MoMo London - Location Based Mobile Services

Wow, another cracking mobile monday last night, the place was packed and there was a great atmosphere.  Such a contrast from the dark days of 2006-7 - mobile really seems to be an exciting place right now with people from ad agencies, a new wave of mobile 2.0 startups and other assorted folk all making mobile monday the best event in London right now.

The presentation session had lots of speakers, was pretty fast paced and with lots of new stuff happening.  For the first time I began to "get" location and how it might fit into mobile and the wider digital lifestyle. 

Anyway, here's a quick write up of my notes from the evening, for anyone that missed it, or for those who attended and want to refresh their memory.  Btw - am blogging this with Zemanta a firefox plugin that helps you add links and stuff to your post easily - it's pretty good so trying to spread the word.  Oh and quick bit of housekeeping Helen Keegan of Beep Marketing the Mobile Marketing Agency, has joined the Momo London organising committee. 

Skyhook Wireless

The sponsor, Skyhook Wireless was first up to present.  They sound like a really interesting platform/ enabler play doing big things.  Props to them for also funding an after-party at a bar round the corner - not had that happen before at MoMo - good on them.  A nice quick and clear presentation, with some interesting nuggets:

- Skyhook wireless is a "hybrid" location platform that uses data from cell towers, wi-fi and GPS

- they have 50m wi-fi access points in their database, which are manually added by 500 people driving around finding them!

- they have a few startups like buddyping, rummble using their platform as well as AOL who are using it to location-enable the AIM instant messaging service (sounds interesting, mind you Meetro wasn't that successful with location based IM)

- a company called Eye Fi is now offering SD cards for cameras with wifi in them, linked to the Skyhook network this means that photos can be location-stamped when they are taken and automatically geo-tagged for uploading to flickr etc (this seems like a great idea)

Yahoo Fire Eagle - Ben Ward

Whereas Skyhook are trying to create the location infrastructure Fire Eagle seems to be sitting a bit further up the value chain, acting as an aggregator for location information from a range of sources.   

- LBS apps need to get location and use location, Fireagle provides a single service to translate location info, allow user to control how it is distributed and share it with services in a simple format

- Iamnear.net uses Fire Eagle and allows you to find local cashpoints, pubs etc (sounds like Findmynearest etc on Orange, hardly revolulionary)

- Two types of location info

- location (a point or boundary box)

- location hierarchy (e.g. a town, street, etc)

- Fire Eagle is linking to services like ambient orb and Nabaztag e.g. they can tell you when you're mate is round the corner

- real focus on allowing people to manage permission to their location data "so many sites are laying on location functionality, but disclosure an issue which Fire Eagle solves"

- also allow others to easily build location services, in beta, launching later this summer

Google

This presentation was all about Google Gears for mobile and was straight to the point and even featured a bit of code, which is always good to see on a ppt. They said a bit about gears for mobile in general then a bit on location. 

- mobile team were getting hassle from Eric Smidt about why they only release one app every 6 months, massive issues with dealing with device fragmentation, applications a nightmare to get out

- Google mobile are moving all development away from downloadable apps to the mobile web (wow! this is big news)

- but mobile web apps also suck at the moment:

  - can only support one javascript thread or the UI blocks

  - can't access location, camera, address book

  - high latency etc

- Google mobile gears improves on the mobile browser, providing storage, data resources, processing, running multiple queries, device access and secure access to user location features

- first API will be geolocation, providing simple access to user location (seems to overlap a bit with Fire Eagle)

- simple call, identical, standard API on mobile devices and can choose location provider (either Google or third party)

- mobile location API will provide positioning request, positioning updating, last known position

W3C

- working on a standard geolocation API to allow people to get location from any sources/ service and integrate in a standard fashion (sounds familiar)

- Join the mailing list if you are interested in contributing

Rummble

Have not seen a Rummble presentation before and it was pretty interesting to see what they are building at the B2C end of the market.  Big lightbulb moment when they talked about instant results e.g. location-aware info that just pops up on your phone without an active search e.g. it's persistent.  Can see how this would be valuable - the trick is making it work easily on your phone.

- Rummble has been around a while (previously it was playtxt), launched horribly early before 3/4 years before users and technology was ready! So have learnt a lot of things...

