The Location-based revolution is coming according to GigaOm

Om Malik, founder and senior writer of GigaOm, has a nice perspective on why the commoditization of GPS and the associated emergence of Location-Based services is poised to change the market. Here's the interesting excerpt:

But lately I’ve been feeling like I may have been too conservative with my outlook for the location-based services revolution.
The main reason is the ubiquitousness of mobile phones; the sheer number of them that get shipped each year guarantees LBS a huge audience. Of course, in order for LBS to be on mobile phones, we need applications, which is where I believe the iPhone plays a vital role. Its large screen and built-in GPS (and now its 3G speeds) enable and encourage truly interesting LBS applications.

I think the introduction of an embedded GPS chip within the iPhone is what the LBS industry needs to move itself forward. Sure, we had a number of different cell phones in the past with embedded GPS chips. And this is the core of the problem: they were different cell phones with very different characteristics. So why is the iPhone different? It relies mostly with developers and their ability to create truly rich mobile applications. No more of those crappy Java-based apps. With that richness, comes very immersive applications.

If you add into the mix location-based services, then you got the perfect recipe for the best location-based device. And this was echoed by the Loopt CEO at the WWDC keynote: "This is the best version of Loopt we've ever made, and by far the best device we've had the opportunity to work with. We've developed for every mobile platform out there, this one is the best and the most powerful" [WWDC Keynote @ 0:28:32]

Although this comment was made in the context of the WWDC, so you should remove some adjectives, I'm convinced that this platform will push forward LBS services further than anything that has been attempted so far.

Happy location reporting - Martin

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Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) is sold out.

For the first time in it's history, the WWDC is sold out. I think this is a clear indication of the popularity of the iPhone and the associated SDK.

The opening of the Apple AppStore (in June ?) will surely be very interesting as eager indie developers rush out to be first to market with new and cheap (99 cents) application for the iPhone.

I was also toying with the idea of attending WWDC to get insight on the iPhone SDK.

This is surely a hot space to watch given the number of new mobile providers that have signed on to distribute the iPhone (Canada - Rogers being one of them).

Happy location reporting - Martin

Apple releases the fifth version of the iPhone SDK

Well Apple is very quick to turn out new revisions of it's iPhone SDK. They just released the 5th version of the SDK available for download here.

Apple is clearly sending a signal that it wants this to be very successful and keeps stabilizing and updating the SDK in a very agile manner.



Happy location reporting - Martin

iPhone SDK and developer's roadmap to be announced on March 6th

Apple sent a number of press invitations to attend the unveiling of the iPhone SDK / roadmap on March 6th at the Apple Cupertino Campus.

I'm really eager to learn what Apple is planning for developers and especially the deployment model of iPhone third-party applications. As I eluded in a previous post, I'm afraid that all applications will have to be channelled through the ITunes application and that they will exercise some kind of policing of applications.

I just remember when FaceBook application directory was flooded with pending applications and developers had to provide backdoor links to provide Facebook users access to it.

More info and move coverage to be done after the unveiling.

Happy location reporting - Martin

Update: It seems my fear of Apple being the watchdog of iPhone third-party applications has been officialized by AppleInsider.

Google Android and LBS Services

Google announced the Android Platform on November 5th and released the first public SDK for it on November 12th. After reading comments and looking at the overall architecture view of the framework, I decided to investigate the android.location API a little more closely.

The API is very similar to the JSR initiative for location-based services: JSR179
However there are a number of very interesting additions that Google decide to provide :

1:  public List android.location.LocationManager.getProviders(Criteria criteria)

Returns a list of LocationProviders that satisfy the given criteria, or null if none do When requesting the LocationProvider, the client application can define a criteria for the type of provider that should be returned. You can specify the power requirement and also the monetary cost associated to the usage of the API

2:  public void android.location.LocationManager.addProximityAlert(double latitude, double longitude, float radius, long expiration, Intent intent)

You can also register an intent (an action of a certain kind) to be executed when the devices "enter" or "leaves" a radius of a specific size from a central location.

The first item is interesting because it would allow you to conserve battery life and, I assume, toggle between (free) GPS positionning and perhaps (not so free) cell-tower triangulation.

The second item is where the interesting stuff can happen.

Imagine an application that knows the location of all your friends and the location of their favorite spots along with the permission associated to all those locations. When you are moving around the mobile application on the device could register some intents (by obtaining specific lat/long information from a dedicated server) to alert you of interesting places but also of nearby friends.

Looking at the Intent API, you could easily display the contact information of that contact in proximity and start an interaction.

This simple functionality is enabling a much higher functional value of client-side for LBS applications.

Instead of receiving basic text messages when friends are in proximity (which we were doing in Kakiloc), you can now be firing specific mobile applications based on a contextual location.

I'm sure Google is seeing this as a big enabler for location-based advertising and other potiential advertising applications. This has a lot of potential for integrating mobile applications with location-based technology.

I'll dig deeper and see what else Android is supplying. I will also look at OpenMoko because their framework also add a very interesting LBS API.

Happy location reporting - Martin

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