Top Mobile Trends

Thanks to NGT

Top Mobile Trends: Location Curation
One of the great things about cell phones–besides Brickbreaker–is their ability to find you in a geographical haystack. As more and more phones come with GPS, developers are increasingly incorporating it (and other cell-spotting technologies) into their apps, called location-based services (LBS). If mobile is about place and time, LBS aim to provide the right place at the right time.

TMI (Too much information)

Loopt, Brightkite and Limbo are a few of the services that help locate your friends via mobile. At their best, they’ll work wonders for your social life. As more people use them, though, they face the TMI problem. Too Much Information. We’ve seen this happen with online communication tools–that’s why SocialThing, Chi.mp and FriendFeed have all stepped in to help you manage Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc… But phones are personal, and mobile services themselves need to help manage and cull information.

PHONES AS GUIDES

If location technologies can make my phone a homing device, I want it to guide me, not make me a target. This is why most services let me choose whose information I receive, so I can “curate” my social map. These people may include my more intimate friends, or loose contacts who provide information I want. For instance, I may only choose to follow my club-hopping friends so I can learn about the trendy new nightspots. These friends can be seen as experts who help me pare down my outside world. This sort of “location curation” by trusted sources offers a more sustained value than pure social plays for both users and advertisers.

POINTS OF INTEREST

Take, for example, Untravel Media, whose “Mobile Narrative System” combines online mapping with audio, pictures, and video to produce “sightseeing experiences” that run on mobile phones and GPS devices. The technology is state-of-the-art (a Flex and AIR front end communicating with a back-end Java server that generates media for a Flash Lite-based player), but more importantly, it’s easier to use than to build. A simple interface allows experts–historians, filmmakers, curators, and travelers–to help craft and narrate tours.

Socialight is another LBS focused on combining place with topics of interest. Using their site or my phone, I can curate “urban mixtapes” to help friends discover New York. I could also find out the “Best fall picnic spots in Wine Country” according to Winetravel.com or if I’m near one of Anthony Bourdain’s favorite restaurants. City of Memory, while not yet mobile, is another good example.

BRANDED MOBILE UTILITY

To reach consumers, LBS need to be useful–and so do brands. This presents a huge mobile marketing opportunity. A brand can show people, quite directly, places of interest related to their “expertise” (e.g., Adidas–sneaker shops, Pampers–nearby restrooms). Louis Vuitton Soundwalk, celebrity-narrated mp3 tours of Chinese cities, does just this (if only it had a map component…). So did Guinness’ mobile app for the Sevens in Hong Kong and Socialight’s “Gossip Girl” and “Project Runway” guides to New York. With open APIs like uLocate’s Where, Google’s Android and the iPhone SDK, we expect to see more brands use LBS to get you–and their marketing message–to the right place at the right time.

You should also check out: Multimedia Microblogging

Original post at:http://www.nextgreatthing.com/wordpress/2008/09/23/top-mobile-trends-location-curation/