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US operator, Sprint have just announced their entry into Location Based Services - hurray! At last a major player is taking LBS more seriously.

The bad news is that the services are about as exciting as their corporate press release - warning, not suitable for staying awake.

The two services are; driving directions and in the event of a breakdown, subscribers being able to ask an operator where they are.

While I think operators should be encouraged to experiment with LBS, I'm not convinced these will be winners for them. I believe that nav systems will be pretty standard in most cars before too long, though I guess it's not too late for the operators to try to reclaim the market, for themselves. There is a logic to be able to remove the nav system from the car at the end of the journey, to be able to navigate the last few streets, in the event of no close parking, as an example.

But anyway, while Sprint are generously not charging a premium over normal Directory Assistance, driving directions are charged at $1.25 plus airtime. So you're hardly going to use this for more than a few minutes.

As for breakdown cover, they really need something that people might use every week, rather than a one-off. Sure, it's a nice-to-have that if you break down with a car full of screaming kids, you don't need to work out exactly where you are. But it's hardly going to set the world on fire.

When are we going to see some innovation in this market, or are we doomed to suffer an endless plethora of boring services that aren't user-driven? Find-my-nearest Chinese restaurant stuff doesn't hack it either, I'm afraid. Although, find my nearest and best Chinese restaurants might have some use.

Well, to answer my rhetorical question, we'll see innovation happen when the operators open up their Location API's to independent developers to play with. With the big proviso that they also price location feeds reasonably. Then, and only then, will we see services that people want and will use.

Via Phone Scoop. Image from Hypno Town

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Near Near Future has an amusing story about a Footsteps of Hans Christian Andersen tour in Copenhagen.

Tourists follow a route marked with 2000 white footsteps on the pavement. Then, at strategic points, they dial in with their mobile phones to listen to an audio narrative about the great man.

A nice idea and an example of many more we'll see cropping up all over the world.

What makes this funny though is that someone has remixed the tour by adding extra footsteps......into gay clubs. The great man was famously gay - a fact that is generally ignored by mainstream society. So the remixing is thought to be the work of the gay movement, showing a nice sense of humour at the same time.

However, it does also point to a potential problem with any physical marker/hyperlink, connecting people to digital information. The physical link can be sabotaged or altered by the unscrupulous or plain mischievous.

Supposing you "click" on Shakespeare's house for more information, but you're taken to say an adult site with Elizabethan wenches doing their stuff? Or even re-directed to a local Shakespeare souvenir shop?

That's why this type of project needs to be self-policing, using Wikipedia principles.

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This one I had to try! I saw on textually.org that pokerroom.com had launched a fully interactive poker client for mobile phones. YAY! That's got to be the best time killer since bejeweled.

I fly off to their website and start looking for the application. After signing up and providing them with all personal information short of my average amount of bathroom visits, I end up with THIS!

So they haven't really launched it yet, well they fooled me. If they keep the mid-april deadline (I don't really trust deadlines with vague
dates) I'll be sure to try out their poker client, for now I'll just try and get unsuspecting fellow travellers into high-stakes poker games.

This promise of on the road poker against real-live players set me on a little, seriously un-scientific "I'm just an end user" kind of quest. I decided to have a look at today's offering of mobile multiplayer games.
I decided not to look at MMORPG's like It's alive but just at simple graphical clients which allow me to play anything from monopoly to chess online.

It turns out to be rather hard to find these kinds of games. I've had a look at some of the leading mobile software distribution sites and none of them had a multiplayer section. I quickly scanned around a bunch of sites and I didn't find anything that caught my attention. This surprises me. Looking at the success of companies such as zylom and popcap, why wouldn't they create simple clients to play the same online games over a mobile phone? By the way, I found mobile games on Popcap's website but no multiplayer ones. I'm also surprised that I haven't heard anything from the carriers in this direction, it's got to be interesting for them as it's bound to generate good data traffic. Much better then MMS anyways ;)

I'm certainly no specialist in this market. I'm strictly a private gamer that remotely stays in touch what's happening in the gaming world. Am I missing something or is this a wave that is still pretty much in development?

