Between Brackets

Lastminute.com has recently introduced a restaurant locator for your mobile phone, fonefood. Apart from the impression that Belgium equals Brussels, i.e. I did not find one entry outside of Brussels, it is a nice application. The application limits itself to a location and a cuisine, which in my opinion is very good as it avoids interface clutter and having too many options altogether. It also allows you to book a table, which is a cool feature, although also a bit cumbersome because you have to enter your name etc.

If you compare the search results with Google Maps for mobile, it is clear that it will be difficult for fonefood to catch up the amount of restaurants (and other data) already in Google. Once you get to Google’s “Search Local” option and make it clear to Google you are looking for Indian restaurant for example, it becomes and uneven match. But Google does require several manual filtering steps which are not applicable in the case of the fonefood finder, and that’s good when you are hungry. A combination of the two would be ideal: the richness of data that Google brings with the direct filtering that it’s only restaurants you’re interested in, and then of course driven by your current location (if your phone supports that, that is).

Yahoo’s Fire Eagle service is definitely an interesting service especially now that they opened up their API. FireEagle allows you to store your current location centrally, and share it with all kinds of applications based on permissions. They have a very elaborate privacy model with very clear rules on how your location is shared between applications. As more and more applications will integrate with FireEagle, there will definitely be some apps that you want to add to your mobile.

But as the number of location-aware apps on your mobile increases, could the plethora of location-based services, the “where are u?” applications, the “when nearby, offer a free cocktail” widgets, cause that one starts to inadvertently share his location ?

Take the following scenario: you are using Fire Eagle on your mobile phone with GPS together with some social service such as Brightkite. You use the service to meet with friends for a coffee, and switch of the app once you have arrived at the bar. When leaving, your next stop is that interview for a new position and in order to navigate to the company, you switch on the navigation program on your mobile.

Now the question is: will Fire Eagle wake-up in the background and send your position to the applications you have allowed it to share your position with without you even knowing ? (Answer: no). Will some other mobile application do that in the future ? Maybe, maybe not. The point is, although all location-based services based on services like Fire Eagle will no doubt offer a lot of extra value to you on your mobile, it will become increasingly difficult to know if you are not sharing your location by accident. Combined with event-triggered applications (“if my friend is within x meters send me an alert”) you might have been spotted in all kinds of places without you even knowing you gave it away yourself.

It is clear that Fire Eagle made a very good start at sharing your location while allowing you to keep control of your location-privacy, but there will be a lot of potential problems to sort out when all those apps start interacting and responding to your whereabouts.

Mobile marketer posted an interesting article on the future of ad networks.

In the article they predict the commoditization of the mobile ad networks, as soon as the big publishers get their own ad servers in-house. And these publishers are able to target properly themselves, since they have advanced content management systems with which they can track who’s watching what and when they are watching it.

And if these publishers are really smart, they just buy one of the big players (hey! didn’t Microsoft buy ScreenTonic last year?). Will someone other big online publisher buy AdMob? That would be a smart move

Adam Gowdiak released information to Nokia and Sun Microsystems with respect to a potentially devastation security leak in the S40 series phones. According to articles on the net (here in dutch and here in english) it would be enough to know the target’s phonenumber to gain access to their virtually any data on the phone (e.g. contact lists).

Most consternation seems to be about the fact that Mr. Adam Gowdiak only gave a summary of his findings to Nokia and is asking about 13000 euros (20.000 dollars) for disclosing the full report.

What’s more worrying to me is that about 100 million devices in the world are now potentially easily hackable. And the question is: how will Nokia make sure (if the vulnerability claims turn out to be real) that every phone gets updated?

This is maybe again a case for having more internet connectivity on mobile phones, because then updates can be more easily distributed on a timely basis. This in the old PC world already proved to be very effective against security vulnerabilities.

The store is indeed making a lot of money. According to an article in the WSJ applications were downloaded for a total of 60 million times the first 30 days. The total revenue during those first days was 30 million dollars (many downloaded applications are free). So the average download was valued 0,5 dollar (or 0,33 euro). It may seem not so much, but it also goes to show that if you’ve got interesting stuff and you give it an interesting price people are prepared to pay for it.

On the other hand this also shows that you need to think big numbers in order to make some money in mobile. But with more than 3 billion possible customers this shouldn’t be a problem

According to this article Ikea UK is about to become an MVNO.

The service is only available for the ‘Ikea family’ -loyalty program- members. And no dates are set for expansion to other countries.

Many MVNOs in the States have failed (e.g. ESPN), in the UK there have been successful services yet (e.g. Virgin Mobile). And actually it makes a lot of sense to offer this service to loyal customers: the more they buy you stuff, the more credits you give them. Whereas the cost of credits to the operator is marginal, the customer perceives it as high-value.

Hopefully we won’t have to assemble the phones ourselves, though

According to the dutch new paper De Telegraaf the Bernhoven hospital in The Netherlands starts a trial to let people that suffer from chronicle pain (e.g. in their back) to send a pain score (on a level of 1-9) for the pain they experience.

The doctors expect to get a better understanding of a patient’s pain and its origin when they have the pain scores on a time line.

This is a very dumb application technology-wise but it takes full advantage of the fact that a mobile phone is always on and always near you. Patients could of course write their scores down on a piece paper. But chances are that they will often forget to take the piece of paper with them. Or it could be done via a PC, but then you need to remember your scores until your back at a PC.
Moreover sending a text message with a score of 1-9 is not hard at all. Making it an ideal mobile application.

I’m curious at the outcome of this experiment.

For some time now, there are significant expectations of real-time traffic information coming to your mobile/GPS that warns you of traffic jams and other problems on the road ahead. That such systems will become wide spread is clear, but at the moment most are still in their infancy.

With the proliferation of camera’s on roads, this camera based solution can be an alternative for the time being (via mobilemarketer). This – US-based – solution offers real-time traffic info to your mobile by allowing you to consult camera’s on your planned route such that you can see with your own eyes if there is a traffic jam ahead or not. Interesting if you driving the same route repeatedly and know where to expect problems, less so if you are on unfamiliar territory.

I wonder if such a solution will raise privacy concerns, since it would make it possible to recognize people’s cars.