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Need to find the nearest toilet or just feeling lonely where you are? No problem, your mobile phone can help.
No this isn’t some advert for a friend finding phone line or even a toilet finding service. Instead this is about location services or rather location aware services. Location aware services allow users to access data that are location specific. If you enter a specific place like say SS2 in Petaling Jaya, a location aware service will show you the various information, depending on what they were developed for. This information can range from location of eateries, point of interests, offers, promotions and even people.
The concept for location aware services is not new. While the idea for location aware services has started to take root commercially in the states and slowly but surely here, Japan was the first country to have a commercial roll out for location aware services back around 2001. These services were based on triangulation for pre-GPS enabled handsets and by KDDI for GPS equipped sets. Also the concept isn’t exactly new over in the United States either as location aware services was already being used by US college campuses in order to make life easier for their student body.
Huge Potential
Over the years there have been various talk of killer apps that will “change the way” we look at mobile phones, computing etc… Well, location aware services and applications seem to be the current proverbial “killer app” for the year and I’m not surprised either considering the potential that location aware services offer.
Say you’re in a certain area of PJ which you’re not familiar with and you’re suddenly hit by a bout of hunger pains. Rather than driving or walking around looking for a place to eat, all you have to do is whip out your mobile phone, fire up that location aware service app installed and voila it tells you which restaurants are nearby.
On the social networking front, you’ll be able to network with people based on where you currently are and this opens opportunity for instantaneous meet ups instead of doing the online “dances”. An added bonus is that we actually meet up with people face to face more often than we would if we were to interact on Facebook.
Let’s not forget the huge potential in advertising that it gives companies. Offers and special events can be instantly broadcasted to people in the vicinity. Near a local bakery, suddenly up pops a 10% discount e-voucher on your phone. This opens up a new way that businesses, especially retailers and FMB outlets can interact with potential customers.
A behavioral change?
There is the potentiality that location aware services can even change how we behave or interact with our surrounding. Our shopping and eating habits (or at least the places we go to) would change to suit wherever we are. It isn’t so hard to see why location aware services have such a draw. Information of what we need, where we need it is immediately available at our fingertips. We don’t even need to push a button or fire up a browser to do a tedious search.
It also changes how to engage each other socially. With social location applications that track our movements and locations, impromptu meet ups are possible. In Shah Alam? Hey three or more friends are in the vicinity - maybe a quick lunch might be possible. Having a lonesome drink at the pub? Maybe your fellow Facebook friends who are nearby could come over and join you.
It can also open our eyes to the things that are near to us. Knowing something new about a place we’ve been all our lives would change how we live or at the very least, view the place. For example, an iPhone location aware service app called WikiMe has Wikipedia entries of local points of interest and displays them based on where you are located.
So why now?
It’s very simple really as in recent times, the amount of phones that are GPS enabled have increased tremendously. That isn’t the only reason though; with the release of the iPhone, getting apps onto your phone has become way easier. And with Android and the S60 platforms following suit with on phone stores, everyone now can easily purchase and install applications without the need of going near their PCs at all.
Wherever there is easy access to a product and at a reasonable price, there is bound to be a boom. Couple that with the novelty of GPS on a phone, people discovering new ways they can utilise their mobiles, their need for more information, and you have the settings that are just right for the boom of location aware services.
The Apps
There are hosts of location aware services available out in the market at the moment and some work here in Malaysia and others don’t. However we’ve highlighted a few that might be of interest to you.
Google Latitude
( http://google.com/latitude )
After killing off Dodgeball, Google launched its very own location based service known as Latitude. It broadcasts your location from your mobile phone and allows you to keep tabs on your social network. It uses My Location in Google Maps and uses tower triangulation to determine where you are. Despite not being iPhone-ready yet, it’s available for Android, Blackberry, Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile users.
It runs in the background and you can choose who gets to view your location and also the right to deny anyone. Latitude does hand over privacy controls to the users. They can choose how much info they want to share by opting any of these levels: no location data, city-level info or the best available data. It also integrates with other Google services such as Google Talk and Gmail.
