Location, location, location...

MoMo London
Last night our resident Technical Author, Ben Morris, attended MoMo London. Ben has a healthy(?) scepticism for anything he considers “trendy” or “marketing” so his thoughts on this month’s MoMo theme Location (a topic that continues to capture the imagination of both trend-setters and marketers alike) were always destined to be interesting.

Find them below…

Location has been the "new new thing" since, ooh, about Y2K, and was the theme at last night's MoMo London with some nice app demos and a panel discussion. A couple of key themes emerged:

• The cool new apps are using location as an added dimension to their main function/service and not as the primary service. Pure maps and navigation thus gives way to "where was I when I heard that song...?"

• There's still a place for pure location though, as Vodafone 360 demoed with its "location nudge" - on the new LiMo based 360 phones from Samsung

• The jury is still out on location based advertising. Biggest boo of the evening was for intrusive advertising along the lines of "when you walk past the store/coffee shop it can send you an offer". What we want instead are apps that add location to enable us to make the choices we want to make...

• In other words we want location browsing, and as if to make the point - the Flook demo seemed to offer us exactly that. Can't wait!

• The elephant in the room was privacy. It was the question I was going to ask, but Dan Appelquist beat me to it. The dystopian vision is of the mobile phone as a self-inflicted surveillance tool. The big question is - do we care/who cares? The optimistic view - perhaps "hide in plain sight" will save us.

• Best use case of the evening - "Let's me find myself when I'm in a bar!"

Loads of people, standing room only, tolerable wine, bags of chat and discussion afterwards until chucking out time.

Considering Ben is also a wine producer, “tolerable” is quite high praise.

Map out your future and get into the fast lane.
That’s the message from our partners NAVTEQ who are once again running their LBS Challenge, this year there is a special category for Touch UI apps in their annual LBS developer competition. The competition is open for location-aware applications based on any platform, including Symbian and Windows Mobile. This presents the perfect opportunity for any Samsung Mobile Innovator members currently developing LBS apps for Samsung's Windows Mobile Samsung Omnia range or the Symbian powered i8910 HD to participate.

For further details see www.LBSChallenge.com