The next challenges for mobile phones: find me and tell me who I am
Mobile phones could soon have improved tracking facilities that will remember the places we frequent and use the data to build a profile of what kind of person we are
Mobile phones have gone a long way towards finding out what cafes we frequent.
There are two great short-term challenges left for mobile phones: knowing where we are and knowing who we are.
It looks as though 2010 will be the year in which the first of these problems will be cracked because of the increasing accuracy of tracking devices thanks to location signals extracted from satellites, mobile transmitters and Wi-Fi hotspots.
If that happens then phones will already have gone a long way towards finding out who we are. If a phone knows what cafes, theatres and shops we frequent and whether we are on a plane or a train, it will know a lot about the kind of person we are.
It sounds like paradise for the advertising industry, but it is also useful for those of us who don't seem to mind information about ourselves being released to acquaintances as long as it is done with our permission.
As with CCTV cameras, the social benefits are deemed to outweigh the intrusive inconveniences. The mobile phone is rapidly becoming a kind of CCTV camera turned on ourselves for our friends to see where we are, what restaurants we like and what videos we have just taken. Location-based services have followed the usual syndrome of a new technology – a slow year-by-year improvement until critical mass is reached as it becomes cheap and reliable enough to attract developers to exploit it for profit. That critical mass is happening this year.
A turning point for me came recently when one of my favourite mobile networks, qype.co.uk, found two restaurants within 0.2 miles of my home (in central London) that I hadn't realised existed. One was a French restaurant hidden inside a hotel and the other a cafe recently converted into a tapas bar.
I then downloaded the mobile version of the Michelin Guide (to my iPod Touch) to find several Michelin-mentioned restaurants within 0.4 miles that I had also been unaware of. Whether these location-based services will ever make anyone any serious money is a moot point but they are certainly a boon to consumers as long as the phone can find where you are speedily.
Having a location-based weather service, giving temperatures along the route you propose to travel plus access to motorway webcams (through the BBC's regional websites) is proving a boon during the cold snap. There are now hundreds of location- based services and new ones are popping up all the time, including Google's Near Me Now, Foursquare.com and blockchalk.com (mainly just in the US at present) which enable you to explore local areas or to leave location-based messages at the end of your road or in a cafe, as kind of green graffiti that doesn't despoil the streets. Twitter plans to expand its location-based aspects to encourage interactivity among users at the local level to compete with other services that have been developed independently.
Satnav in cars – usually regarded as the cutting edge of location – has also been slowly improving and, equally important, collapsing in price. Copilot Live GPS Navigation (available for £25.99 as an iPhone, Android or Windows application) claims 200,000 downloads in its first six months. That's an amazing bargain compared with the high cost of dedicated satnav devices but is, itself, being undermined by Google's turn-by-turn navigation application which will be free.
The underlying problem of satnav – that they are brilliant when you don't need them (eg, in open country) but flaky in towns – remains true despite recent improvements. A new one I tried over the Christmas break, Vexia's Econav, adds a green dimension claiming that it can save you up to 25% or more in fuel charges.
Apart from offering what have become standard services, such as speed camera warnings, Econav tells you on the screen what gear you should be in from data gleaned from a database of 9,000 modes of vehicle. This suffers from the same weakness as satnav itself in that it is not much use on the motorway when you know there is no alternative to, say, fifth gear but in towns it can get irritating as it switches from two to three and back again in lagged response to rapidly changing traffic conditions.
It is excellent in directing you along the greenest route to your destination – preferring shorter cross country routes to motorways – but impatient with deviants. We decided to go by a quicker, though longer, motorway route and it was 20 miles on before Econav accepted it was beaten and re-adjusted its route. For most of the time it gave good clear directions but more than once took me down a country lane that led nowhere.
In its favour it was easy to use as it picks up where you are quickly so you just need to type in a destination post code. It is also very compact, almost the size of a smartphone – and there's the rub. Satellite navigation systems are shrinking to the size of mobiles while mobiles are acquiring the features of satnav and offering them for nothing. It is becoming the latest consumer device to be gobbled up by the mobile phone. The biggest manufacturer of satnav devices, as of cameras, calculators, music players and so forth is almost certainly – yes, you've guessed it – Nokia.
