ones. I'm also surprised that I haven't heard anything from the carriers in this direction, it's got to be interesting for them as it's bound to generate good data traffic. Much better then MMS anyways ;)

I'm certainly no specialist in this market. I'm strictly a private gamer that remotely stays in touch what's happening in the gaming world. Am I missing something or is this a wave that is still pretty much in development?

We thank Dennis Hettema for contributing this article.

Location and Commonwealth Games

The Queen handed the Commonwealth Games baton to supermodel, Elle MacPherson at a ceremony in Buckingham Palace, last night. The baton will be passed by relay over 180,000 km until it reaches Melbourne in time for the 2006 games.

For the first time, this baton also includes a GPS device and two miniature cameras, allowing people to track its progress on the net. Link to the (less than compelling) video here.

A fun use of location technology.

New Location Based Social Networking

Bookcrossing is a new form of location based social networking, that I think is really cool, even if it doesn't really involve technology.

Bookcrossing n. the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.

(added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary in August 2004)

You simply leave a book you really like in a public place, for another to find and share. You register your book on Bookcrossing.com so that the lucky recipient can see who left it and what you thought about it. And you get notified when someone finds your liberated book and what they think about it.

What a cool small way to make the world a nicer place. or maybe I should have been a hippy.

As seen on Business Blogs.

Location, Location, Location

There's an online forum and happening, taking place from November 26 through December 5, which looks like it's worth checking out here, where you can also sign up to discussions.

It's the precursor to an interdisciplinary research residency taking place next year at the University of California Humanity Research Institute.

In the last few years, advances in wireless telecommunication, sensor technology, and Geographic Information System tools have inspired a tide of experimental creative projects. Artists are using these tools and location-aware media to renegotiate how communication, navigation, and big data are played out in space. As the landscape and urban streets become the canvas for computer augmented social and physical interaction, what possibilities emerge for practices outside the arts? How can we mutually inspire and inform diverse practices?

The invitation is mainly addressed to artists working in this space, where many (actually most!) of the interesting things are currently happening in Location Based Services - no, we're not talking "Find my Nearest...Chinese Restaurant".

Regular readers of this blog know that these emerging areas are where I think the promise of location based services may lie.

Check it out.

Original story: Turbulence.

Consumers want to pay for downloads?

Engadget features a piece of interesting research by Jupiter into DRM (Digital Rights Management). The research found that:

contrary to the conventional wisdom, consumers are willing to pay for digital music.... Consumers value the portability and flexibility to which they have grown accustomed with conventional CDs and the MP3 file format but fifty-five percent of users also said they would pay $9.99 for a CD they could copy to multiple devices. This number is in contrast to only 23 percent of users who would pay the same price for the same album they could not copy. For single downloads, only 17 percent who would purchase a song for $0.99 they could not copy. By contrast 47 percent of consumers would pay $0.99 per song they could download to their PCs and copy to multiple devices.

Without having access to the methodology, this strikes me as a rather disingenuous conclusion:

1. Are people likely to admit to downloading "illegal" material (or certainly, material they could be sued for downloading)?

2. "Intention to buy" research is notoriously misleading.

"Would you buy the new fabulous Rolls-Royce, Mrs Barely-able-to-make-ends-meet?" quoth the interviewer.

"Ohh yes, Ducks, it looks very nice indeed. I could get Mr Barely-able-to-make-ends-meet to drive me to Sheila's of a Sunday."

In other words, those pesky users tend to lie through their teeth in this type of research. Partly, coz they can (there's no downside for lying), partly as they want to be nice to the interviewer and tell them what they think they'd like to hear and partly out of fantasy.

The facts are that as I blogged last month

Research firm NPD disclosed that the number of users downloading music has fallen from a high of 1.3 million a month to 1 million. The drop off coincides with the end of launch promotions.

Meanwhile, the number of households using P2P free downloading sites has risen to 6.4 million.

So, no matter what the users in the Jupiter survey tell those nice young interviewers, something isn't stacking up.

I wonder who Jupiter wants to sell their reports to? Could it be those beleaguered record companies, desperate for a ray of hope in this darkest hour? Or perhaps the DRM companies who'd like to persuade those record companies that they have the solution to all their problems?

