Self localization on non-GPS enabled mobile phones isn’t new. Google Maps Mobile does it, and the the US cell carriers Helio and Sprint have added services like Buddy Beacon or Loopt, which even let you locate your friends. Yet another service has launched in Germany called NowHere. I stumbled across an ad for their service on Facebook today and immediately tried it out.

So let’s start with my personal expectations first. The ad promised to “localize your friends via mobile phone and find out where they hang out - easily and free”. So that sounded interesting.

After registering on a rather dry looking site and confirming by SMS I want to be located with NowHere, I was keen to find out how I can find or add friends. But the only option given to me was a search form. No way to access friends I’m already connected with on other social communities or even run a match with my address book. I also didn’t find out how to use the service on my mobile. Wasn’t the promise of the ad to localize friends via mobile phone? Or did they mean the localization happens utilizing my friends’ mobile phone, not necessarily me being able to localize them using my phone?? Oh well.

So I’m left with locating myself in front of my laptop. And while I do this the pin marker often appears miles from my actual location. So in terms of proximity the location is more on a city level than on a street level. Maybe NowHere should take a peak at how the guys at Google display the “My Location” pin on Goggle Maps Mobile and nicely manage the user expectation of how exact the location is.

And then, what do you do with a city level location? Is this suitable for a service targeted at a young, urban user base - who want to find out where their friends hang out? Or should NowHere think about targeting business users - who are more interested to find out who of their peers are in town today. (If the latter is the case, then move advertising from Facebook to LinkedIn or Xing!)

My view is that NowHere seems to got the technology side to work, but needs a better way of making this an actual marketable product. One first step might be to try and tightly integrate into existing social networks, so NowHere users are not required to built up yet another friends list.

As you might heard Nokia is pushing connected location based devices and context aware Internet services. They announced Ovi in August 2007, a portal for consumers to get to and share music, games and maps.Now they have started a beta version of a sports tracking portal that extends their GPS enabled mobile phones. Funny enough, this is not integrated into Ovi but a standalone website for now. But let’s take a closer look.

With Nokia Sport Tracker you can keep track of training activities like running, cycling, skiing, and driving (of course!). First you need to register with the Nokia Sport Tracker site, set up your profile and download the Sports Tracker application for your phone. Sport Tracker basically works with all Nokia phones running the S60 software. See a full list of supported Nokia phones here. Then of course you need a GPS enabled phone. Either one that comes with GPS as a standard (e.g. the N95, N82, 6110 Navigator), or one you can pair with an external GPS receiver, like the nifty Nokia LD-4W.

Here is the route of my first go at using Sports Tracker. I did a quick drive around the area of my office. All you have to do is start the Sport Tracker application. Then select “new workout” from the menu und press “start”. Now the clock starts ticking and the tracking begins. It took a while for the N95 I used to pick up the GPS signal, but then everything was cool. The application started to record time, speed, elevation, and the route I was driving.

After I did my lap I simply pressed “stop” and then uploaded my workout to the portal straight from the phone.

Now back to the Sports Tracker web site where I can see the route I was driving and a nice graph of the speed and time it took me to get around my lap. I can’t wait to take this to a proper track next spring.

While I think this is a great demonstration of how to extend the physical Nokia phone products to the web, I wonder how many athletes will make use of Sports Tracker in the long run, literally.

When visiting a foreign city on your own you probably prepare yourself by checking out a few places in advance, don’t you? You look up where your hotel is, the places you plan to visit (or the office), surrounding restaurants, bars, shopping, ATMs etc.
At least that is what I did when I was traveling on business to Chicago just recently. I’m much more comfortable while traveling when I explore the destination a little bit in advance.

So what I did was bookmarking or “map-marking” a couple of places on an online map.

View Larger Map

I annotated those map marks and so whenever I needed to orientate myself I could quickly open the mapping site on the web and have a look without typing in and looking up the same place (hotel, office) every time again.
I also updated the comments of my map-marks as I will probably visit Chicago again and want to remember where I went and how the experience was. Plus I can now share my personal map with colleagues or friends going to Chicago.

