July 23, 2008
Location Aware Mobile Content Strategies
Not too long ago (pre-iPhone) we would sit down with publishers to discuss their future content strategies and these discussions would often times include strategies for Mobile content distribution. Major publishers have designated roles and partnerships for delivering mobile content, and usually that meant multi-media text messages, or specially created content exclusively for mobile content subscribers. The question now is, has that game changed? With the iPhone, and virtually all competitors now displaying capable mobile web browsers, can we forget about SMS and mobile content subscription services?
The iTunes Application store, and Google's Android mobile platform are ground-breaking. Mobile content strategies have to change. If you want to see a really polished application for mobile content delivery just look at the New York Times iPhone app, it is a thing of beauty, but it is lacking in one key area, location awareness. I feel location awareness is the next big thing in smart mobile content delivery. With location awareness on cell phones you can tailor content delivery to be so much more personalized by knowing where a user is (provided the opt in to the location check). Why should I have to type in my zip code to figure out the weather report, or the local news and events?
Publishers, Newspapers especially need to think about how location awareness can be a value-add service. People will pay for cell phone applications if it's worth it.
One killer app I was thinking about that could take advantage of location awareness would be self guided tours. The recent trend in self-guided tours has been to provide the user with an audio device to walk around with, or a cell phone number to call. These tours offer a quick explanation of what you are looking at, but what if it could be a much richer experience with Wikipedia-like entries showing all sorts of related information and images.
Posted at 06:23 pm by Ivan Mironchuk
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Geotagging goes hand-in-hand with your self-guided tour idea
These days, phones have cameras almost universally, and the more forward-thinking platforms are already adding GPS info to the photo's metadata. From there, it becomes a simple lookup process to be able to automatically add meaningful metadata to the image. From latitude and longitude, it should be a simple matter to tie into a GPS coordinate database and determine the actual named location the image was shot at, be it the Taj Mahal or Gramma's house.
Extra credit for adding an internal compass so the camera knows which way it was facing when the picture was taken and can then infer what the actual picture was of.
Then suddenly, you go from a simple self-guided tour, to a self-making scrapbook that tracks and tags your images along the way. Sounds excellent to me.