Either way, the truth could be argued to get in the way of the reason to buy the report. No one wants a report that says "you're doomed - doomed I tell ye". Do they?

Neighbourhood Notice Boards - Virtually

One of the big claims about the Internet is that it expands your social network in ways that were impossible to imagine only 10 years ago. I have people in my social/business network from all over the world - from Japan and Australia to the US and Europe.

But has this been at the expense of real neighbourhoods? It's often easier to touch base with someone living in another country than the people who live in your immediate vicinity.

A while ago I wrote about Plazes which has local social networking possibilities (among other things). Now we have NeighborNode.

NeighborNode is a virtual noticeboard that relates to a wireless node, that transmits for 300 feet around itself. Anyone in that 300 feet (in line of sight) can both access the Internet and read the noticeboard and place messages on it. When you log in to the net, you're firstly sent to the Notice Board once a day and from there, you go where ever you want.

NeighbourNodes are then linked together, creating a wider neighbourhood network, enabling news, gossip and information to be passed into the wider local community.

You can either tap into an existing node (mainly in New York) or create your own by adapting a Linksys wireless router (pretty simple to do) or buying an off-the-shelf NeighborNode.

There's a couple of interesting points that don't seem to be covered on the site:

1. Who's paying for the Internet connection? Clearly, the person who puts up the node in the first place, but it would be cool if there was some way of sharing this cost across the Neighbourhood.

2. What would the ISP's think about sharing access in this way?

3. What about security, when sharing access? As a non-geek (sadly) I'm pretty sure that the security risk is minimal, but is this right? In any event, I think they should tackle the issue head-on, on the site.

We've seen a plethora of social networking websites (Ryze, Friendster, Ecademy, Linked In, Open BC to name a few), so could LSN (Local Social Networking) be the next big thing?

If you think about it, it does make a lot of sense.

If you're looking for dates or even business contacts, it's probably better to have them where you can meet them. And neighbourhoods tend (gross generalisation alert) to have the same sorts of people living in the immediate areas.

Still no business model though!

And even for areas with close communities, another Neighbourhood notice board will never go amiss - as the saying goes, you can never be too thin, have too much money or too few notice boards :-)

UPDATE: I emailed them with my questions above and this is what they wrote back:

1. Who's paying for the Internet connection? Clearly, the person who puts up the node in the first place, but it would be cool if there was some way of sharing this cost across the Neighbourhood.

Answer: Currently, the person who hosts the node pays for the connection. Hosting a node could be seen as a public service to your neighborhood, but I see it as something one would want to do just to meet one's neighbors. In that sense, it's not an altruistic action, but something that people are motivated to do out of their own interests. This project is still in it's very early stages however, and there are lots of possible payment models we could adopt going forward. We're examining all of the approaches and talking to the various parties involved, and you may see the payment model change in the future.

2. What do the ISP's think about sharing access in this way?

Answer: I don't know much about the UK market, but here in NYC, there is a spectrum of attitudes toward sharing access coming from ISPs. Some (most notably Time Warner) are very opposed to it. Several others (bway.net, Speakeasy, Cloud9 to name a few) explicitly support it. Still others are somewhere in the middle, with vague, undefined policies on access sharing. These differences could become a factor for end users in determining which ISP to use as awareness of shared connectivity grows.

3. What about security, when sharing access? As a non-geek (sadly) I'm pretty sure that the security risk is minimal, but is this right?

Answer: Wireless is inherently less secure than standard, wired ethernet. Any data sent wirelessly to a router unencrypted can be viewed by anyone in the area with the appropriate tools. This is true for ALL wireless, not just Neighbornode. The solution is to be aware of this, and to use encryption tools (notably SSL, SSH and VPN) when sending sensitive information. This will become much more standard behavior in the future, as the world increasingly goes wireless.

Original source: Net Art News

Location Based Gaming

There's a pretty good list of location based gaming (both mobile phone and non-mobile phone based) at In-Duce.

Check it out.

Pic shows playing Cutlass in New York.