The only two things I was missing were these:

I’d love to have my personal map and map-marks on my mobile for on the go orientation. This could have been even an offline version, as all I want to do is quickly have a look at what I had set up already online. Of course I wouldn’t mind using the map online on my phone (i.e. over a data connection). But I somehow struggled to use my phone to go online and so and offline version would be a safe bet for such a service.

The other thing I’d love was to have an offline version on my laptop. My hotel had a steep rate for Internet access and although my company would probably pay for it, I was just to greedy to use it. So when returning back to the hotel after work I’d love to be able to check my map again and see where exactly to go for food and drinks I had researched before the trip.

One can argue that all hotels have some sort of free tourist guide and a map available at the concierge. However, those recommendations are often quite mainstream or biased by being paid for to be on that map.
Call me a punk or a chicken, but in today’s digital age I just don’t want to scribble around on a paper map and carry it around in my back pocket. Not to talk about unfolding it and letting everyone know that I’m a tourist.

I’d like to know if you have any experiences, tips and thoughts about what I just described. Are there better tools out there to set up and share map-marks?

The Firefox Minimap Sidebar is a handy little thing. It allows you to very quickly locate any address on a map in a sidebar window of your browser.

It’s an easy Firefox add-on install and once the Minimap Sidebar is open, simply highlight an address you found on a website and drag and drop the address from the website into the Minimap Sidebar’s drop box. And voilà, the location is displayed on a Google Map.

It doesn’t stop there though. Addresses are listed in the box for later use. These can then be used for driving directions by selecting them from a drop down. You can also set a home address and start routing to and from there. The choice is yours whether you prefer Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps or Microsoft’s Live Local.
And last but not least you can also share the location by getting its coordinates, a link to the map page, e-mail the link or even get an embed code for your own site - and all that straight from a right-click context menu.
KML and GeoRSS are also supported and of course you can also manually type in an address. Once an address is located you can browse places with Tagzania, Platial, or Loc.alize.us flickr photos.

The Minimap Sidebar is developed by Tony Farndon. Go visit his site at http://firefox.spatialviews.com/ where you’ll find the download link as well.

Highlight address details on page and drag to drop zone in lower left corner.

The map view is updated with the address. Start routing or exploring.

In the past few weeks I’ve looked at a couple of different local search services. After BMW announced last week that Google Local Search is now available from the latest BMW onboard navigation system it is about time to share some thoughts with you. I also have to admit writing this post has been fueled by a discussion about whether Yellow Pages are of any use these days or just a waste of paper. Even Seth Godin, has posted on his blog about the possibilities and opportunities of putting the “Yellow Pages in your Pocket“
So besides BMW, let’s have a look at two mobile product/shop finders and how to choose a proper pub in Japan.

Sprint, a US based mobile carrier has recently launched a location based product finder. The service is provided by Slifter, whose promise it is to find any product you are looking for at a local store near you.
Slifter can actually be used with any phone that has a web browser. Simply type in the product you’re looking for and the zip code of the area you want to search the product in and you get back a list of search results.
I was wondering who actually knows an area’s zip code away from home and so did Sprint. The trick with Sprint is that selected handsets are “GPS-enabled”, so you don’t have to type in a zip code. However I’m not sure what GPS-enabled means for Sprint as they had phones listed I wasn’t even aware of having a GPS chip, e.g. the LG 550, the RAZR V3m, or the Samsung M610. I had a look at the manufacturer websites and I couldn’t see a GPS chip on any of those phones’ specifications listings. (If I’m wrong, let me know!).

But let’s refocus on the service.
I gave it a shot and searched for a yummy “cheese cake” in the zip code area 10003, which is New York’s East Village where I once lived.
Unfortunately, the result that I got back was for a Jazz CD titled “Cheese Cake” at the online store Buy.com. Well, not really what I was looking for. It seems like local search is not a piece of cake for Slifter as a couple of other searches led to similar awkward results.

