Mapping the Future
What's on the drawing board for mobile communications?
By STEVE HOMER London
Europe's cellular operators plan to incorporate new technology over the next year that will allow them to better pinpoint a caller's location. That will lead the way for new services which can guide a user to restaurants, pubs, tourist attractions and stores.
Here's a look at some of the location services being developed:
Weather, Traffic, Events
Expect to see other operators follow the lead of Swiss mobile operator Diax (www.diax.ch) which is offering users of Wireless Application Protocol (wap) phones (www.mregio.ch) local and regional news, plus weather forecasts, traffic information, events calendars and other information, all tailored to where the caller is at a specific point in time.
Maps
Webraska (www.webraska.com), which sells mapping infrastructure to mobile operators and adds service layers on top, provides technology which helps callers find the easiest way to get from an ale-house in Aberdeen, Scotland to a bratwurst and beer joint in Berlin, Germany. Offering street level data for 13 countries, its services can be accessed via a wap phone but you have to manually enter where you are and where you want to go. A competing service, Citikey, which also offers guides to European cities accessible via Palm and Windows CE handheld devices (www.citikey.com) and wap phones (wap.citikey.com), hopes to get fully location-aware service launched by year's end.
Shopping
Like Webraska and Citikeys, Multimap (www.multimap.com) is launching a new service covering street-level mapping for European countries. But it offers a plus — a store finder service for wap phone users, through its business relationships with most of the U.K.'s leading retailers, such as Woolworths, electrical retailer Comet and B&Q home improvement stores. Type in where you are and what chain you are interested in on your phone's keypad and Multimap's service will give you the location of the nearest store branch (wap.multimap.com/wap). It plans to extend its store finder service to the rest of Europe later this year on the Web and on wap.
Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker
Scoot (www.scoot.com), the U.K. business directory service, is expanding across Europe. In future your phone will be able to tell Scoot where you are and you will be able to ask Scoot for a bakery or a taxi and get through to a local firm. Until then Scoot says ring up if you don't want to tap in the address on a wap phone.
Finding Friends
London-based CellPoint (www.cellpt.com) plans to develop with Yahoo a service called Find a Friend. You highlight a friend's mobile phone number and the service interrogates the telephone network and finds out where the mobile phone is. Your friend's phone beeps and, if they give permission, their location is transmitted back to you in a text memo. The next step will be to integrate Internet instant messaging services allowing you to check where your friends are and suggest to any of them who are within a kilometer that they meet you at a certain pub.
Looking for Love
Longer term, Yahoo plans to integrate the Find a Friend service with its online messaging system, which would allow Yahoo users to search out like-minded souls in the local neighborhood and exchange messages. In Japan a sort of proximity love match has proved very popular.
Catching Planes
Airlines are hoping that location-based services will do everything from speeding check-in to finding that last missing passenger when the flight is ready to depart. British Airways, Swissair, Finnair and SAS have all introduced wap services and are eager to use location information to drive messages to customers. For example, if an airline knows where a customer is, and a flight is delayed, it can send her a message depending on where she is — a warning not to hurry if she is not yet at the airport or an offer of a complimentary drink if she's already there.
If all of these location-based services come to fruition Europeans might discover something else: wap phones are a real find after all.
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