Source: We Make Money Not Art/Near Near Future via The Invisible Rabbit

Guidelines for LBS Applications

My thanks to C. Enrique Ortiz (great initials) for directing me to his Privacy Notes: Geofencing and Guidelines for LBS Developers. They're definitely worth a read if you're involved or interested in Location Based Services.

His basic concept is that if it's a person being tracked, they must consent to being tracked and be able to opt out at any time. A little like Best Practice push marketing, the ability to simply opt out is not enough - you must opt in, in the first place and must be able to stop it anytime you want.

If you don't operate under these guidelines, at some point there will be such a big backlash from ordinary people, Government (jumping on a vote-winner bandwagon) and NGO's that it'll kill these types of services.

But the dilemma comes when an employer wants to track his employees. Even if they give their consent, how do we know that such consent has not been given under duress? I'm not talking about thumbscrews and chains here, but:

"Hi Guys and Girls" says the Sales Director. "On Monday we're going to start tracking your asses where ever you go. That'll keep you out of the sports bar on Friday afternoons won't it Malcolm?"

Malcolm now feels mightily pissed off. Yes, it's true that he does spend the odd afternoon celebrating a big sale. But he is the best sales guy the company has ever had, selling 4 times the amount of the second best sales person.

"Now, being tracked is entirely optional" continues the Sales Director. Looks of relief pass around the room. "You can agree" he quips " or you can leave."

Hmmm, you can just see it happening.

As I've said before, I don't like these employee tracking businesses, from the smug CEO's making jokes about people's privacy (Xora CEO Sanjay Shirole "There's no electro shock--yet,". Ha ha Sanjay, no any good jokes about Zyclon-B?) to the types of organisation who feel they need to use the systems.

In fact, I'd go so far as saying any CEO of any company that feels the need to track their employees to control them like this has got their people management policy so wrong that they should be fired. They're trying to treat the symptom, not the disease and that's a serious failure of judgment. How else are they going to screw up?

Of course, there are legitimate reasons to track employees. Like a cab company might like to know the nearest driver to a collection point. But controlling movement is not one of them.

And there's plenty of great LBS applications yet to be delivered, despite lack of traction in this area to date.

But trying to control your employees is not a good use of the technology.

Mobile Social Software

ElasticSpace has done a fabulous job of cataloging a whole bunch of mobile social software applications.

We've featured quite a few here, but there's some new ones too:

Jabberwocky / Familiar Strangers

This research project explores our often ignored yet real relationships with Familiar Strangers. We describe several experiments and studies that lead to a design for a personal, body-worn, wireless device that extends the Familiar Stranger relationship while respecting the delicate, yet important, constraints of our feelings and relationships with strangers in pubic places.

Encounter bubbles

A visualization tool based on Mobster that enables users to explore their social encounters in new ways. Designed to be an open framework on which locative (meaning location-based) networking applications can be built.

Fluidtime

The first of these services is aimed at public transport users in Turin. While on the move, travellers can find dynamic information on mobile screen-based devices while at home or at the office, people can find the same information on physical display units. The other service is a personalised and flexible scheduling system to help Interaction-Ivrea students organise shared laundry facilities; mobile and stationary tools give them constant updates about the progress of their laundry cycle.

Mobster

Affords the social creation and excavation of proximity history. At its core is a simple question: Who was near who when? Software on users’ mobile devices (laptops, cell phones, PDAs) monitors the presence of nearby devices (Wi-Fi hotspots, cell towers, Bluetooth devices), from which Mobster infers historical proximity models. We call these sociospatial histories.

WiFi Bedouin

Expanding the possible meaning and metaphors about access, proximity, wireless and WiFi. This access point is not the web without wires. Instead, it is its own web, an apparatus that forces one to reconsider and question notions of virtuality, materiality, displacement, proximity and community.

Tuna

A mobile wireless application that allows users to share their music locally through handheld devices.

Mamjam

One of the first location-based instant messaging platform for mobile phones. Asks the user to input location, and then creates links to others in the same space.

Dodgeball

Tell us where you are and we’ll tell you who and what is around you. We’ll ping your friends with your whereabouts, let you know when friends-of-friends are within 10 blocks, allow you to broadcast content to anyone within 10 blocks of you or blast messages to your groups of friends.

