Comments on: Location on Mobile: Still Wandering Around A Little Aimlessly

By: Mobile Location Really Is About To Get Interesting | Mobile Inc

Mobile Location Really Is About To Get Interesting | Mobile Inc — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:05:22 +0000

[...] joining in the debate at MobHappy on the post ‘Location on Mobile: Still Wandering Around A Little Aimlessly‘ I decided to post on here why I think location is about to become very [...]

By: Murat

Murat — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:47:16 +0000

aaaand, here it comes:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/29/facebook-rewrites-privacy-policy-foreshadows-location-based-services/

By: McGuire’s Law » Blog Archive » Observations: Services - October 20, 2009

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:25:51 +0000

[...] Location on Mobile: Still Wandering Around A Little Aimlessly [...]

By: Murat

Murat — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:05:01 +0000

I disagree. Forget about the Starbucks example for now and consider what is more likely to happen on a large scale in the near term.

Facebook and Twitter is going to enable location at some point and then we’ll really be able to see the ways it becomes useful rather than just another mobile ad mechanic.

By integrating it with Facebook, you don’t have any barriers for usage for 300 million users. They just continue updating as they always have, no download, no new sign ups, that’s how I see location being a hit. The whole latitude thing didn’t work so well because not all my friends have a Google account, however they do have a Facebook one.

Location will be utilised by either handset manufacturer (things like Nokia Maps/Blackberry Maps serving ads), mobile network (signing up for a service where your location is used to send you offers via partnerships with brands) or Apps/online sites like Facebook/Atm finder etc.

How could location be a service on it’s own? I didn’t really get what that meant.

By: Tomi Ahonen

Tomi Ahonen — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:41:45 +0000

Brilliant Carlo

Twittered about it, excellent posting, totally agree.

Tomi Ahonen

By: Robert Christie

Robert Christie — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 15:13:23 +0000

Carlo, yes some of us are gadget/technology heads and occasionally we can be impressed by something new which we once thought difficult to achieve, a la Nick’s 15 eggs/wineglasses trick in Russell’s scenario two years ago. However even for the those endowed with the fanciest propeller-hats, a new technology is only interesting the first time viewed and once we’ve blogged & tweeted it to our friends the endorphins soon flush from one’s system.
But as SBS, a TV station here in Australia tags “there are six billion stories”. We are all here on this planet at our own unique location and we all face issues, problems, and opportunities at any time of day. We all have ideas, cravings, wants and needs at any time – some of which are related to or sparked by our location.
I was fortunate enough to be involved in J-Phone’s launch of their J-NAVI service in 2000. A mobile concierge that searched the Japanese business and fixed-phone directories (35m records), J-NAVI returned the usual details and optionally a map of the found place. The launch was promoted by an advertising campaign that cost somewhere near $6m and achieved 3m user sessions in the first 3 days of operation. By my calculation it broke even after 9 months and continued to run very profitably for about 5 years.
Why was J-NAVI successful? Going beyond the famous Japanese enthusiasm for new gadgetry, J-NAVI provided a simple and accessible alternative to the city street directory (of which there were very few in Tokyo at the time) in the worlds’ most consumer-driven city, where most people are public transport commuters and go out to eat lunch most days. Tokyo is big and densely populated with very confusing street addressing (yes even for locals). J-NAVI provided answers to daily questions for J-Phone subscribers and until the ubiquity of Google Maps there has not been much else to compare in the (dare I say it) LBS space.
But what about the maps? In those days, all the GIS guys tried to tell us that we needed maps to know where we were and to know where we were going. I used to say “who needs a map or directions when you have your wife in the car beside you and your mother-in-law in the rear seat?” Well J-NAVI also debunked the stuff about maps and LBS too – from my memory of our log analysis, about 91% of all queries ended with the text response and only 9% of users continued on to request a map on their phone. The implication being that most people know where to go and don’t need a map because they are searching in familiar territory.
I guess my point is this. The fact that we all have a location as one of our personal parameters at any point in time means that the things we are thinking about at that time often have a location context. If our location can help to solve a problem then its use may contribute to a service that people are willing to pay for.
I won’t get into location-based messaging (a la SBux) but suffice it to say that in my view there are still some missing pieces to that particular puzzle and you can bet your bottom dollar that the G-gnomes are hard at work on gaining control of them right now.
Perhaps if we renamed the services that use location, to something nice like “Really Useful Services” we could get away from the LBS cringe, but oh damn, Andrew Lloyd Webber already owns that…

By: matt sapero

matt sapero — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:37:16 +0000

Carlo, yes, and ironically it is also quite similar to Mobile Hunt which I designed in 2000. Go figure Another case of my being WAY ahead of the curve. Hopefully I have the timing right with my latest: http://www.cryptopix.com

By: Carlo

Carlo — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:53:39 +0000

Thanks for the great comments!

Matt — I have seen Foursquare, it’s a good example of what I’m talking about in that it’s basically the same service as Dodgeball was several years ago (made by the same people, in fact), with a few incremental upgrades.

iPhone Developer — sometimes it’s the most obvious lessons that are the most overlooked

By: Paul Coulton

Paul Coulton — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:35:27 +0000

For the only real sustained example of a location orientated service is geo-caching where a community has built up around this acitivy. However, the most often cited reason cited for partaking is social walking so location is simply a means to this end not the reason itself

By: iPhone Developer

iPhone Developer — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:12:49 +0000

‘… But it’s the ones that are actually based on stuff people want to do that will succeed.’
Yes, but what could be more obvious!
@Mark – love the website but couldn’t find PocketPLaces on the AppStore?!