Another service I looked at was ShopLocal.
Since the beginning of August they also offer mobile local search in addition to their web search site. The mobile service was developed in partnership with uLocate Communications as a widget on the WHERE platform. The biggest difference here is that you can’t simply open your mobile phone’s browser, visit a mobile web page and do a search. You have to download a widget application first and install it on your phone - at US$ 2.99 a month the widget has a price. Is it worth it? I honestly don’t know because it only works with US carriers. Please let me know if you have experienced ShopLocal on your phone and share your thoughts.
I did a couple of ShopLocal searches using their website and yes, it found Cheese Cake in New York … at Amazon.com. That not really the localized search result I expected.

So I can only agree with Steve Smith, who asked “What The Hell is Mobile Search Anyway?” after a rather sponsored experience on his phone.
To me it seems like Slifter and ShopLocal are more or less an advertising platform and if the local store at the corner hasn’t bought into it, it won’t display in the search results. The expectation of local search though is a different one for consumers. You’d expect an unbiased truly local store search. When doing a local search on the go you don’t want e-commerce links, you want the address of the next nearby store that carries what you are looking for. Am I wrong?

BMW is meeting that expectation by offering Google Local Search on their onboard navigation systems in Germany.
Simply enter what you are looking for and Google delivers relevant search results right around your car’s current position. If you read about what Google is up to by paying freelancers to go from store to store and catalogue local business free for the stores’ owners then you might not be too surprised that they are clearly on the right track.
I think this is a nice step to make BMW Connected Drive the leader of the automotive pack. They have already introduced a “Send-to-Car” feature in early March. Look up a destination in Google Maps and send it to your BMW’s cellular-based Drive Assist navigation system.
Now let’s look at how Guinness is bridging the distribution channel divide in Tokyo.
Consumers thirsty for a pint of the Irish draught can easily locate a proper pub nearby using the mobile local search called Guinness Navi. They simply snap a picture of a Guinness QR code to pull open the Guinness Navi mobile search page. Of course the Guinness Navi URL can be entered manually too, but QR codes are so popular in Japan that this significantly lowers the barrier of usage vs. manually typing in a URL.

Once the Guinness Navi search page is accessed the consumers location is send to the service which then displays a map with the closest pubs serving Guinness. The consumer’s location is determined by using any of the localizing technologies available in Japan; antenna triangulation/cell ID, GPS, Wifi, and of course also manual address input.
You can see the desktop version of the map on the Guinness website.

Guinness Navi was developed by Naviblog a Tokyo-based mobile marketing firm and as no downloads, installs or updates are needed for using the service it’s really nice and slick.
Kampai!

Last week Nokia introduced “Ovi“, their new extended platform for mobile services.
Ovi is supposed to offer a consolidated web portal to already existing Nokia mobile services, like music, games, and maps. Plus they plan to enable access to users’ existing social network, communities and content.
Nokia’s aim is to bring even more Internet based services to Ovi in the coming months, so we can all be curious.

As Nokia is offering a map application for their phones to European customers already this will now be integrated into the new home.
So far the Nokia Maps application offers services like,
maps of 150 countries, navigation and routing, supporting internal as well as external GPS receivers
3D route guidance of voice-guided navigation (at additional costs),
and city guides.

As Ovi means “door” in Finish you can see their ambition: an easy to use one-stop place on the web for users to access their Nokia services.

The Ovi is not yet open. But I’ll post again about it once it is.

NFC, short for Near Field Communication is a technology that enables the communication between devices over a short distance (ca. 0-8 inches), using magnetic field induction. The technology is primarily aimed at usage in mobile phones.

Now why do I think this can be alternative to GPS? Because I’m a dreamer!
So here is what I was thinking:
With NFC you can transfer location coordinates from a transponder to a phone. As it works without the need for satellite reception it is perfect for urban street canyons or indoor use like subways, shopping malls, or conference centers. Yes, because of the short range there is a downside which is the need for tagging street corners or building corridors with transponders. And yes, NFC is still in its infancy. So let’s look at a field test I was able to sneak myself in - and my experiences so far.

Let me set the stage first.
My local public transportation services company is already offering a mobile phone ticketing solution - sans the need for NFC. Passengers can download an application to their mobile phones and use this to purchase paperless pay-per-ride tickets to use trains and buses. This works on almost every phone with Internet access.