We thank Dennis Hettema for contributing this article.

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The Queen handed the Commonwealth Games baton to supermodel, Elle MacPherson at a ceremony in Buckingham Palace, last night. The baton will be passed by relay over 180,000 km until it reaches Melbourne in time for the 2006 games.

For the first time, this baton also includes a GPS device and two miniature cameras, allowing people to track its progress on the net. Link to the (less than compelling) video here.

A fun use of location technology.

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Bookcrossing is a new form of location based social networking, that I think is really cool, even if it doesn't really involve technology.

Bookcrossing n. the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.

(added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary in August 2004)

You simply leave a book you really like in a public place, for another to find and share. You register your book on Bookcrossing.com so that the lucky recipient can see who left it and what you thought about it. And you get notified when someone finds your liberated book and what they think about it.

What a cool small way to make the world a nicer place. or maybe I should have been a hippy.

As seen on Business Blogs.

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There's an online forum and happening, taking place from November 26 through December 5, which looks like it's worth checking out here, where you can also sign up to discussions.

It's the precursor to an interdisciplinary research residency taking place next year at the University of California Humanity Research Institute.

In the last few years, advances in wireless telecommunication, sensor technology, and Geographic Information System tools have inspired a tide of experimental creative projects. Artists are using these tools and location-aware media to renegotiate how communication, navigation, and big data are played out in space. As the landscape and urban streets become the canvas for computer augmented social and physical interaction, what possibilities emerge for practices outside the arts? How can we mutually inspire and inform diverse practices?

The invitation is mainly addressed to artists working in this space, where many (actually most!) of the interesting things are currently happening in Location Based Services - no, we're not talking "Find my Nearest...Chinese Restaurant".

Regular readers of this blog know that these emerging areas are where I think the promise of location based services may lie.

Check it out.

Original story: Turbulence.

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Engadget features a piece of interesting research by Jupiter into DRM (Digital Rights Management). The research found that:

contrary to the conventional wisdom, consumers are willing to pay for digital music.... Consumers value the portability and flexibility to which they have grown accustomed with conventional CDs and the MP3 file format but fifty-five percent of users also said they would pay $9.99 for a CD they could copy to multiple devices. This number is in contrast to only 23 percent of users who would pay the same price for the same album they could not copy. For single downloads, only 17 percent who would purchase a song for $0.99 they could not copy. By contrast 47 percent of consumers would pay $0.99 per song they could download to their PCs and copy to multiple devices.

Without having access to the methodology, this strikes me as a rather disingenuous conclusion:

1. Are people likely to admit to downloading "illegal" material (or certainly, material they could be sued for downloading)?

2. "Intention to buy" research is notoriously misleading.

"Would you buy the new fabulous Rolls-Royce, Mrs Barely-able-to-make-ends-meet?" quoth the interviewer.

"Ohh yes, Ducks, it looks very nice indeed. I could get Mr Barely-able-to-make-ends-meet to drive me to Sheila's of a Sunday."

In other words, those pesky users tend to lie through their teeth in this type of research. Partly, coz they can (there's no downside for lying), partly as they want to be nice to the interviewer and tell them what they think they'd like to hear and partly out of fantasy.

The facts are that as I blogged last month

Research firm NPD disclosed that the number of users downloading music has fallen from a high of 1.3 million a month to 1 million. The drop off coincides with the end of launch promotions.

Meanwhile, the number of households using P2P free downloading sites has risen to 6.4 million.

So, no matter what the users in the Jupiter survey tell those nice young interviewers, something isn't stacking up.

I wonder who Jupiter wants to sell their reports to? Could it be those beleaguered record companies, desperate for a ray of hope in this darkest hour? Or perhaps the DRM companies who'd like to persuade those record companies that they have the solution to all their problems?

