People have been talking about location-based search for a while, and we’ve covered Geovector’s “World search” idea here too. NYT has a fairly in-depth piece with examples of how it works: “Mr. Matsunuma showed how it works on a Shinjuku street. He selected “lodgings” on the screen. Then he pointed his phone toward a cluster of tall buildings. A list of hotels in that area popped up, with distances. He chose the closest one, about a quarter-mile away. An arrow appeared to show him the way, and in the upper left corner the number of meters ticked down as he got closer. Another click, and he could see a map showing both his and the hotel’s locations.”
The system uses GPS and an electronic compass in a phone to work out what it is being pointed at, and there’s currently 700,000 locations in the free database (a bigger, premium database is planned). There’s
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