BEDD

A Bluetooth-enabled mobile social medium that allows people to meet, interact and communicate.

BuzZone

Using Bluetooth-enabled laptops and PDAs to find new contacts, communicate over small distances, and share information related to their business.

IcyPole

Uses Bluetooth to detect the proximity of other devices and determine whether there is a match between users’ entertainment profiles. The application can be used as a platform for personal area network music discovery, file exchange and/or sampling, as well as for social networking based on similar entertainment interests.

Peepsnation

Enables users to connect with others with a similar interest that meet your filter criteria using user-definable groups tied to a specific location.

Proxidating

Using bluetooth technology, ProxiDating allows you to meet people with common interests.

Plazes

Plazes is a web service offering information on people and places based on your location. It enables you to tag your location and announce it to your friends or the world. You can find other Plazes in your vicinity or see where your friends are at the moment. It also allows you to see other people you do not know yet at the same Place.

Plink mobile

A ‘people search engine’ and social networking application. You can search for friends, see who they know and who knows them, find people with shared interests. Can use an SMS interface in the UK.

Saw you

Saw-You allows u 2 chat 2 people who go to the same social venues you do on your mobile phone. U don’t see their number and they don’t see yours.

Mobule serendipity

An application for mobile phones that can instigate interactions between you and people you don’t know. A profile, along with your mobile phone provide a connection a community of people around you.

Who at

Lets you find dates and friends anywhere, anytime. Tell WhoAt where you are and we tell you who’s nearby – all from your mobile phone, PDA, or PC.

Hocman

We have performed an ethnographic study that reveals the importance of social interaction, and especially traffic encounters, for the enjoyment of biking. We summarized these findings into a set of design requirements for a service supporting mobile interaction among motorcyclists.

ImaHima

The Japanese expression for “are you free now?”. A mobile, location-integrated, community and instant messaging service allowing users to share their current personal status (location, activity, mood) publicly and privately with their buddies and send picture and instant messages to them.

Socialight

A location-aware mobile social networking platform that allows people to connect with their friends and friends of friends in new, expressive ways.

Socializer

A distributed, peer-to-peer platform that connects a person to people and services in the same location. An open, extensible platform. New features can be developed and propagated by an open-source community running on wired as well as wireless networks.

Aware

A flexible platform that operates a spatio-temporal moblog (mobile log) allowing collective contribution and distribution of media. Considering scalable systems, comprehensive and inclusive models for participation, the project has focused upon how to communicate context-awareness, mobile experience, and its narrative potential.

Meetup

A technology platform and global network of local venues that helps people self-organize local group gatherings on the same day everywhere.

Modus

Music in a venue should reflect the taste of the people in that space, not the owner of the jukebox or the people working behind the bar. What if a jukebox allowed people to add their own music or could help you remember what was played at a particular time? What if the box was aware of who was in the room and could queue up your favorite songs as you walked through the door?

Traces of fire

Transmitters, embedded in cigarette lighters deliberately lost in carefully chosen pubs, illuminate the social relationships underlying daily habits of travel, entertainment and (nicotine) gifting.

Ashphalt games

An Internet-enhanced street game in which players stage and document small interventions or “stunts” on the street corners of New York in order to claim turf on a virtual map of the city. The game is an experiment in collectively reimagining commonplace views of New York. By providing an online counterpart to the urban environment, it allows players to share their visions of the city with others.

Crowd surfer

Enables a user to surf for other Bluetooth devices and get in contact with them, primarily designed for a campus environment.

Pocket rendezvous

A web server for the Pocket PC that advertises itself to other Pocket PCs in the neighbourhood wirelessly using ad-hoc WiFi networks and Rendezvous.

Activematch

Enables users to find their ‘ideal partner’ on the spot (unity of time and venue). Works in any GPRS network and on all mobile phones with Symbian OS and Nokia’s Series 60 platform.

Mtone

A social networking multi-user game “Cell Phone” is based on the popular Chinese movie of the same name. This comedy movie was directed by one of China’s best known directors, Feng Xiaogang. Customers play this multi-combining romance and SMS and MMS.

