The Year of Location Based Services (LBS)

BARCELONA -I attended a great seminar on Wednesday at the Mobile World Congress, where various panellists presented and then debated their view on LBS's for 2008, including Nokia's Michael Halbherr and Googles' Gummi Hafsteinsson.

Nokia kicked off the session by stating their expectation to ship 35m handsets with GPS in 2008 and that all N-series will come equipped with in-built GPS. Michael also stated that increasingly, Nokia is looking to incorporate a compass for navigation within their handsets (making the vision outlined in my earlier post on 'Point to Discover' one step closer).

A key note from Nokia was that LBS were 'really about the pedestrian experience', a point that is sometimes lost amongst the noise surrounding LBS.

Onwards to Gummi from Google, who emphasised that for LBS's to work they need to get 3 things right: Openness, Comprehensiveness and Juxtaposition of Data.

Other key items discussed were: the need for educating the consumer on the usage of GPS functionality and for hybrid solutions that can ensure location coverage in all situations (GPS outdoors and Wi-Fi hotspots indoors) as well as the trend towards 3D mapping, with the height of buildings in urban areas being an important factor in adding relevance to a LBS.

Finally, the panellists concurred that in the same way as Web 2.0 was all about the comunity effect, so will the success of future LBS applications be determined by community-generated content.

Point to Discover (P2D)-the LBS of the future?

Location-based services (LBS) are receiving plenty of buzz these days. However, what I consider to be exciting is to look at the future possibilities for these services that lie beyond our current reckoning.

The idea of the mobile device as a pointer came up recently at the CES in Las Vegas -where we saw some prototypes of handsets capable of projecting their screen's image when pointed at a blank wall.

Rainer Simon of the Telecommunications Research Centre in Vienna published a paper last year where he gives us an insight into the possibilities of P2D (Point to Discover) technology.

In his paper he asks us to: "Imagine you could point your mobile phone at a bus stop to find out when the next bus is leaving; or point at a tourist landmark to get travel guide information; at an advertisement billboard to take part in a prize draw; or at a mountain top to find out the name of the mountain while you are hiking or skiing". Sounds pretty neat, doesn't it?

Rainer also goes on to postulate that the handset of the future may well come equipped with tilt sensors and digital compasses that would turn them into true interactive, navigational devices. Eventually, handsets could be able to recognise the 3D landscape around them and compute schematized 360-degrees panoramas , presenting nearby buildings and points of interest in a simple skyline-view that scrolls horizontally as the user turns.

Some food for thought for the good folks over at Google Mobile Maps, who may well be testing how to build this future functionality into their current application as we speak...