Where Are the Other Mobile Buddies Around Town?

The WOMBAT (Where Are the Other Mobile Buddies Around Town?) written by people from BT, T-Systems, Portugal Telecom and Elisa Communication, talks on the feasibility to introduce location based services to fulfill the demands of the youth market considering today’s technology constraints. It particularly focuses on how positioning technologies can aid young people micro-coordinate (making arrangements while on the move). By making a lot of over-simplifications and using basic usage scenarios their result show that:

Virtually no positioning technology is able to meet the requirements, and only by limiting the service offering in terms of accuracy and usage environment, can some of the current technologies begin to meet the needs of the youth market.

They explain the lack of acceptance of LBS by young people is due to technical limitations. We know it is more complicated than that. They make references to very general findings on how young people use mobile technologies (an intrinsic part of their lifestyles, communication is key, peer groups, mainly used indoors) without really trying to understand the habits of coordinating and their social impacts.

Nicolas has interesting words about it.