It’s been a while since I got excited about a new app but today’s news about Detour got the old wheels spinning again as I dug in to learn more about it and started thinking about the potential it unlocks . But I’m getting ahead of myself. Detour splashed into the world today across all the […]
Tag: LBS
Location Based Services
Object Trackers – Two Approaches
Nokia announced, the Treasure Tag, new hardware to go with their Lumia phones sporting the latest update. The tag is a small piece of hardware that communicates with the phone via bluetooth and an app on the phone that monitors proximity, alerting you when the device falls out of bluetooth range from your phone. Until […]
Facebook Find Friends Nearby
UPDATE: Looks like the feature got pulled offline. Wonder if the legal department got involved. Some are calling Facebook’s new Find Friends Nearby feature (turned on just this weekend) as a Highlight-killer. Maybe so but that’s only if you keep the app on the FFN page at all times. It doesn’t track your location in the […]
Location-based DRM
Reading news of the Loopt acquisition this morning got me thinking. What if someone were to build a service that would check your location and use it as a way to unlock content that would normally sit behind a paywall? Here are a couple of the use case. Starbucks could do a deal with the […]
People Discovery Apps, a Cautionary Tale
This was the weekend everyone signed up and joined Highlight or Glancee. TechCrunch has written about it and Robert Scoble has been going on about how viral these location-based services are. No doubt about it, these new apps which run in the background on your phone and let you know when someone you know (or […]
Douglas Adams on Location-Based Services
Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, spoke to a room full of telecom executives in 2001. In the middle of pleading with them to improve the call quality along the 101 freeway near his home in Santa Barbara, he also included this prescient nugget describing a world that is just starting […]
Foursquare 2010 Infographic
Foursquare has published a beautiful infographic highlighting tidbits gleened from the collective check-in activity of their global audience of over 5 million.