The winners of the Navteq Global LBS Challenge have been announced, which rewards developers for building Location Based applications.
While I’m very excited about location based services, I am sorry to say I’m slightly underwhelmed by the results. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that the technology is fiendishly clever and the guys who built these things have brains the size of planets. And that the applications do what they set out to do brilliantly. But it’s just that the applications are somehow a little predictable and well…just a bit boring.
Having said that, the overall winner is quite cool and goes by the great name of “Bones in Motion”. It’s an application that allows you to monitor, measure, share and motivate runners, by using their GPS enabled mobile phone.
It records stuff such as record time, distance, speed, location and calories burned while running (or walking and cycling, I guess) which you can upload onto the net, see graphically and share with others, if you want. And you can use it to see where other sports people run and cycle – presumably if they have the same application installed, which is pretty unlikely in the beginning, anyway.
But after that, we have things like navigation systems and child tracking applications.
Yes, nav systems are great/invaluable/brilliant and probably make shedloads of money, but don’t do much for my wow genes.
Child tracking and people tracking in general I view with huge amounts of cynicism *and* scepticism.
There’s two main problems with people tracking.
Firstly, you don’t track people, you track their phones. So in Scenario 1, where concerned parents want to keep their kids safe from being abducted, it doesn’t work as the abductor switches the phone off or ditches it. So really the child is no safer and maybe less safe, as there’s a false sense of security.
In Scenario 2, it’s for geo-fencing – people want to make sure that errant spouses are where they should be or rebellious teens aren’t off partying when they say they’re in the library. In these cases, people simply leave their phone where they should be and go to the party, often with a second phone kept for the purpose.
And then as this report from Textually describes someone’s invented a way of shielding a phone from being tracked at all – a Harry Potter Phone Invisibility Cloak, if you like.
“Sorry dear, I was at work and not in that Lap Dancing Bar, but there’s something wrong with my phone’s GPS.”
So I don’t think these services work at concept level. And I don’t like the way they’re frequently marketed, trying to scare parents, who have quite enough to worry about, without being emotionally blackmailed into buying technology that can’t ever do what it promises – to keep their kids safe.
In the words of Tom Peters, all these winners are a bit ho-f*cking-hum at best. Where’s the stuff that makes you go “Wow, that *is* cool!!”?
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