Nokia viNe
( http://www.nseries.com/nseries/vine/ )
Nokia viNe isn’t exactly a service per se more that it is an add-on tool to your already vast set of social networking tools. Where Twitter allows you to give regular short updates on what you are doing, viNe does follow the same concept, only it allows you to broadcast your travel routes and what you’ve been doing, listening and taking with your Nokia device. It is a concept that Nokia calls the web “made by hand” allowing users to show their friends what they’ve found interesting. All of this is broadcasted onto the viNe’s website where the routes, videos and pictures can be seen.
Whrrl
( http://www.whrrl.com/ )
Whrrl is a geosocial networking and discovery site that allows both web and mobile users to find, explore, share, meet up at, and rate points-of-interest in their cities. It has integrated twitter functionalities as well as integration with Facebook which means you’re able to update your status and location and broadcast it to all your friends. It already supports BlackBerry devices as well as S60 devices and it joined the legion of iPhone apps in July 2008. Whrrl also launched a partnership with HBO enabling users to follow the characters from the popular television series of Entourage on their website.
Locale
( http://www.androidlocale.com/ )
For Android users, there’s something called Locale. Although Android is not available in Malaysia, no harm getting to know what’s in the Android Market. It allows you to create Situations, where you can set Conditions and it will change your phone settings accordingly. For example if you set your phone to be silent entering a specific place, the phone will automatically turn silent once it detects that you’re in that location. Aside from locations, users can also set times and other conditions to trigger on.
Location-aware browsers
Apart from your mobile phones, your browsers can also become location-aware with a simple plug-in. For Firefox users, there’s a new plug-in called Geode. It allows any website to query your location from Skyhook, a service used by iPhone. At the moment, it’s using WiFi to determine your position so desktops might not work well with this application.
But according to Geode, it’s implementing W3C geolocation standard which adds the native ability for websites to request you to grant access to your location. It also means that upcoming beta releases of Firefox 3.1 and its alpha releases of Fennec (Mozilla’s mobile browser) will work with that standard.
They also claim to have an accuracy of between 10 to 20 metres, normally within a second. As for privacy concerns, the current provider, Skyhook doesn’t store or use any personal identifying information and they only keep data in anonymised aggregates.
The privacy issue
This brings up the big issue of privacy. When does that much information become too much information? Location aware services have opened up a whole can of worms in the privacy debate. Proponents of such services say that it’s nothing new. As it is, we can already be tracked via our mobile phones with the right know how and programs, they say. There is even an SMS service that allows you to track your friends location, that is with their permission of course. Also in the more illegal side, a skilled cracker with the right know how would be able to hack into your mobile network and get your personal data.
We had a chat with General Manager, Nokia Singapore, Malaysia & Brunei, Vlasta Berka during a media preview of their social-location service, viNe which allows users to broadcast their routes in real time while showing people just what they are listening to or even what videos and photos they are taking.
“It’s really in the user’s hands what they want to reveal and share. They are able to choose what to disclose and who they want to share it with. Having said that however, Nokia takes privacy concerns of its users seriously. You can also remotely bar the app if you happen to lose the phone,” said Vlasta.
BBC News reported that privacy advocates are beginning to voice out. Recently the Centre for Digital Democracy in US said that “while these services will be a powerful force in our lives, they are a potential privacy nightmare.”
The comments were made following the launch of Yahoo’s Fire Eagle. The service helps manage location information for websites such as Brightkite and Loki and for any device that has Internet access.
Head of policy and advocacy at the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Paul Stephens, also commented on Fire Eagle. He feels that Yahoo can’t control how their partners choose to take advantage of the information they garnered.
“This is an opt-in service but privacy policies differ from website to website and they can be changed without warning,” he added.
Not all social location services are that honest, in fact some allows you to do otherwise. Fire Eagle lets you hide your location and even lie about where you are. Although Fire Eagle allows you to purge your info, the apps attach to it still keep the data that it collected from you. A string of apps such as Google Latitude for Android and Sparrow for iPhone lets you fill whatever you want to the location box.
Ultimately if you’re considering utilising these services, you should be prepared to deal with some of the privacy issues that crop up. Assurances from developers notwithstanding, as a user you should be responsible and smart enough to know where and when to reveal certain information and in this case your physical location. Read the terms and conditions of these services properly and decide from there if they suit your needs. Then again with many of us already involved in social sites like Facebook and Friendster, we are most likely used to dealing with such privacy issues already; that is if you were already aware of them in the first place.
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