- developing mobile apps is painful, hardware is there but user epxerience is still slow

- Wisdom of the Crowds doesn't work for location, you end up with Wetherspoons (bland UK pub chain)

- ... users are lazy, they aren't going to make a massive effort to try and grapple with new services

- GPS proliferation good for mobile LBS industry as it has allowed people to get to grips with the concept

- Rummble instandly delivers relevant content that you can use on a daily basis

- LBS services need to be trusted, relevant, immediate, easy to access

Buddyping - Justin Davies

Buddyping is a product from Ninety Ten, who build social media platforms for major brands, one of which is Buddyping.  These guys have been working on mobile location based services for a long time and really know their stuff, in fact, they were probably one of the first to launch a mobile LBS 2.0 service. 

Buddyping was the only company to do a live demo, using a camera pointed at a handset which was worth risking as it helped to break up the presentations a bit.  Live demos are really important at Momo as they ensure that it isn't just death by powerpoint.  The demo was on the Buddyping Symbian client on an N95.  Key points:

- hardest thing for mobile LBS startups is getting lcoation data cheaply across lots of handsets, Skyhook are a good option!

- Buddyping lets you find friends' location, and integrates with facebook, twitter and finds relevant info like maps

- location must go beyond phonebook to include social network wherever that lives e.g. bebo, facebook, twitter, myspace and provide a contextual overlay

- there's not likely to be a mobile-only location based soc net that takes off, got to integrate with web-based soc nets

Locatrix

Locatrix is an Australian company that develops mobile LBS and mososo apps and aims at working with Mobile Network Operators (Telstra). 

- Uandme is their LBS service, with proximity alerts (sends you an sms if someone in the area)

- to make an end-to-end service you need lots of integration with billing, OSS, SMSC, MMSC, mapping, GPS etc

- location is the key element of the mobile experience, the one thing that changes compared to a fixed platforms

- need to make sure there's a business model (hence they are aiming at operators)

- the location ecology/ value chain has lots of different layers

PANEL

- some people really care a lot about privacy issue, some don't e.g. South Africa, no-one cares, regulator doesn't care about privacy, up to the individual to manage it (Rummble)

- location information needs to be made simpler, technically you can get location info but needs to be scaleable for users and as a business model (Buddyping)

- Cell ID can be "good enough" for a lot of use cases, even though it isn't that accurate

- location is being commoditised, what you do with it is important, got to be part of a wider picture/ service

- first stage issues are currently largely around power, market is at an early stage

- business models emerging, advertisers very interested, Loopt in the US is running a subscription service

Right that's it! Thanks again to the organisers and the sponsor for the drinks.  Shouts to @technokitten, @deidre, @tarek, @mbites, @justindavies, Google mobile crew, Racepoint, Mint Digital, Sirish.

PS You can read another write up at http://puddingrelations.blogspot.com/2008/07/pr-event-mobile-monday-enabling.html

and here's another http://www.dw2-0.com/2008/07/momo-london-momentum-continues.html

Comments

[David Wood]

>Google mobile are moving all development away from downloadable apps to the mobile web (wow! this is big news)

I'm not sure I remember the statement being quite as clear cut as that. But I agree that there are some important big ideas here. Reading your blog gave me inspiration to pull together the following thoughts: http://www.dw2-0.com/2008/07/mobile-development-in-hurry.html

// David Wood, Symbian

[Deirdre Molloy]

Sterling write-up James. I know what you mean about the getting the sense from proceedings that location based mobile services have turned a corner.

But who is this deidre that you speak of?! I don't think she's UK-based ;-)

BTW, Suzanne from Chinwag has done a nifty little post on the event too:
http://tinyurl.com/5j7xg3

Cheers,
Deirdre

[james (mjelly)]

thanks deirdre sorry i spelt yur name wrong again!

[Pietig]

G8 tech blog man.Now a days we find google everywhere.

[Juan]

Hi everyone.

A few days ago, I was surfing the web and I found out a project that works over most mobile phones which lets you know where your friends are in real time and update your status in twitter. It´s called Dimdix.

On their website they say you don´t need a GPS system to detect your location. Does anyone know how this works?

I´m using a Motorola L7 and amazingly it detected my location.

I cannot stop thinking of all the things I could do with it.

If anyone wants to take a look you can go here

Thanks,

Regards,

[Juan]

http://www.dimdix.com :$

[fussball]

Gute Arbeit hier! Gute Inhalte.