Wavemarket

A suite that can turn a mobile phone user into an on-location broadcaster. You can add information and commentary about restaurant reviews to safety tips. You can find a buddy, or track a truck, inspect a neighborhood for real estate or child safety. It’s good for both social and business and it puts the power of blogging technology into the hands of the masses.

You'll have to head over to here if you want the links to all these sites.

Cache her if you can

Megallan via W2Forum has details of the annual "Cache her if you can" GPS Adventure game.

Throughout the summer, thousands of friends and families in America will enjoy fun and adventure in the great outdoors — hot on the trail of a fictitious criminal mastermind and searching for secret locations where treasures await. The Magellan® “Cache Her If You Can” GPS Adventure is a geocaching game that sends amateur crime-solvers on a weekly quest for clues in 30 cities across the U.S., competing for grand prizes.

Found exclusively at www.magellangps.com, “Cache Her If You Can” is the second annual web-based contest hosted by Thales, global provider of Magellan GPS consumer products. Running from June 24 to September 1, 2004, the game showcases geocaching as an ideal outdoor recreation activity for people of all ages.

“We were delighted by the excitement that thousands of people expressed during our 2003 treasure hunt, so we decided to do it again but with a detective-story twist,” said Karen Carbonnet, vice president of Corporate Communications for Thales’ navigation business. “Our geocaching adventure offers something for everyone, and is the perfect activity to encourage kids, parents and friends to grab their Magellan GPS receivers, get out of the house and enjoy some family fun and adventure while taking in the natural beauty of the great outdoors.”

In the contest’s fictional storyline, the “Magellan Detective Agency” enlists the contestants as agents to assist in foiling the sinister plans of the notorious “Stella DeCache” and her devious henchmen of “Organization X” before they are able to disrupt the game of geocaching.

To play, and be eligible to win, participants will need to have access to a GPS receiver and register at www.magellangps.com where, each week, the Magellan Detective Agency will post a series of clues. With this evidence, contest agents will use their investigative instincts to narrow down the possible locations where they’ll carry out their next mission.

The final clue for each mission will provide the exact latitude and longitude coordinates for contestants to enter in their GPS receivers so they can use it to guide them to a secret “cache,” a black, briefcase-like container hidden above ground on public property, like a park or forest. The first person to find the cache case and the top-secret reward document inside wins a grand prize plus some of the cool items they find in the cache container.

Location based gaming is going to be hot over the next couple of years. And actually will start to help us understand what the future of mobile and location is all about.

Blueooth Flirting

Wendong reports on BluetoothFlirt, a German based service that

permanently searches in the surrounding to find another BluetoothFlirt-user. After detecting the mobile will automatically calculate a flirt factor based on the data of both mobile users. Also a picture of the flirt partner is submitted automatically via Bluetooth

We're going to see more and more of these local connectivity apps. If the bluespammers don't ruin the channel first :-(

The Economist Bluejacks

According to Campaign (no link as it's old media) The Economist has been bluejacking in Asia

The opportunity to bluejack ( sending messages via Bluetooth technology to relevant mobile phones ) saw The Economist brand first approach people at the Asia Businessman Readership Survey in Singapore with the message " caffeine-free stimulant " as the delegates tucked into breakfast .

Similar tailored messages from the brand greeted mobile phone users at Media's advertising awards ceremony this year, as well as sports fans attending the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens .

While I think it's pretty cool as a novelty, using Bluetooth as an advertising channel like this is still irresponsible marketing - it's Bluespam, when all is said and done.

I'm sure no one was especially offended by this campaign, as it's new and the brand is "respectable". But if you take this to its logical conclusion, hundreds of advertisements could be sent daily to every phone with Bluetooth switched on. How uncool would that be?

Furthermore, once you've bought the basic equipment (a few hundred dollars), it's free to send messages, so it's a spammer's delight.

So, the channel will either be banned or consumers will switch Bluetooth off altogether, ruining a very promising communication channel for all kinds of things, other than just spamming.

I never thought we'd see The Economist tarnish itself with spamming. What will we see next "Ho.t L!ve Fore.cast.ing" or "Wanna BI.G 0ne? Gro.w bigg3r id.eas wiv The 'Conomist" subject lines in our emails?