Here is what you do to buy a ticket:
If you have bookmarked the application on your phone, it shouldn’t take more than 2 clicks to start it up. Another 2 clicks and you can type in the stop where you want to begin your journey. Then enter the stop’s name, which is not too trivial given many names are not included in the standard T9 dictionary. And then it’s only another six clicks before you can actually purchase the ticket.

Long story short: Not user friendly at all.
The hassle of digging for loose change is replaced by the hassle of too many clicks on your phone.

Enter NFC.
NFC is indented for mobile micro payments, e-tickets, access control and the like. No wonder a public transportation company is looking into testing it to make mobile ticketing easier. And it really does. Keep on reading to see how.

So about two weeks ago I received a Nokia 6131 NFC, provided to me at no charge by the public transportation company. As this is a field test and I’m a volunteer I can even keep the phone. (Thank you RMV!) After unpacking the phone I downloaded the software and installed it - and that was it. I was all set.

Well, not really all set, because all my contacts where still missing on the phone and I couldn’t get it synced with my Vaio at work nor with my MacBook at home. A little bit of tinkering finally resolved the issue (thank you Thierry) and I could easily transfer my address book from my Mac to the phone. Oh, I’d also like to thank Nokia for not even replying to my cry for help via their support center.
I’m sharing this hassle because you have to put yourself in the consumers’ shoes when rolling out a new technology that requires the replacement of a personal device such as a mobile phone.

But let’s look at how NFC has changed the ticket purchasing process.
When I approach a station, I simply flip open the phone and briefly hold it to a transponder tag attached to the ticket machine or stop sign post. The phone reads the embedded information of the tag which are the stop’s name, a unique ID, and the WAP address of the station’s schedule. This triggers the ticketing application on the phone to pop open, with the name of the stop already selected. Now it’s only one more click to choose a ticket type, confirm the purchase and you’re done.
One word: Easy!

What you have to know is, where I live there are no turnstiles like in New York’s Subway, London’s Tube or Paris’ Métro. You simply walk into the station, past the ticketing machines, down the stairs, and get on a train. Trams and buses don’t require you to show a valid ticket before or while you board or stamp it in the cars. It’s a very liberal system with very rare random ticket checks by teams of ticket inspectors. So the infrastructure really supports a mobile ticketing solution without the need for special changes to any hardware. Instead of a small paper ticket you simply show your digital ticket on the mobile phone to the inspectors - if you’re lucky enough to make that encounter.

But now let’s return to my question of whether NFC can be an alternative to GPS.
I think that if an NFC tag can tell my phone the name of a station and provide the URL of that station’s schedule, it might as well tell my phone the lat/long coordinates for a navigation application or simply the URL of a mapping site displaying the current location. Do you agree?

If this works NFC could be utilized for …

• well, mapping (not navigation),
• micro maps in shopping malls,
• guiding folks to their seats at events (and to the rest rooms!),
• telling you where you’ve parked your car in that monster parking garage at the airport,
• and whatever you can dream up (let me know!).

What I don’t know is …

• whether it’s less expensive to embed NFC into mobile phones than GPS,
• whether NFC will establish itself and by when,
• whether it will be adapted by location based services,
• whether you think I’m a crazy prankster.

So let me know your thoughts.

In the last two posts I looked at how TomTom and Google are engaging users to contribute or refine map data. Today I came across the news that Google has started a program to pay independent contractors to capture the details of local businesses like stores, restaurants, and service providers. Google’s intention is to not only index where on a map local businesses are, but also more detailed information like opening hours, payment options, the various offerings, and a couple of photos of the store, storefront or building.
While local businesses can already sign up themselves , this is clearly a move by Google to actively become tomorrow’s Yellow Pages. Clever as Google is, they encourage the contractors, which may refer to themselves as “Google Business Referral Representatives”, to introduce Google’s advertising opportunities while talking to store owners.
And there is really a lot more to this.

I think this is particularly interesting because by sending out swarms of contractors to catalog small and medium businesses and convert them into advertising customers Google may be able to kill two birds with one stone.
First of all they offer businesses a free listing in today’s de facto number one online shopping portal - and by that increase their superiority when it comes to local search results too.
And second, they offer an advertising opportunity, which may be soon directly geo-tied to local search results. This gets even more interesting if you think about the possibility of Google Maps becoming the users’ first choice on portable devices like map enabled smart phones - which again will make it the primary business listing for store owners. By creating this network effect Google sets out to dominate not only web, but also local search.

