Mobile Monday London

Last night's Mobile Monday featured a set of interesting presentations around location based services. First up was SeekerWireless, who provide a localization service that - according to the speaker - in terms of accuracy is half-way between GPS and Cell-ID based systems. I would like to find out more about what technology they employ (I did not understand how they use SMS) and also would like to see the system in action (there was no live demo yesterday). But I also was not clear that accuracy in locating a user is still a major issue in the LBS world. Specifically a slide outlining the various restrictions Nokia defines in the N95 GPS manual I felt made the drawbacks of GPS very clear.

Next up was LocoMatrix, outdoor games. The speaker was a sympathetic, entertaining if somewhat timid guy, with an obvious passion (which I totally respect): to help getting kids outdoors and moving around, in order to tackle isolation and obesity. Just not sure I was convinced by the games that were presented, I don't see that they can compete with the WIIs and Playstations / PSPs and indeed more and more advanced mobile games of this world. But cudos for the cause.

Trackaphone offers a service that helps tracking people, with apparently a focus on security-related use cases. They have a "red button" emergency concept, where upon acttivation of that feature a SMS/notification is sent to a number of defined recipients and the device starts recording what is going on ( I believe audio only). Living in a high-crime rate area of London I welcome any such technology, but wouldn't want this button to be pressed involuntarily while the phone is in my pocket without the keypad being locked.

Buddyping is one of those LBS products that I personally feel can play a part in LBS living up to its long unfulfilled hype. I don't believe that many users will look for the famous "pizza" place nearby, or be happy about receiving dozens of promotional SMS as they walk around (the Starbucks scenario). However, keeping track of your buddies with a Twitter component I think has huge potential. Which brand / product eventually establishes itself in that area remains to be seen, but I am positive that this kind of service will become exponentially more popular in the near future.

A neat tool for joggers, skiiers etc. to keep track of where they have been going in what time, distance, with a great maps integration is SportsDo. Definitely want to check it out, although need to check if I have a device they support and also - more importantly - need to get my lazy butt moving, and start running on a regular basis again.

The final presentation was by m-spatial, which again I think I need to play around with more - the demo showed how different content sources are integrated for any local search query. Another feature they presented was a tool that allows the user to highlight an address on a PC-desktop webpage, and then receive a link via SMS that takes the user to a mobile page with additional information about that location.