Capitalizing On The Location-Based Services Opportunity
Posted: December 21st, 2005 | 1 Comment »I wanted to get some update on the JSR-179 implementation and stubbled on Capitalizing On The Location-Based Services Opportunity, a March 2005 document by Nokia for their developers community. It is strange to notice Nokia pushing for A-GPS solutions while my understanding was that Nokia (unlike Motorola) did not want to embed GPS into their products. I could also spot some irony in “Applications that use LBS are limited only by developers’ imagination“. This has to be ironic, right!?. Anyway, it is still not clear to me on how much the JSR-179 Location API allows us to develop terminal-resident (better for privacy and less dependent to operators) rather than network-resident applications. I’ll need to get myself a JSR-179 enabled device in order to really find out I guess.
The document mentions the usual application opportunities (all related to billing models and positioning technologies, of course):
- Mapping, navigation and directions application, and the ability to combine them with other services
- Workforce tracking
- Entertainment and gaming
- “Finder” that helps to locate friends and things.
- Location-enhanced imaging
- Weather applications
- Location-based reminder
On the semantic of privacy, it is interesting to notice that people allowing other to locate them are considered as “friends” and never as “employees”.
Wavemarket is one of the operations out there that codes employees as generic “resources” in their Resource Finder application. Blech. Horrid idea, but in service of the enterprise, it makes lots of “good” sense, in the same way that trimming workforce to maintain a competitive profile in the marketplace makes “good” sense. (Practice before ethics — something business schools probably teach when they do teach ethics.)