Google has always been very smart at leveraging its content and tool offerings to sell advertising in their rather discreet “sponsored links” fashion.
So when local businesses are given the opportunity to hyperlocalize their advertising with self-service tools like Google AdWords (or AdLocal?) the really clever ones will soon start including up to the minute special offers, let’s say a low price on an overstocked item, a special lunch deal around noon, umbrellas when it starts raining, or whatever they think will help them convert searching passersby to customers. And to encourage just that Google is happy to once again hit it twice. Once business owners review the details online for accuracy that have been collected by the contractors, they can get a free US$25 credit to spend on AdWords. This ensures a proper QA and drives Google’s AdWords business - at least when the business owner has a website to promote. If not, well then Google might need to come up with an idea around how to measure conversion of consumers to a store visit rather than a website visit. I’d say with mobile couponing just around the corner, a solution is in sight already.

What do you think?

The July issue of WIRED features two interesting articles - and you may have seen them already. If not, please find a brief overview and links to the articles below. I’m also pointing out some sections I found most interesting and like to share why I’ve picked them.

The first article is titled “Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World“.
The article gives some fascinating insights into how Google Maps and Google Earth developed over time. You will also learn who the key persons were to drive most of the cool usage possibilities these services are recognized for today. An interesting read beefed up with interviews of some of the leaders and pioneers of the (online) GIS industry like John Hanke, Director of Google Earth and Google Maps, Michael Goodchild, a professor of geography at UC Santa Barbara, Paul Rademacher, creator of the first Google Maps mashup, and David Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

The second article is “Dispatches From the Hyperlocal Future“, written by no other than cyberpunk Bruce Sterling. His protagonist is Harvey Feldspar, a self proclaimed top tier geo blogger, typing dictating away on his Senseo-Transicast 3000 in the summer of 2017. Harvey is ranting and raving about geospatial and hyperlocal gadgets and feature sets.

While I very much recommend reading the two articles yourself first, here are a few quotes or paragraphs I liked most. And I’ll also tell you why.

About user generated map data:
“It didn’t take sophisticated software,” Hanke says. “What it took was a substrate — the satellite imagery of Earth — in an accessible form and a simple authoring language for people to create and share stuff. Once that software existed, the urge to describe and annotate just took off.”

We can argue about user generated maps’ data quality, reliability, and possible bias of POI entries. However, no one can deny the fact that the Internet has democratized the tools for production in many areas - map making being one of them. Chris Anderson wrote in “The Long Tail“: “Never underestimate the power of a million people with keys to the factory.”
So in case you might wonder whether this is the end of digital map providers like Navteq and TeleAtlas: I don’t think it is. It is just a perfect example of how you can allow people to add value to a product. “Give people the power to create their own ground truth,” as Mike Liebhold, a senior researcher specializing in geospatial technology at Silicon Valley’s Institute for the Future is quoted in the article.
I see great potential in allowing people to create a much richer hyperlocal detail level and then making those map layers available to a broad audience. Filtering will help find and boost the relevance of these layers to individual users in a magnitude never dreamed of before: The wine & dine layer, the scenic roads layer, the hip-hop culture layer, the shoe boutique layer, the Obscure-Street-Food- in-Eastern-Jackson-Heights layer … build your own and extent the long tail.
The call is for the map and map device makers to enable user-generated micro layers to be easily made, offered, found, and applied.

About hyperlocal advertising:
“I’m [...] careering along the Beltway [in a Hyundai GPS-King]. I downloaded a cool plug-in to block out the gas-food-lodging ads that hit my screen a quarter mile before each exit, so I’m free to concentrate. What do I care about lodging anyway?”

I agree location based advertising is one of the many emerging possibilities often mused about. And above is the horror scenario, isn’t it? Given what is possible today I see a different scenario if only ad-serving technology would be used at its full potential. Context is king. And that means active context, initiated by the user - not passive context, observed by some software.
It’s really an old story: Pushing out messaging to users based on observed behavior rather than users’ explicit preferences does not work too well. But hey, the time will come and a broader level of marketeers and media agencies will get it too.