Either way, the truth could be argued to get in the way of the reason to buy the report. No one wants a report that says "you're doomed - doomed I tell ye". Do they?

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One of the big claims about the Internet is that it expands your social network in ways that were impossible to imagine only 10 years ago. I have people in my social/business network from all over the world - from Japan and Australia to the US and Europe.

But has this been at the expense of real neighbourhoods? It's often easier to touch base with someone living in another country than the people who live in your immediate vicinity.

A while ago I wrote about Plazes which has local social networking possibilities (among other things). Now we have NeighborNode.

NeighborNode is a virtual noticeboard that relates to a wireless node, that transmits for 300 feet around itself. Anyone in that 300 feet (in line of sight) can both access the Internet and read the noticeboard and place messages on it. When you log in to the net, you're firstly sent to the Notice Board once a day and from there, you go where ever you want.

NeighbourNodes are then linked together, creating a wider neighbourhood network, enabling news, gossip and information to be passed into the wider local community.

You can either tap into an existing node (mainly in New York) or create your own by adapting a Linksys wireless router (pretty simple to do) or buying an off-the-shelf NeighborNode.

There's a couple of interesting points that don't seem to be covered on the site:

1. Who's paying for the Internet connection? Clearly, the person who puts up the node in the first place, but it would be cool if there was some way of sharing this cost across the Neighbourhood.

2. What would the ISP's think about sharing access in this way?

3. What about security, when sharing access? As a non-geek (sadly) I'm pretty sure that the security risk is minimal, but is this right? In any event, I think they should tackle the issue head-on, on the site.

We've seen a plethora of social networking websites (Ryze, Friendster, Ecademy, Linked In, Open BC to name a few), so could LSN (Local Social Networking) be the next big thing?

If you think about it, it does make a lot of sense.

If you're looking for dates or even business contacts, it's probably better to have them where you can meet them. And neighbourhoods tend (gross generalisation alert) to have the same sorts of people living in the immediate areas.

Still no business model though!

And even for areas with close communities, another Neighbourhood notice board will never go amiss - as the saying goes, you can never be too thin, have too much money or too few notice boards :-)

UPDATE: I emailed them with my questions above and this is what they wrote back:

1. Who's paying for the Internet connection? Clearly, the person who puts up the node in the first place, but it would be cool if there was some way of sharing this cost across the Neighbourhood.

Answer: Currently, the person who hosts the node pays for the connection. Hosting a node could be seen as a public service to your neighborhood, but I see it as something one would want to do just to meet one's neighbors. In that sense, it's not an altruistic action, but something that people are motivated to do out of their own interests. This project is still in it's very early stages however, and there are lots of possible payment models we could adopt going forward. We're examining all of the approaches and talking to the various parties involved, and you may see the payment model change in the future.

2. What do the ISP's think about sharing access in this way?

Answer: I don't know much about the UK market, but here in NYC, there is a spectrum of attitudes toward sharing access coming from ISPs. Some (most notably Time Warner) are very opposed to it. Several others (bway.net, Speakeasy, Cloud9 to name a few) explicitly support it. Still others are somewhere in the middle, with vague, undefined policies on access sharing. These differences could become a factor for end users in determining which ISP to use as awareness of shared connectivity grows.

3. What about security, when sharing access? As a non-geek (sadly) I'm pretty sure that the security risk is minimal, but is this right?

Answer: Wireless is inherently less secure than standard, wired ethernet. Any data sent wirelessly to a router unencrypted can be viewed by anyone in the area with the appropriate tools. This is true for ALL wireless, not just Neighbornode. The solution is to be aware of this, and to use encryption tools (notably SSL, SSH and VPN) when sending sensitive information. This will become much more standard behavior in the future, as the world increasingly goes wireless.

Original source: Net Art News

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There's a pretty good list of location based gaming (both mobile phone and non-mobile phone based) at In-Duce.

Check it out.

Pic shows playing Cutlass in New York.

Source: We Make Money Not Art/Near Near Future via The Invisible Rabbit

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