| Location, location, location |
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| Written by Aeon McNulty | |
| Saturday, 27 October 2007 | |
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I've written about this several times, and here's yet another
location-based service that has recently sprung up. This one, however,
seems to be significantly further along than the numerous other
augmented reality technologies I've been impatiently watching develop. Whrr l, as John Cook reports ,
not only allows mobile phone users to chronicle their social
activities, but plots the information on a map and combines it with
similar content from friends. It also provides the real-time locations
of people as they wander from place to place in a city, tracking chosen
friends as dots on a map. This is heady stuff, like Harry Potter's map that showed people moving about Hogwarts. The difference is that young Harry's needed magic; this one uses technology. Furthermore, in that not everyone wants their movements to be known, you can set different levels of secrecy, either showing your whereabouts only to chosen friends, or going all the way up to a full-scale Romulan cloaking device; and that was supposed to be science fiction. Led by Jeff Holden and Darren Erik Vengroff, both of whom previously held high-ranking positions at Amazon.com, Pelago is one of a number of companies trying to tap the emerging arena of location-based services. The idea is that mobile phone users will want to locate friends -- who may be at a nearby restaurant -- or at the very least get a review of the restaurant that a friend wrote a few weeks ago.The idea is to combine social data with factual knowledge, and access 'tribal knowledge' from friends about which places are good to eat at, or worth seeing, or merit a visit. Meanwhile Google has bought Jaiku , a competitor that allows mobile-phone users to create a running web log of events, recommendations and other information. And also out there is Twitter , which I wrote up before, that also allows people to share small tidbits of information with friends. The market for location-based services begins to get crowded, and not before time.
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