Attended my first meeting of Mobile Monday (http://www.mobilemonday.us/) yesterday.  It was an unusual meeting because it was demo night.  There were about 6 different presentations.  Some presentation had the gods of demos smiling down peacefully while others had to survive the loss of the WiFi connection.  It was not pretty.

Two points came to mind while I was watching these demos.  The first was that most of the demos and two in particular tried to create simple ways to search the net using a mobile phone.  Unfortunately, it may be a while before any winners in this area appear.  The second point had less to do with the particular demo as opposed to the review of the current technology.  One person showed an application that he had created for linux-based WiFi phones.  I had not realized that the Open source programming for cell phones had advanced so far so fast.  His description of calling his parents in India for free using his WiFi phone just showed what a tight position the cell phone companies are going to be in.  He said that his parents preferred that he phoned using his WiFi phone as opposed to his cell phone because it sounded better.  The WiFi phone sends voice as 64kbs streams vs. the 32kbs stream of the cell phone.  Once again, I can’t figure out why anyone would pay billions for a 3G license.

One of the most interesting/scary demos was for Loopt (https://loopt.com/loopt/sess/index.aspx).  It lets you located your friends and lets you know when they are within a certain distance.  I realize that his is a great technology for tracking people and places.  I also realize that this type of technology is exactly the thing that will make Geogad Mobile Tours even easier to use.  However, it is a little creepy to see the screen of the demo cell phone map your friends, even down to saying that they are currently in a McDonalds that is 7.12 miles away from you.

On the way out, I bumped into a person who worked for NTT Japan.  Since Japan has had this “find friends” and “broadcast my position to my friends” technology for ages, I asked him if it has taken off in Japan yet.  He confirmed what I have always heard, that people don’t use this technology because they don’t what others to be able to track them.

I can understand this idea.  In fact, I asked the guy from Loopt a question along these lines during his presentation.  He said that they have considered many privacy issues and have included the ability to turn off your “broadcast my position” functionality by using the on-phone application, a SMS, or by dialing a phone number.  I asked if they had come up with any excuses for their customers to use when they shut off their broadcast position function and their girlfriends were no longer able to track them.

Technorati tags: Mobile Monday, Loopt, Linux phone, WiFi, mobile internet    

Tags: Linux phone, Loopt, mobile Internet, Mobile Monday, WiFi

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 4:44 am and is filed under Business Lessons, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.