For a long, long time we’ve been waiting for carriers to launch automatic location-detection for phones. In 1996, the government mandated that carriers roll out this technology for 911 calls. The commercial possibilities were fascinating; entrepreneurs and investors and analysts talked up the potential for a whole new category called ‘location-based services’, and Vindigo was one of dozens of companies founded in the last 10 years in anticipation of LBS.
The technology is ready. In most parts of the country, emergency
services can locate a wireless 911 caller. And if they can’t, it’s
probably because the local authorities haven’t got the funds to link their
systems to the carriers. But we’re still waiting for commercial services … 1997. 2001. 2005.
To cut a 10-year-long story short, with the exception of Nextel, the carriers just haven’t gotten around to LBS. There’s always been something more important to do: WAP, or Java, or ringtones, or push-to-talk, or 3G. And unfortunately, because the wireless Internet in its current form is closed and proprietary, the rest of us have to sit tight and wait for the carriers to decide when this application is important enough to bring to market.
Which makes Navizon very interesting. Navizon offers a small app for wireless (Wi-Fi or cellular) Pocket PCs. Download their app and in many places in the US they can provide you with a good estimate of your location, based on the co-ordinates of the Wi-Fi nodes or cell towers that you are within range of. But how do they know those co-ordinates? That’s the interesting part. A small number of their users are GPS enthusiasts; people who have a GPS attachment for their Pocket PC. Navizon’s app runs in the background on their machines and as they walk around it records the latitude and longitude of all the nodes and towers they pass. Given enough users in the right places, Navizon can collect and maintain this information for the whole planet - for free. In Web 2.0 speak this is called peer-produced content; folksonomic location-finding.
It’s fun to think of the other data that could be collected this way. Volunteers with the right attachment for their phone could build up global maps of air pollution, air temperature, noise levels, or traffic, just by walking around. They could monitor biohazards or radioactivity. They could collect prices in stores (from their RFID labels), or sample music played in public. Or maybe they could just cheat at hipster bingo.
I don’t know whether Navizon will be a successful business, but it’s
a great example of what will be possible once consumers are carrying
true smartphones: devices with open operating systems and an IP stack. Most importantly, we won’t have to wait for the carriers to decide which
applications to prioritize, and which ones we have to wait 10 years for.