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.
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