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A GPS iPhone will show where the money is
Published: 5 December, 2007
Tags >> iPhone
Location based services (LBS) have launched with a trajectory that has become standard for virtually all new services introduced by the mobile industry - a period of intense hype, followed by disappointment, ensued by a reality check, then some nascent traction and finally steady growth. WAP, MMS, Mobile TV are just a handful of examples which have all followed, or are currently following, this well-trodden path. Almost without exception, these services only started to gain real traction when compelling applications emerged which took advantage of the technology and therefore encouraged its use. For example, even though operators aggressively rolled out camera phones and addressed network interpretability issues several years ago, MMS has only recently started to take-off. One catalyst for this has been the rise of online user generated content (UGC) applications which are encouraging users to share their experiences by using the multimedia capabilities of their handsets. And far from simply extending the PC experience, interfacing with these applications from a handset is producing richer content owing to the context of its mobile origin.
In a similar vain, LBS has been a technology looking for an application since obvious services like navigation and tracking have only limited use for the average mobile users. When I got my first GPS phone, I played around with the service incessantly, using Google Maps to track my location until I quickly came to a depressing realisation - about 99% of the time I know exactly where I am and I know exactly where I'm going. Booting up GPS on my phone is more novelty than necessity. Sure, for hardened travellers and business executives, embedded-GPS is useful since it mitigates the need for a separate satnav device, but this demographic alone is not going to drive the location technology into the mobile phone mass market.
As with MMS, mobile UGC is a fuel which will drive demand for embedded location technology in mobile phones - more so than E911 in the US has done. Dating, chat, find-a-friend and mobile blogging are all UGC applications which are enriched by a location context. One service which depicts how the marriage of GPS and mobile UGC might look is geotagging - the tagging of geographic locations with reviews, commentary, photos, video or other multimedia content reflecting a person's experience when they were physically present in that area. For instance, someone might rate the food at a restaurant; take a photo of a giant Christmas tree standing in the parking lot of a shopping centre; or video an amusing incident outside a train station. Then, when someone in their social network enters any of these locations, this information is triggered on their mobile device. Some of this information is trivial, but some, like restaurant reviews, have real value. From an advertising perspective, geotagging holds tremendous opportunities.