Can anyone think of anymore?

Location Gaming

We make money not art has a great round up of the current crop of location based gaming experiences. Including some of our old fave's like Pac-Manhattan and Uncle Roy All Around You.

The whole list is sourced by Mjriam Struppeck from www.interactionfield.de in Bauwelt, (a german architecture Magazine).

There's quite a few new ones on the list - obviously a growing trend.

Are they a fad or are they here to stay? I'm convinced that they're the first wave of something fundamentally very, very big and rather scary, actually. The distinction between the digital world and meat space is blurring.

Tom Tom

Thanks to TJ for sending details of Tom Tom - a portable, stand alone car navigation system. It's "plug and play", very easy to use and gives clear spoken directions to your destination, according to its Dutch inventors.

It'll be interesting to see if personal systems like this win over built-in car nav systems. Longer term, I'd bet on the built-in version.

Location Gaming

Supafly via We Make Money Not Art, is a new game for mobiles based partly on location - kind of Celebdaq for real people. Neat.

Supafly® is a virtual soap opera, and the goal is to become a virtual celebrity. To do that, you have to create as much gossip around you as possible, while maintaining your relations and status in your group.

Using positioning technology, the game takes place in the real world, and you play on your mobile and on the web.

In Supafly you can become a local celebrity by appearing in the online newspaper "Hype". But competition is fierce, and you must find allies among other players, belong to the right group, and follow the latest fashion trends in order to stay on top.

Your character stays in your mobile phone and - since the game is location-based - it follows you along wherever you go. As your trusty companion, your character will help you find nearby friends or maybe find a date.

YAFRO meets Moblog

MoFriends is (an Italian - I think) moblogging service crossed with a location based friend finder crossed with a Friendster-type model (YOFRO = Yet Another Friendster Rip Off). Oh and they're trying to sell T-shirts, ringtones and logo's.

And that's just the front page.

They probably have a zillion members already. But I'd say they need to be clearer about what they are if they're to really succeed - their propositon is just too complex. And what's with the hip dude pictured on the right - on the front page as a member? With all due respect and all that.....

I think Moblogging will be slow to take off, but it's going to happen. The reasons why it'll be slow mirror those of the slow take up off MMS generally (shite usability, shite pricing and shite interoperability - the Shite Trinity). But unlike MMS generally, Moblogging is something I can see that consumers actually want to do.

Geoslaves of the Mastery

There's a "dark side" article on Location Based Services in Newsweek, reported here. I spotted it on W2Forum, which requires membership to see. Having said that, if you’re interested in the mobile space, you should become a member. It’s free (if you ask me nicely) or you can pay up the GBP 200 if you prefer :-)

The gist is that services like employee and parental child tracking will creep in and before we know it, we’ll all be Geoslaves (great phrase, if somewhat melodramatic).

Sooner or later, though, it will dawn on us that information drawn from our movements has compromised our "locational privacy"—a term that may become familiar only when the quality it refers to is lost. "I don't see much that will bring about [protections] in the short term," says Mark Monmonier, author of "Spying With Maps." He thinks that we'll get serious about this only after we suffer some egregious privacy violations. But if nothing is done, pursuing our love affair with wireless will result in the loss of a hitherto unheralded freedom—the license to get lost. Here's a new battle cry for the wireless era: Don't Geo-Fence me in.

Much the same thing has happened with security cameras – no one asked the residents of London if they minded being filmed 300 times every day!

There’s also a quote from one of the companies selling this technology:

"It they're not in the right area, they're really not working," says Aligo CEO Robert Smith. "A notification will come to the back office that they're not where they should be."

He sounds a really motivating man to work for doesn’t he? Do you think he makes his colleagues clock in and out to go to the bathroom and conducts full body searches before you’re allowed home?

I’d say that a company that feels that it needs to monitor its workers like this has some deep-routed personnel problems to solve before looking at this kind of technology. What happened to positives like motivation and trust? I'd recommend investing in a copy of one of Ricardo Semler's books and having a long hard look at your organisation before buying into something like this.

