Session: Mobile/SMS/GPS/LBS - Daniel Newman
Event: BarCampDenver
Location: Window conference room
Time: 11:00
- Rule: All speakers must define their TLA's (three-letter acronymns)
- SMS:
- GPS: Gloabl positioning service
- LBS: Location-based services
- SIP: Session Initiation Protocol - open VoIP (voice over Internet protocol)
- PBX: private branch exchange
- Problem with mobile services: Carriers want money from consumers; little competition currently exists.
- Upcoming: wifi/SIP phones, wifi/Skype
- Digium sells little boxes to build your own VoIP PBX; they sponsor Asterix
- Will we reach the point where cities are saturated by wifi/wimax, and everyone can get a wifi/wimax phone? Will telco lobbyists complain?
- What about wifi/wimax and 911?
- IETF has worked on geo-location privacy; give location only to 911, but not marketing.
- Presence -- currently: online/offline/in meeting/sleeping/whatever
- Presence -- future: what's playing on mp3 player, where am I, what am I wearing, etc.
- Customers can manage "buddy lists" providing presence information
- Moving from calling a location where a person happens to be, to calling a person whose location is indeterminate.
- plazes.com -- geo-location based on IP address
- Application: Send message initiating chat to all buddy-list friends in town today to discuss getting together tonight.
- Blackberry version of Google Maps "is fantastic"
- Emerging problem: Filtering information -- what do you pay attention to? Who/what manages what you see and what you don't see?
- Filtering currently relates aggregating content -- Google News versus a human filtering news articles for a newspaper/online service
- Website: dodgeball -- location-based social networking service; users send messages to server, server broadcasts to buddy list
- Website: jillslist (?) -- personal recomendation websites (astroturf?)
- Cell networks keep track of which tower a phone is associated with; it's trivial to get location ballpark that way. Technologies exist to correlate signal strength from multiple cell towers to get location more accurately. Who has access to this information?
- What about spam/advertising? Will spam make location-based services useless? What is the difference between spam and advertising?
- Service: Take a picture of a barcode of a product and make decisions about: whether it's a good deal (what it sells for on eBay); whether it's produced by socially-concious companies.
- Someone mentioned the :Cue:Cat, with respect to scanning barcodes.
- Junkyard application: Hand-held computer with inventory of parts in an arbitrary car; buyers can tell how much to pay for a car at auction.
- Grocery stores in the north east are test-marketing a service with a shopping cart that scans sales and auto-charges cards. Uses location-based advertising.
