After years of what I consider false starts in figuring out the holy grail of GPS-driven "geo-location" applications for cell phones, this New York Times article finally describes one that intuitively feels just right and seems to fill a real need. Titled "With a cellphone as my guide", the article explains:
"If you stand on a street corner in Tokyo today you can point a specialized cellphone at a hotel, a restaurant or a historical monument, and with the press of a button the phone will display information from the Internet describing the object you are looking at.
The new service is made possible by the efforts of three Japanese companies and GeoVector, a small American technology firm, and it represents a missing link between cyberspace and the physical world.
The phones combine satellite-based navigation, precise to within 30 feet or less, with an electronic compass to provide a new dimension of orientation. Connect the device to the Internet and it is possible to overlay the point-and-click simplicity of a computer screen on top of the real world."
The service is available only in Japan for now, because US wireless carriers haven't seen the need (or the money) in introducing a similar capability here. Only Verizon and Sprint here seem inclined to introduce this capability in the US. The technology apparently adds less than $10 to the hardware cost of a cellphone.
This type of a "geo-location" service is particularly relevant in countries like Japan, where a formal grid-based postal addressing system has not yet been developed. There are other countries like India, and many parts of China that have a similar problem and opportunity.
There are countless possibilities of good and bad applications of this type of technology for consumers. The blog 21talks describes just one neat application made possible:
"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."
And terrestrial tourism is only a trillion dollar industry worldwide.
One can only imagine the kinds of things that are possible when a service like this is tied together with web-based mapping systems from companies like Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL.
What's truly remarkable about the service in Japan so far, besides the fact that it has over a million users, is that the base service is apparently FREE to use.
Additional premium overlays are planned, but the fact that a free service is made possible by the various companies involved, including the wireless carriers themselves, is a remarkable act of commercial self-restraint.
Because a sure way to kill the open-ended innovation possible around a capability like this, is to stifle it with surcharges right out of the gate. Thus ensuring that many mainstream users will never take a chance in trying it.
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