About social-localizing:
“It’s the most common question during cell phone conversations: “Where you at, dawg?” Those queries will soon be obsolete. Helio’s Buddy Beacon allows you to locate other “don’t-call-it-a-phone” users on MapQuest by glancing down at your screen.”

This is not the future. This is today!
Helio has indeed launched the Buddy Beacon service late last year. Read more about this location based socializing service on Matt’s blog. Yet another mobile friend finding service is Loopt, who according to Reuters where able to sign up about 40,000 customers in the first seven weeks of a free trial after signing a deal with Boost Mobile.
This may sound like a very geeky application, targeted at the young and footloose generation. But that’s not my point. I think services like these will have a great affect on how a whole range of future location based service will be adopted by this (and other) generations in the years to come.

The extensive coverage by WIRED will definitely propel the thinking to new height. So what do you think?

So TomTom is acquiring Tele Atlas and according to the joined press release, one of the main benefits is “more accurate navigation information” by utilizing “[…] TomTom’s installed user base of over 10 million GPS devices to effectively operate as map surveyors in an automatic and simple way.”
So let’s look at this in more detail.

The above seems to refer to the June 2007 announcement of TomTom to introduce a feature they call Map Share (see the press release). While the overall concept was greeted with a lot of applause, the first release of Map Share boils down to offer only very limited feedback possibilities and they will not be as automatic and simple as promised.

The features are:

• Block and unblock a street
• Reverse a street’s traffic direction
• Edit a street name
• Add a missing POI
• Edit a POI
• Report other errors

The Map Share feature will at first be offered with the newest yet to be released TomTom GO 520 and TomTom GO 720 - so it is essentially not installed on any of the over 10 million devices today.

TomTom enthusiasts have expressed their disappointment on online message boards about Map Share’s limited feedback possibilities and also about how participation is encouraged: Not at all.
One user wrote: “When I help to improve the map data, I’m expecting some kind of reward or a discount when buying a map update. Who am I to report map improvements via TomTom to Tele Atlas and then pay them for my own improvements?”
Another user suggests to simply find a way to post the corrections and improvements to a server for everyone in the TomTom community to download for free, bypassing Tele Atlas. Something that even TomTom has thought about already, planning to offer the exchange of non-validated map changes via their TomTom HOME service which over 1 million users have signed up for.

Without doubt there will always be altruistic enthusiast aka Social Utilitarians who are willing to submit correction for a better future. Tele Atlas has introduced Map Insight in late 2006, a process of reporting map improvements on the Tele Atlas website. Joy Morel, Tele Atlas Consumer Markets Director said they receive “thousands of reports each month for review” in an interview with ClubTomTom. He goes on to explain that “these reports go through extensive quality control checks to ensure only the most accurate reports are captured and expedited into Tele Atlas systems.” This sounds fair but I wonder how Tele Atlas is going to cope with a growing number of user reports, especially when contributors expect to see their submissions in the next map update release they purchase.

But let’s refocus on the promise of a large community of TomTom owners continuously improving Tele Atlas’ map data. The challenge is still ahead: How to get a large volume of user to contribute?

As we all know the obvious top incentive is filthy lucre. This can work in three ways.
Offer a relatively small incentive for every report, just like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has built a business model around farming out simple desktop tasks for about 10 cents a task.
Or do it the other way around. Just remember the guy requesting a discount in exchange for submitting a report.
And then you can always advertise a really big incentive that will only be granted to one randomly winning contributor - lottery style.

TomTom’s management may want to take a look at how Luis von Ahn is trying to harvest the idle moments in our lives and turn them to productive use. WIRED has a great article with the punch line being: “People will contribute their brainpower, but only if they’re given an enjoyable, time-killing experience in exchange.” Yes, we are basically talking about something quite similar to a video game. Whether this is the road to follow I’m not too sure, but it definitely should spark some thinking.

While the acquisition of Tele Atlas makes a lot of sense in many areas for TomTom, I personally think they’ve exaggerated quite a bit when it comes to talking about an armada of loyal customers automatically reporting map improvements as they go.