LocalMind wins O’Reilly Where 2.0 Startup Showcase

LocalMind wins O’Reilly's Where 2.0 Startup Showcase. Here's the video of the interview with Robert Scoble.

Here's an outline of LocalMind:

Localmind gives you the ability to send any question you want to someone that is at a location you are interested in. That person (who is either a Localmind user or one of your Foursquare friends) receives the question to their phone and responds, in real-time.

Lenny was my Engineering Manager whilst I was the Product Manager at Webmetrics.  He was a very sharp guy - with wisdom (not merely knowledge) beyond his years. From a product manager's perspective, he was a highly adept project manager, meaning that I didn't have to do low-level project management or run sprint / scrum meetings - a massive relief.

Lenny was a star at Webmetrics - the man deserves to do well  with LocalMind!!

Update: Scoble posted this earlier: LocalWhat’s the best SXSW app? So far, for me, it’s LocalMind. Here's a great video interview with Lenny explaining the service:

Google's My Location

Google Maps has My Location in beta.

It displays your current location on Google Maps. It works with a GPS-enabled mobile phones - so no real surprises there.

What I like is that it works (using the same interface) on non-GPS phones using cell triangulation. You press '0' on your keypad to do the location look-up. Here's a YouTube explaining it.

Now, we all know that mobile operators charge for location look-ups using cell triangulation (eg about 7p in the UK (about 15 US cents)- I know because I experimented launching an LBS service in 2003).

Google's service is in beta - what happens on launch? Presumably, it will be funded by Google's giant advertising machine. I also assume that there will be a geo-location version of their advertising service to follow.

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.....

Update on Loopt - the geo-tagging service

Loopt launches on Monday 20th November - download available from www.boostlive.com. It's a location-based social mapping service that's only available in the US on the Boost network that I have mentioned before.

The system automatically updates the location of everyone in a private network of Boost customers and displays that information directly on a map on the phone. When a friend in the network is nearby, it sends an alert. It's the first geo-tagging mobile service.

The service is free for the rest of this year and $2.99 per month from 2007. We'll watch this with interest...... it looks darned good... gettin' jiggy to switch over to Boost just for this.