I’m running a series of posts on my predictions for this year. Don’t forget to leave a comment!
Location Based Services
I don’t think 2005 is going to be the year for LBS – as much as anything the operators aren’t really behind it yet and their technology hasn’t really been deployed. But we continue to see grass roots initiatives and they’re not going to go away. As much as anything, there’s too much investment by vendors of the tracking technology for them just to write it off. So they will continue to pressure operators into deployment.
This will allow developers to unleash their imaginations and give us a lot more than the “logical”, but useless stuff we’ve seen so far along the lines of “find my nearest Chinese restaurant” and the flawed Starbucks Scenario (a retailer with a low retail price could never afford the messaging costs).
I think one very interesting application for LBS is where people can enrich the real world with a type of virtual graffiti. This could be done by a location feed from an operator, but could also be supplied via a unique code (perhaps a barcode) at the point where the information lies waiting to be discovered.
This would be like a real world hyperlink into the virtual world.
The other area just waiting to explode is LBS Gaming. Not forgetting dating/social networking/”adult” friend finders.
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