Location Based Services Leading To Smart Places

from the just-how-smart-do-we-want-our-locations-to-be? dept

Wed, Mar 24th 2004 8:11pm — Mike Masnick

People have been talking about location-based services for ages, but it's getting more and more attention lately as all the pieces are falling into place to make it more of a reality. While not all of the location-based applications that eventually show up will fit into the sort of applications people expected, it's clear that "smart places" are at least drawing a lot more attention. The Guardian newspaper in the UK has a good overall roundup of a variety of location-based services that companies are experimenting with. Right now, they mostly focus on things like tourist information, such as audio guides that can be dialed into - along with the ability to leave your own feedback. The writer suggests that RFID may be the missing ingredient to make such services even more valuable, by allowing more pinpoint use of location info. This certainly beats some of the applications that people were originally predicting for location-based services - where the restaurant you were walking by would spam you with a coupon. When the content is both interactive and user requested, things begin to get a lot more interesting. Combined with realtime information (for example: traffic info, event info or location of other friends) location-based services become increasingly useful, without most of the downsides. The main fear is still the privacy issue, but properly implemented (a big if) most of these can be solved.

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6 Comments

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bg, 24 Mar 2004 @ 8:54pm

directed coupons could be cool..
I think the potential for providing users with coupons could be quite valuable. Especially if the subscriber could select their categories which they are interested in. It could possibly help offset the cost of phones for the consumer...

I imagine walking in the airport passing two different bars and getting a coupon for a free appetizer with the purchase of a beer. Guess which one I'm going to give my money...
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thecaptain, 25 Mar 2004 @ 3:34am

Re: directed coupons could be cool..
Depends.

If I'm walking in the airport and passing two different bars and I get spammed that coupon on my cellphone, without my request AND I have to pay to RECEIVE the damn message...

Guess which one WON'T get my money?

Also...guess which way marketters will decide to operate?

Go on...guess...
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Giles Lane, 28 Mar 2004 @ 1:00am

Urban Tapestries
Mike -- it's not entirely clear from Jack's article, but UT is specifically designed to provide a 'public authoring' platform for location-based information -- where the users are the authors and not merely consumers of tourist information. This is what sets UT apart from the other projects Jack mentions, such as Mobile Britsol or Antenna Audio's projects.
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Adam, 30 Mar 2004 @ 1:23am

Real Estate
I see real estate being a key early adopter here. If you walk past a house, and get its key stats on your cell phone -- we're talking a usefull service with a strong b-model.
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Guido, 14 Apr 2004 @ 6:45am

Useful...
This might fancy some of you guys -- you can see how such technology is being used in Prague, Czech Republic...

www.jellingspot.com
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Etienne, 29 Jul 2006 @ 2:46pm

Use cases
This kind of Bluetooth proximity marketing is already used in France, Germany, Benelux from the company Alterwave. They have done various events, even for Nokia, advertising panels... Stay tuned!
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