http://www.podmo.com/ is a Bluetooth based contextually aware network. Good thing about Bluetooth: Will work just about anywhere with nodes, which is also the biggest down-side. The people in Podmo have managed to get the most popular coffee franchise in Adelaide to hop on the bandwagon and set up posts in all their outlets. This provides good cover in areas of the city where these cafes are.
GPS while being the most accurate and widely available means of contextual awareness still seems to face some reliability issues on phones. Nokias have A-GPS, which means that phones triangulate a general location and connect to a server via the phone's internet to get a list of the closest satellites to connect to. This is great, but then it won't be able to connect in areas where there is no reception, and I've found this to be Nokia centric. I've got a Samsung i550w with GPS, but I'm unable to use Nokia's location service. This might be changing and it seems most people are happy with the GPS on the new iPhone and I am confident that with convergence rolling more of our devices together, the day will come soon that GPS on phones is the norm. Nokia is already including geotagging into some of their newer model phones. People are demanding more and more from their mobile apps, and contextual awareness it would seem is the way to go. I agree that one of the biggest issues with such applications is cross platform compatiblity. Where I'm working we've been thinking about how to go about building a mobile app for our purposes, but because we're a small crew we find it's difficult for us to commit to one platform. It would seem however, that J2ME would appear to be closest to being the most widely accepted platform to work off but then the problem is that it isn't supported by the iPhone (yet) which will likely bring in the highest number of users. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=31360 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
