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Product Management :: Product Marketing


17 February, 2007

Handset manufacturers getting into Location Based Services?

The world's two largest handset makers (Nokia and Motorola) have each introduced their own navigation services that use GPS on their phones. From a CNET article:
The company also said this week that it plans to make application programming interfaces to its software available to third-party developers so that they also can develop new services and applications that leverage location through GPS.
This is a great prod in the right direction, as the mobile operators (as least outside of US - see the excellent article for the reasons why) have been slow to deploy or make much value out of LBS. However, this won't really work as a platform to enable innovative (and compelling) 3rd party applications to appear - you know the sort of services that are always showcased:
Where's are my friends? Then lets go to a nearby Italian restaurant that has a fish promotion on.
The reason being is that these LBS APIs needs to be inter-operable so that someone on a Nokia handset can find out where their friends are on Seimens, Sony Ericsson, LG handsets. Sadly, this isn't a strength of handset manufacturers - operators do a better job of this generally. However this announcement may spur the operators to innovate.....

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Arthur,

Our company has developed a solution for GPS enabled phones. Check out http://www.5o9inc.com for more info. We solved the problem of transmitting GPS information over the HTTP protocol so with our thin client you can now do local search.

Cheers,

Peter