Cellphones as a compass
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Some people say the future of journalism is pointing. You will point, link, backlink, deeplink, but you don’t report anymore.
It’s not journalism here, it’s mobile world. But the principle is the same. In the future, instead of listening to your handset, you could just Point, Click, Select.
Point your cellphone at a restaurant, a church, a house. Press a button to grab information from the Net, from a database, from Wikipedia. Select a place, a contact on a list.
Mr. Matsunuma, a beta tester interviewed by the NYTimes, showed how it works on a street in Tokyo: “He selected ‘lodgings’ on the screen. Then he pointed his phone toward a cluster of tall buildings. A list of hotels in that area popped up, with distances. He chose the closest one, about a quarter-mile away. An arrow appeared to show him the way, and in the upper left corner the number of meters ticked down as he got closer. Another click, and he could see a map showing both his and the hotel’s locations.”
GeoVector, a tech company based in America but mainly working in Japan, built the system. It mainly based on global positioning system.
We also found Navizon that gives another approach to the geolocalization. Its technical solution can tri-angulate the user’s position by taking readings from WiFi hot spots or cellular towers.
If you can plug voice over IP or podcast with this kind of service, you can end up with geolocalized tourism, voice-assisted Yellow pages or even cellphone-based Treasure Quest.
Anyway, “several industry analysts said putting location-based information on cellphones would be a logical step for search engine companies looking for ways to increase advertising revenues. Microsoft has already moved into the cellular handset realm with its Windows Mobile software, and Google is rumored to be working on a Google phone.”
Be prepared to see some new Web 2.0 startups in this field.
Jun 28, 2006 | By Nuno
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ON CELLPHONE BASED GEO-LOCATION SERVICES…
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