Victor Keegan
Thursday 14 January 2010 14.45 GMT
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
Mobile phones could soon have improved tracking facilities that will remember the places we frequent and use the data to build a profile of what kind of person we are
Mobile phones have gone a long way towards finding out what cafes we frequent.
There are two great short-term challenges left for mobile phones: knowing where we are and knowing who we are.
It looks as though 2010 will be the year in which the first of these problems will be cracked because of the increasing accuracy of tracking devices thanks to location signals extracted from satellites, mobile transmitters and Wi-Fi hotspots.
If that happens then phones will already have gone a long way towards finding out who we are. If a phone knows what cafes, theatres and shops we frequent and whether we are on a plane or a train, it will know a lot about the kind of person we are.
It sounds like paradise for the advertising industry, but it is also useful for those of us who don't seem to mind information about ourselves being released to acquaintances as long as it is done with our permission.
As with CCTV cameras, the social benefits are deemed to outweigh the intrusive inconveniences. The mobile phone is rapidly becoming a kind of CCTV camera turned on ourselves for our friends to see where we are, what restaurants we like and what videos we have just taken. Location-based services have followed the usual syndrome of a new technology – a slow year-by-year improvement until critical mass is reached as it becomes cheap and reliable enough to attract developers to exploit it for profit. That critical mass is happening this year.
A turning point for me came recently when one of my favourite mobile networks, qype.co.uk, found two restaurants within 0.2 miles of my home (in central London) that I hadn't realised existed. One was a French restaurant hidden inside a hotel and the other a cafe recently converted into a tapas bar.
I then downloaded the mobile version of the Michelin Guide (to my iPod Touch) to find several Michelin-mentioned restaurants within 0.4 miles that I had also been unaware of. Whether these location-based services will ever make anyone any serious money is a moot point but they are certainly a boon to consumers as long as the phone can find where you are speedily.
Having a location-based weather service, giving temperatures along the route you propose to travel plus access to motorway webcams (through the BBC's regional websites) is proving a boon during the cold snap. There are now hundreds of location- based services and new ones are popping up all the time, including Google's Near Me Now, Foursquare.com and blockchalk.com (mainly just in the US at present) which enable you to explore local areas or to leave location-based messages at the end of your road or in a cafe, as kind of green graffiti that doesn't despoil the streets. Twitter plans to expand its location-based aspects to encourage interactivity among users at the local level to compete with other services that have been developed independently.
Satnav in cars – usually regarded as the cutting edge of location – has also been slowly improving and, equally important, collapsing in price. Copilot Live GPS Navigation (available for £25.99 as an iPhone, Android or Windows application) claims 200,000 downloads in its first six months. That's an amazing bargain compared with the high cost of dedicated satnav devices but is, itself, being undermined by Google's turn-by-turn navigation application which will be free.
The underlying problem of satnav – that they are brilliant when you don't need them (eg, in open country) but flaky in towns – remains true despite recent improvements. A new one I tried over the Christmas break, Vexia's Econav, adds a green dimension claiming that it can save you up to 25% or more in fuel charges.
Apart from offering what have become standard services, such as speed camera warnings, Econav tells you on the screen what gear you should be in from data gleaned from a database of 9,000 modes of vehicle. This suffers from the same weakness as satnav itself in that it is not much use on the motorway when you know there is no alternative to, say, fifth gear but in towns it can get irritating as it switches from two to three and back again in lagged response to rapidly changing traffic conditions.
It is excellent in directing you along the greenest route to your destination – preferring shorter cross country routes to motorways – but impatient with deviants. We decided to go by a quicker, though longer, motorway route and it was 20 miles on before Econav accepted it was beaten and re-adjusted its route. For most of the time it gave good clear directions but more than once took me down a country lane that led nowhere.
In its favour it was easy to use as it picks up where you are quickly so you just need to type in a destination post code. It is also very compact, almost the size of a smartphone – and there's the rub. Satellite navigation systems are shrinking to the size of mobiles while mobiles are acquiring the features of satnav and offering them for nothing. It is becoming the latest consumer device to be gobbled up by the mobile phone. The biggest manufacturer of satnav devices, as of cameras, calculators, music players and so forth is almost certainly – yes, you've guessed it – Nokia.
Victor Keegan
Thursday 14 January 2010 14.45 GMT
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
