NOKIA WORLD BRINGS together handsets, location-aware search results, and service providers. I listened to five clever speakers talking about what lies ahead in the world of location-based services.
Ford wants to use its vehicles as platforms and through that platform allow drivers to operate safer and with elegant background syncing. I hear Leo Laporte talking about Ford Sync and I like the idea of thinking of my car as a wheeled device connected to the cloud.
BMW is all about leveraging location. Find the best route and harvest the dynamic content to drivers and passengers and you have a winning offer. It is a majoir challenge for BMW to stay abreast of the massive changes in the fast changing smartphone landscape.
Groupon sees "location" as a key component of its daily deals business. Groupon Now is a hyperlocal service highly dependent on smartphones taking the "engine of local commerce" to a higher level as a result of both vendors placing offers into a local discovery platform and users being interested in discovering interesting things to explore and buy.
From personal experience, I like Foursquare's "assisted serendipity" because it helps me locate people who may be nearby. This is part of Radar in iOS. It will be ported to Nokia Lumia as soon as battery issues are addressed. Foursquare's recommendation engine has provided me with essential tips. Its "specials" help venue managers to drive capacity into restaurants, shops and any commercial place on Foursquare.
Microsoft's vision involves search, location and the geocoding of the entire universe. Connecting people to activities--not just to search results---is the future. Search engines will no longer merely hold data about places. In the brave new world of location-aware services, information will dynamically push to people who let their location be known to service providers. This kind of evolution brings conceirge advertising to the forefront.
Sent mail2blog from my Nokia E7, a phone that no longer looks as smart as before.
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