TagSpot Blog

“Mobile”… You hear that word a lot those days, and it’s easy to forget what it really means, especially in terms of the services users can have access to when they are… mobile!

In first approach, something that is mobile is something that moves, right? So logically, a mobile service is a service you provide to moving people. Now what does it mean in terms of service characteristics? What does it change compared to a more traditional online service like Amazon or eBay.

Well, it changes at least 3 important things:

1. Users are probably not in front of a traditional computer. Maybe they are using a laptop on a table at Starbuck’s, but most probably they’re using a cell phone of some sort.
2. You don’t know where your user is, and his/her location can be meaningful.
3. The user is probably heading somewhere and our service might provide him with information about where he’s going.

Let’s call those level 1-2-3 of mobility.

Level 1 is very often just a transformation of an existing online service so that it can be accessed anytime, anywhere, from a mobile device like a cell phone. That’s the case of Facebook for the iPhone for example. Most of what we call the mobile web relies on mobility level 1 since it’s very hard for web or WAP sites to know your location unless you tell them explicitly.

Level 2 is what we often call Location-Based Services (LBS). Most of the time, such services are applications that you have to install onto your phone or come pre-installed when you buy it. Those applications use one or several location methods to know where users are and take that location information into account to provide users with location-aware information. For example, there are some mobile games that allow you to locate other players, or mobile social networking applications like Loopt, or weather services.

Finally, level 3 is about considering both your location and your intentions to move as interesting input to provide you with very relevant and targeted information. Once again, it’s almost impossible (at least for service providers who don’t have direct access to the mobile network infrastructure) to locate users from within a mobile browser. So you need your users to install special software that can query the network, an embedded GPS receiver or a Bluetooth GPS device to locate you precisely enough. And of course the service has to be intuitive and take into account the information users have and don’t have about where they’re going.

As you have probably guessed by now, TagSpot implements mobility level 3, as it relies mostly on an embedded GPS receiver OR an external Bluetooth GPS device to locate users, and by extending the concept of word-of-mouth, it provides users with both relevant and valuable information about wherever they’re going. We’ll talk about word-of-mouth next time.

Céline and Soulira are friends. They share their taste for good restaurant and nice bars
They both possess a mobile phone with a GPS integrated, and lately downloaded TagSpot service.

When do they use Tagspot ?

CELINE :
“Last week, I was in a good Asian restaurant located near the Place Flagey in Brussels. I thought of Soulira while I was tasting a ‘Pho’ soup. I wanted to share this good adress. How ?
I could give her a call… right
I could propose her this new restaurant next time… right
I could tell her next time we meet… right
I could inform her by email or via one of our common network community website… right

BUT I can also decide right now to use TagSpot and share this information through my mobile
OK let’s do that !
I TAG the place where I am
1) What is it ? a restaurant, they do Asian food, so I enter ‘restaurant’ and ‘asian’ as keywords
2) What is the name ? L’Indochine
3) and I give a short personal description of what I liked most in this Asian restaurant :
‘I love the warm welcome of the place. Annie is smily and it’s my favourite Asian restaurant if I want to eat a typical Pho soup’
4) I press Tag
5) The place is registered from my original location”

Céline thinks: ‘Next time, if Soulira is around the Place Flagey, and if she looks for a nice restaurant to eat, she will be able to use Tagspot and find my information about L’Indochine’

SOULIRA :

“Today, I am with some friends near the Place Flagey, we’re having a drink at the Guru Bar. We would like to find a nice place to eat in this neighborhood. We have our favorite spots but it would be nice to find a new place. How ?
I could give Céline or another friend a call… they always have good ideas
I could have checked on the internet before
BUT I can also decide right now to use TagSpot and search this information. Maybe Céline or even another friend already suggests a nice place to eat around the Place Flagey

OK let’s do that !
I SPOT based on my location
1) What am I looking for ? A restaurant
2) How far ? around 100-500m from my original position
3) I press SPOT
4) A map is displayed and indeed, shows me there’s a restaurant, called L’Indochine, located Rue Lesbroussart 58, and suggested by Céline.
Her short description attached already makes my mouth water !

Soulira thinks: ‘I can trust Céline on good Asian restaurant! Let’s go there… Oh… and before I go…

The Guru bar was also a nice bar, I should TAG it, so Céline and others can also find my favorite bar when they are in the neighborhood of the Place Flagey’

From a technical point of view, the Global Positioning System (GPS) is at least three things:

• A satellite constellation covering all points of Earth surface at any time.
• A receiver chip that sees some of those satellites and is able to locate me.
• An application that makes it possible for me to use that location for something.

