Mobile location based services suck due to content
Industry has been trying to tackle problem of location based services (LBS) for years. There was always something stopping wider adoption: mobile providers having brain of the size of a peanut finding always a reason to reject the request for the location data (famous code of conduct), clunky mobile handsets with no capabilities what so ever to accept in convenient way user’s input or to display in an acceptable way results, expensive mobile data pushing most of the possible users of the LBS systems off. I could go on and on about the reasons. Let’s just add one more: content. The ideas for location based services exist for years and I believe are very good. There are endless ideas which could improve our way of interacting with context sensitive data, ideas which could be possibly monetized.
Which year is now? It has been at least 7-8 years since I started to put interest in that. But what has changed, what has improved, what hasn’t? Certainly the capabilities of mobile handsets has improved with the new era of the “touchy” handsets changing completely the user experience. Let say it loudly: it becomes acceptable experience now. The problem of the cost of data becomes valid but more and more operators offer (unlimited) data packages for reasonable price. The wide adoption of Wi-Fi and wireless internet capabilities of modern handsets play important role here as well. Nothing really changed in the Telco Towers in term of availability of the location data. Ok, maybe you can get your location but forget about any ideas based on sharing your location with other people. Ain’t gonna happen. Luckily there are services like Yahoo Fire Eagle which tries to fill the gap, services which facilitate users sharing own location with push model and serving that location to interested parties (other applications), doing this in a secure way where the user can control who can see what and when by delegating authorization to own data. There is as well wider presence of mobiles with a GPS module built-in or connected via bluetooth.
We can see improvement and work done in all areas. So, what’s the reason for this rant? The reason is that the experience of using LBS services is still horrible! Let’s take the simplest possible service: “what’s nearby” search. I can get my location as accurate as it can be via GPS but I still can’t really find what I am looking for. Real life situation: I am near Blackfriars station in London, I know that that there is a branch of the Halifax bank nearby, possibly on Fleet Street. Can the new technology help me? The answer is NO. The Google Maps found couple of banks near Fleet Street, but not what I was looking for. The same Yahoo! GO service. Nokia Maps: no love neither. So, let’s face it: mobile location based services suck due to still poor content.
Popularity: 33% [?]
I was looking for a way of synchronizing my private Google calendar events and my professional Outlook calendar with Nokia N95 8GB. As it turned out it is possible to have quite neat configuration with 2-way syncing to and from your mobile. What is interesting it can be used with other phones as well, not just Nokia, not just Symbian 60 3rd.
Programmable Web 