I can employ someone to stand on the street in front of a business and hand out vouchers, and they will be more effective than most mobile solutions. Why? Because they have eyes and ears. They will only give my coupons to people matching the descriptions I provide – 20-25yo, not in a hurry, in a mixed sex group of 3 or more and so on. When we have a mobile solution that can do likewise, plus match personal buying patterns, schedule, location/destination and cohort information we’ll be on a winner.

There are a raft of location/calendar/social apps (eg. whereyougonnabe?) coming to market that will facilitate correlation of a number of these attributes.

I invite you to give it a try for yourself. Currently, you need a Blackberry to install the software but it will be running on other phones shortly.

Juston

The key point is location relevancy. Location is not an application like many companies have assumed to date, location is a feature AND a design constraint. As the panelists noted, location in the context of the application is what matters. Other constraints in mobility include personalization, proximity information, relevant communications, relevant advertising (if contextually appropriate), etc. The feature set has boundaries set/implied by location where relevant. NOT the other way around. The mapping companies solved the location problem years ago, even on mobile devices.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Curtis

I think the explosion of mobile based services is still hampered by power consumption and/or inadequate battery power on mobile devices, as well as the time involved when using true GPS. That last point is also related to power though…if you try to save power by disconnecting GPS, you have to reacquire the next time you need location, and this takes a significant amount of time…enough to make it not worth the effort for small tasks.