Srcasm

In this day and age of mobile phone, PDAs, Flip Video cams and EyeFi cards, everyone and their mother is connected to the world wide web (even my mother texts now…  guilt in multiple forms.)  This also means that location-based services are even easier to work with today than they were only a year ago.

Tools like Brightkite and Loopt allow a user to both tell everyone where they’re at and pinpoint people and places close by.  Now I’m happy to see sites moving to a more granular location system.

When I searched for a car two years ago, I went onto Cars.com and searched for cars in my area.  This meant “within 10, 20 and 30 miles” were my options.  This is fine when searching for something in the area, but what about if I want to know the closest restaurant to eat at while downtown at New Work City?  This is where granularity comes in.

GoMobo.com allows restaurants to setup online ordering for their customers directly from their mobile phones or the web.  While I believe this is a fantastic idea (especially for my late-night Wawa trips), something they’ve taken one step further is how they show restaurants near you.  It’s no longer large areas around a point, I can go as close as .25 miles away from my location.

While up at NWC, I could see restaurants that are actually within walking distance, not those that I’d spend an arm and a leg taking a cab to.  I could see places to grab some grub that would deliver, not those that I had to go schlep over and pick stuff up at.  This is superb on a number of fronts but in my mind it’s the way of the future. 

Now that you’ve found me to the square meter (GPS), tell me what’s near me to the square block.  Now, who wants to order from Cafe Español?

As everyone around me knows, I’ve become a huge fan of the G1 and the Android OS.  I’ve written about it a few times on the blog and I will continue to.  Today’s post is more about the service provider behind the product.

In my mind, TMobile never had great coverage.  I tested a TMobile Blackberry 8700 about 3 years ago and was getting dropped calls right in Olde City, Philadelphia.  That’s just not good.  Sure the coverage was decent on the highways and even up near my parents house in Quakertown, PA but to have calls drop out in a major city, no way I could use it.

Fast forward about 3 years to today.  The G1 is an excellent phone.  From design to execution it has been a total pleasure to work with (not that it hasn’t come with its kinks).

I called up TMobile yesterday and spoke to a wonderful woman named Luciana.  Her rep ID ends in 32880 and she’s in the Dallas, TX call center.  She was pleasant to talk to, she understood my problem (the hing seemed a little wobbly and I didn’t want it to fall apart) and she simply ordered me a new one — free of charge.  I didn’t even have to go into a store, they ship it UPS to me.

Many people might think it’s crazy that I’m excited about such a simple thing but calling customer service at any cell phone company can be aggravating.  I will usually go through 4 or 5 different people before I find the one I need to talk to and then they send me through a whirlwind of questions until they finally come to the conslusion they should, replace it.  TMobile didn’t make me do this at all.

I will definitely be sticking with TMobile for the time being and I will be trying to give Luciana a call the next time I have any issues.  TMobile is lucky to have someone like her on their staff because she just won them a customer that was with AT&T Wireless for 6 years and a blog post dedicated to them.  Customer service FTW!

Way back when, car phones were the new in thing.  Then came cell phones (they could actually fit into your pocket!).  After cell phones came smartphones.  The first gen versions of smartphones were bulky, slow and black and white — Gross.  Today we have iPhones, Blackberrys, Windows Mobile and Android phones (to name a few) that can do so much more than their older brothers and sisters from only a few years ago.

One of the biggest things to enter the cell phone market was GPS and aGPS.  Both of these services provide the ability for the phone, service and people to know exactly where they are in real time.  Scary, huh?

While location based technology can be freaky, it can also be a huge help to your everyday activities.  I leave GPS turned off and use cell tower-based location (where your phone can approximate where you are based on towers around you) to find restaurants and machanics.  But there is so much more than can be done with location.

Since I’ve been testing out the G1 from HTC, there is an amazing application called Locale that comes in the market for Android apps.  This program lets me change almost every setting on the phone based on where I am.  No location information is sent to any outside service so I have no fear of people tracking me.

It automatically turns on vibrate mode when I’m at work and turns the phone up louder when I’m out running (Hey, I run sometimes).  For power-saving, I have the phone set to leave wifi turned off unless I’m at a place that I know has it available like National Mechanics or IndyHall.  This means that I get faster web browsing without touching the configuration of the phone.

This is a location-based application that I believe that everyone could sink their teeth into.  It doesn’t share where I am, it doesn’t interrupt me while I’m in a meeting and it provides a service to me that I otherwise would have had to work for — Changing my own ring volume?  No way!

What do you think are some other great uses of location-based services or applications?  Restaurant reviews?  Movie listings?  Why would you use them in the first place?

Today it seems like there is a never-ending supply of social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), contact relationship sites (Plaxo and Salesforce), email address books (Gmail and Yahoo) but what about when I need to reach Alex from my cell phone and I forgot to put his number in? What if I never even had Alex’s number? What if he’s available via IM right now and doesn’t want phone calls? These are all great questions and I think I have an idea or a solution…

Aggregated address book system

On the top level, it’s simply a way of pulling in contacts from all over the globe. Bring your friends from Facebook (with their IM name, email and phone numbers), your business contacts from LinkedIn (with their title, company, email and website) and your main homeboys from Gmail (with their emails, phone numbers and whatever else you’d like to include) and pull them all together into one simple, online and offline-capable address book. Add the ability access this service via SMS or WAP site and you have yourself an always-on address book system

To sweeten the deal, add the ability to not only have presence detection (such as if the person is on Gtalk, AIM, Yahoo Messenger or simple available via text message) but also allow masked-communication with users. This could use a service like Jajah to connect the two parties.

On top of these amazing features (which are already out there, they just need to be mashed together), offer both natural language search (i.e. call Joe Schmoe at home) as well as opt-in and opt-out communication methods. For example, say I am “friends” with Joe on Twitter. Twitter knows that Joe’s phone number is 555-1337 (this would take some work with Twitter to allow this in their API with an opt-in option) but I don’t know that Joe’s number is that. I text 232665 (ADBOOK) or visit m.addbook.com from my mobile and type in “call Joe Schmoe’s mobile”. Within seconds, Joe Schmoe is notified that I’d like to get in touch with him. He can simply reply to a text message with Y or N as to whether he’d like to talk and voila, with a Y response, Joe and I are connected (neither of us know the other’s phone number).

See how helpful that could be? Now get out there, and someone, set this up as I have a lot of contacts I’d like to reach.