However, from a user point of view, all of that is mixed, the first 2 levels are hidden and the only thing that really matters is the application. And the problem is that today there is only one mainstream application using location: personal navigation.

Personal Navigation Devices (PND), like the GPS in your car, allow you to drive directly to a predetermined location, like an address or a Point of Interest (POI). And of course, that’s a very common use case. The first thing I noticed when I bought my own PND is how it really improves your driver freedom: when I needed to go to a place and didn’t know how to get there, it really had to be important to overcome the fact that I had to plan the whole trip on Mappy or something. Now obviously the possibility to just get in my car and let my GPS lead my way, even if this way has to change because the road is blocked or something, is really amazing.

But what if it was not the only application, what if there were other obvious use cases that we just don’t dare to imagine today. The truth is that the combination of location and connectivity opens really interesting perspectives. The thing is that not only can you move around with a connection to the world in your pocket, but this connection can also use your location to improve the relevance of the services it offers. That’s true mobility.

Does a tree make some noise when it falls in a forest if no one is here to hear it?
Is it really interesting to be able to use mobile services if they don’t know where you are and where you’re going?

I’ll talk about true mobility in another post, but in this one, I just wanted to insist on the fact that GPS is just a technical way to locate you. And this possibility can be useful for so much more than just personal navigation. TagSpot IS another application on top of GPS, and you will see how it unleashes the full power of a truly mobile service.

There’s been a very interesting phenomenon in the mobile world lately, a phenomenon that we’re following very closely in the context of TagSpot development: mobile platforms are converging.

A few years ago, most mobile phone manufacturers developed their own in-house mobile operating systems and the only way to expand the capabilities of those devices was to use semi-portable technologies such as Java.

That was until Nokia invested a lot of effort in the Symbian operating system that is now the platform for all of its high-end phones and smartphones and is even used by other manufacturers like Sony-Ericsson. Yet, I think it was more a way to reduce costs by reducing the software engineering cost for each phone release, at least until the iPhone came to existence

It’s not that the iPhone OS is more open or offers more possibilities for extensions, since Symbian already offers about the same level of extensibility. But the iPhone platform is so much sexier and so much more ergonomic that it forces all the actors on the market to rethink their platform strategy and focus on user experience. Because let’s face it: I’m the happy owner of a Nokia N95 8GB, the top-notch smartphone in Nokia’s line-up, and obviously they have some work to do before they can reach the same level of usability as the iPhone.

Yesterday, there was the Google I/O conference and a few demonstrations of a new mobile operating system and development platform being developed by a consortium led by Google (the Open Handset Alliance as they call it). This platform is called Android and it definitely has some amazing features.

There’s still no phone on the market based on this platform but there’s no doubt that manufacturers who don’t have an operating system that is usable enough to compete with iPhone’s will consider this option. As for Nokia, I suspect there up to something with Trolltech’s Qtopia.

So hopefully Java and custom mobile operating systems should soon be reserved to low-end devices and we should be able to offer innovative mobile services like TagSpot on really usable devices.

By the way, we are looking for iPhone and Android developers to help us develop TagSpot support for those platforms. So feel free to contact me or Eric if you are interested or if you know someone who could be.

Yesterday, the whole team gathered around a white board (well not so white actually) to talk about what is TagSpot, what defines it. So I thought it could be interesting to share our conclusions and possibly get your feedback about those characteristics.

This post is the first one of a whole series about TagSpot characteristics.

No it’s not an excuse to justify my stoutness, even though it’s certainly an indirect consequence. Actually I’ve been pregnant for something like 3 years now, which makes my gestation period even longer than the elephant’s 22 months (ridiculous!). What makes it even more surprising (I mean beside the fact that I’m a male) is that I’m carrying a project.

And since I hope to give birth to it very soon, I think the time is right to start talking about it, anticipate it, celebrate it. This is the whole purpose of this blog. Here you will be able to follow the last weeks of the gestation and the beginning of the life of TagSpot.

Now of course, I’m carrying it, but as a baby is usually raised by… several parents, so will TagSpot. And I brought Eric and Céline on board to help me do just that. Céline will be the main editor of this site and will tell you everything about how the baby grows up. And of course, Eric and I will tell you a few stories here and there along the way. We might even bring more “parents” on board!

Ok, I’ll stop here with this silly analogy because it’s becoming really creepy. I just wanted to write the first episode of what will hopefully be a long and prosperous adventure.

Stay tuned!