Finally. Techcrunch50 has put up the extremely entertaining presentation held by Tonchidot, a japanese company that wants to push the envelope in mobile.
Their attitude is beyond awesome, an inspiration for anyone who wants to do something different.
So. Let’s build together. Using imagination.
Urban Prankster reports of a service that charges 50 cent for giving you a suggestion of what to do. Sure, it’s a vending machine for now, but I bet that this type of service will pop up with suggestions based on current time, location awareness, including a hookup to your adress book / social graph etc. and naturally you’ll be able to say thumbs up or down and it’ll learn over time.
Strange that such a service hasn’t been promoted over SMS earlier.
So Google has announced their My Location service for the mobile version of Google Maps, a sneek peek what their Android platform is capable of.
The My Location feature takes information broadcast from mobile towers near you to approximate your current location on the map – it’s not GPS, but it comes pretty close (approximately 1000m close, on average).
It’s a native app, meaning that you have to download and install it on your desktop for it to work. Just a couple of phones are supported, and it currently seems to be US-only. So it’s not available for services running thru say, the browser. Or any other app for that matter, even the native ones. No soup for the rest of us then, at least not until they release Android, which has the My Location-stuff included in the core libraries, accessible for all native apps. But not the browser, which might be good. Maybe it has some standardized opt-in procedure to clear access for certain websites (kind of like cookies are handled now in browsers)?
Anyhow. I pondered a little on how they might have done it, and came to the conclusion that they must employ something like the Intel Placelab project, meaning that they listen to “radio beacons”, such as cell towers, wifi hotspots, bluetooth etc. These “beacons” all have unique MAC IDs, which has been geotagged in the Placelab database. Establishing the position is a matter of triangulating different beacons, combined with signal strength and bam! you’ve got a location.
Although Google seems to be only using one beacon, the tower you’re connecting to right now, so maybe they have watered down this principle a little? Kind of like what Plazes does with Wifi. But knowing what tower you connect to is a bit tricky, if you’re using your phones preset values for IP-traffic, so maybe they employ some type of hybrid approach… ie. send an SMS thru the tower, which contains an session-ID and tower info, matching this to a database of geotagged towers, routing this info back to the user thru IP-traffic?
Anyhow, it’s nice to see that they’re keeping a steady pace. From what I know, the iPhone has no feature like this, even if it’s completely integrated from hardware interface, to operating system, to operator services.
Gotta go, have to take a stab at the Android API! 
As you may or may not know, I’m a big believer in mobile advertising. My reasons for this are reach, creative assets (accurate location, movement, personal information etc.) and to some extent, the increased potential for functional advertising.
Hypothetically, reach is already there – mobile penetration is 100 percent in most target audiences. But where are the ad serving platforms, standardized formats and touchpoints? All these things need to be there for us as a creative agency (and we’re one of the tech-driven ones…) to allocate investments to mobile channels. Be they’re not anywhere to be found. And regardless of what people (like the Yahoo-guy here at Daytona Sessions today) say, to my knowledge there are no approaches that can scale across time, products, brands, companies and business models.
Or am I missing something?
Recent Tweets
