It’s that time of year when people reflect and project. Rather than review what has happened in 2008 I am more interested in what is going to happen next year. What will be the ‘next big thing’ and who we should be watching.
After much reading over the last couple of months I have noticed an increase in chatter about Location Based Services (LBS). This is all about providing and aggregating content that is relevant to your location. For instance you may wish to find out where the nearest cash machine is to your current location or to track friends, colleagues and even children! It can also be used by businesses to provide location-based mobile advertising (something which has been done previously with varying success with Bluecasting).
A key enabler of these new services is GPS. Previously the size and cost of GPS receivers had ruled out their use in mobile devices (a rough location could be estimated by the cell site it was connected to) but now that are almost ubiquitous in new devices on the market. And with the explosion of the GPS enabled iPhone 3G and the Apple Apps store have exposed a huge number of people to LBS and created a real buzz. T-mobile’s G1, Blackberry and touch screen Android (Google’s phone operating system) based phones are following closely behind.
Who should we be watching? There are numerous LBS’ out there with huge variations in their usefulness but the following is a pick of what I will be watching: Continue reading
00:00 on Saturday 10th January 2009 was meant to be the launch of the new site for Monster, the UKs largest jobs board. I was talking to a friend of mine online last night and they pointed me to the site where there was a countdown to the big launch. I watched the seconds tick down to midnight eagerly awaiting a great new site. Midnight came and went and the countdown was at 0 days 0 hours 0 minutes and 0 seconds and I waited, and waited and waited. No new site just a timer. I finally went to bed confused as to why the new site hadn’t launched on time. Continue reading