When is your location information the most important piece of information? And not to you, but your peers? If you're a cop in trouble. And you often may be in a position or situation where you cannot 'speak' even to your wireless police communication system, because it may be that some drug-dealing criminal with an Uzi is trying to find out where you are.. Yes, the US police do truly have that need, they want their dispatchers to konw where they are, so if in trouble, they can summons help without speaking. So what do we give them? A Blackberry and PocketCop as explained in the Mobile Industry Review.
The City of Baltimore is a typical major US city with its share of violent crime (as popularized by HBO's TV series The Wire). They trialled the PocketCop with 80 Blackbery handsets. It had typical police-work type of uses, like looking up suspicious car license plates, collecting the crime history of suspects, and with Blackberry cameras, many cameraphone-related uses obivously from collecing digital pictures to sharing images. And being a Blackberry the police officers can communicate silently using the QWERTY keypad and Blackberry Instant Messenger. Best of all its the most secure mobile phone system so it can't be easily hacked by criminals and the Baltimore police department can instantly disable any of its Blackberries remotely if one is stolen etc. All good.
So they bought 80 Blackberries and trialled the system. The police department loved it so much, and found it was so useful in policework they bought 2,000 Blackberries. Remember what Howard Rheingold wrote in Smart Mobs in 2002 - Mobile phones "amplify human talents for cooperation." Police officers need to cooperate. That is why when radio communications were very expensive in the 1930s and 1940s, it was police cars who started to get the expensive radio communciations and today we can't imagine a cop car being without a radio communciation unit haha. But the Blackberry with PocketCop enables everything that the traditional car-based police radio system allowed, and it adds all the instant messaging, social networking and cameraphone based collaboration. And yes, for the police officer's safety, it allows constant monitoring in real time where each cop is. Wonderful!
For those who think - Tomi you have now contradicted yourself - no I have not. I have always said that niche-oriented location based services can be very successful from parcel-tracking to pay-as-you-drive car insurance to your hunting dog-tracker. But that mass-market location based services are the biggest waste of money going in mobile haha. So yes, I celebrate all successes in mobile and this PocketCop is truly a wonderful service that I hope every cop department will evaluate and adopt as soon as possible.
I also think location based service are on the top of the hype arc and are coming down, but for the sake of speculation I would say that in the future location based services will be everywhere. There is no doubt about that advertising and control (where are my worker bees right now :) needs this to run it's business efficiently. There are already many places, like the PocketCop example, in professional or business world where it can be utilized today and get the benefits. In the future it will be in every hand held device (celltower or GPS location) you carry with you and so it will become ubiquitous to the average user. Will there be any profit for businesses? Maybe, if they are smart e.g. carriers/operators provide in exchange to free data plan to use your location to allow marketing etc. Will there be benefits for parents wondering where their children are. Absolutely.
Posted by: Kimmo Korhonen | April 28, 2010 at 06:37 AM
s to the average user. Will there be any profit for businesses? Maybe, if they are smart e.g. carriers/operators provide in exchange to free data plan to use your location to allow marketing etc. Will there be benefits for parents wondering where their children are. Absolutely.
Posted by: yiwu china | October 06, 2010 at 12:25 PM
I was reading something else about this on another blog. Interesting. Your position on it is diametrically contradicted to what I read earlier. I am still contemplating over the opposite points of view, but I'm tipped heavily toward yours. And no matter, that's what is so great about modernized democracy and the marketplace of thoughts on-line.
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I also think location based service are on the top of the hype arc and are coming down, but for the sake of speculation I would say that in the future location based services will be everywhere. There is no doubt about that advertising and control (where are my worker bees right now :) needs this to run it's business efficiently.
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