Personally, I've always far preferred to pay my colleagues fees rather than wages anyway. In other words, I'll pay for results, not their time. So if Colleague A can get better results than Colleague B in half the time, good for Colleague A! Why shouldn't she go home early and work a 3 day week?

Having said that (before being accused of being a total Luddite) I can see that there can be huge business efficiency advantages. My point is just that to focus on the "checking up on the workers" aspects is not the real benefit of these systems.

And the tracking of kids? Anyone who has been a kid (and that makes most of us, I think) will know that kids will find a way round this one. If you're meant to be studying with your mate Jimmy, guess where your phone will be, while you're out partying and painting the town red?

This will also mean that there'll be a rise in two-phone-ownership, as everyone knows that removing a teen's phone is like removing their socialising gene.

Or maybe they'll be a tech solution to beat the tracking systems? There's already noise alibi's so you can pretend you're somewhere else. So location-alibi’s doesn’t seem that much of a stretch.

Location feeds explained

Anyone interested in the Location aspects of mobile phones might be interested in this presentation from m-location.

It explains the different enabling technologies, in a clear, concise (if technical) way.

As I've noted before, Location won't reach its real potential until the consumer doesn't have to actively tell her phone to find her location every time she wishes to use it.

Anyone reading this who hasn't asked for my free White Paper on location based marketing - now's your chance to request a copy. Drop me a line at russell@mobile-weblog.com

Location Text Marketing

There's an interesting article on Adverblog today, reporting on a survey by Empower Interactive.

"Eight out of ten mobile phone users in Europe wouldn't mind receiving promotional offers and marketing messages via SMS." I don’t like research that so transparently supports the interest of the company commissioning it. (“Pope reveals soaring use of prayer as consumers errr…pray” type of thing). But this has a ring of truth about from my experience of actually working in this field.

But as Martina points out “People might be willing of receiving mobile coupons, messages concerning text & win campaigns, but we can't consequently assume they want to get messages simply saying "the new XXX product is out" or "wash your hands with XXX they will be softer than ever".”

This is an excellent point. What many marketers don't appreciate is that the mobile channel is a *promotional* one, not an advertising channel.
Having overseen 1500 of these types of location based campaigns, I'd say that this is pretty much established. If you use the channel, your point of view as a marketer must be how you can add value to the consumer with your communication. This can be a coupon, for sure. But if we start getting creative, there are other ways. News, information, jokes and inside knowledge of something, are all examples.

But if you simply send "Our brand is great" type of advertising, not only will it not do you any good, but you'll end up harming your brand. "Why did you text me to tell me that?" they say.

And if you do go down the offer-led route, it needs to be an exclusive one, not just one available to anyone who happens to be passing the shop. Again, this leads to a negative, not a positive response.

But the overall findings of the research are very positive, if unsurprising. We had 85,000 people opting in for local messages when we launched this kind of service.

If you’d like to find out more on this, email me for my free White Paper on the subject.

Location Tracking by WLans

Back in the 60's the Americans spent billions on developing a writing instument that could work in space ie in zero gravity. The Russians used pencils.

The pencil users in this case are a very clever company called Quarterscope.com. They have come up with a way of tracking location based on your position in relation to wifi hotspots.

Rather than spending billions on satellites and infrastructure, like GPS, they spend nothing. They just use other people's wifi hotspots to triangulate your position.

Not only is it clever commercially, but it works better too. Most people live in urban areas and GPS doesn't work very well in errr....urban areas. The thing is that your device must be in line of sight of a satellite in order to work. So it doesn't work in heavily built up areas, in buildings or in tunnels. But that's where wifi location works best, as there's a lot more hotspots around.

Pure genius.

Now all they need to do is figure out that what people want to use location based services for. And if anyone whitters on about restaurant and ATM finders, I'm far from convinced.

GPS Drawing

Another creative experiment that has practical uses is GPS drawing

Essentially, people carry GPS devices and their movements are then tracked as drawings published on the Web.

As mobiles increasingly incorporate tracking facilities, we'll all be able to look back at our movements over a specified period off time. I wonder what a 5 year pattern would look like of your life?