Wireless & Mobile
FireBall: Twitter Your Location, Mobile
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Written By Drupad Sil | April 22, 2008 | Share This
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Some news on a cool app that isn’t getting much coverage yet. FireBall is a mobile geo-location service that integrates Twitter and Upcoming with Fire Eagle, a Yahoo!-run platform for controlling people’s location information. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld with a quick bit on how it works:
“When you want to find out where your friends are who have also signed up for FireBall, you send a message to a FireBall account on Twitter. You get back a text message with a tiny URL link. When you click on the link, it opens up a KML file that launches Google Maps on your cell phone and shows you all your Twitter friends as pinpoints on the map. So your Twitter contacts serve as your mobile social network. You can also Twitter in your location. Simply mention a room at a conference, for instance, and it can pinpoint exactly where you are through integration with Upcoming.org.”
FireBall is definitely looking like a smart and hip mashup of popular and useful services. For now, it’s in private testing and only works in
Also, while Twitter and Upcoming need no introduction, Yahoo’s Fire Eagle platform merits a paragraph as a standalone service. Originally described as “twitter for location”, Fire Eagle had its private beta launch earlier this month, allowing a select group of users to stream their location information to each other. But, as Michael Arrington at TechCrunch explains, it’s much more than that:
“FireEagle has (well, will have) open APIs to send data and get data out. That will make a variety of other web services much more useful, since they’ll be able to figure out where you are without asking. Flickr images, for example, can be auto-tagged with location by comparing the time the photo was taken to your location at that time in FireEagle.”
Other sample features include a MySpace “I was pinpointed” badge that shows off your location, a Facebook app that displays a map with your friends pinpointed, and SMS update functionality on-the-go. The Fire Eagle team has announced that there are at least 50 third-party sites that have developed apps with the locator’s API, letting us imagine a social media suite that instantly updates based on location, adding tailored local search and news results. We can’t wait.
Four Questions with Nasser Manesh, Frucall CTO
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | April 9, 2008 | Share This
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Nasser Manesh is an entrepreneur and the co-founder and CTO of Frucall, a mobile comparison-shopping site. Manesh also writes a blog at Unixica, where he comments on startup news. Searchviews asked him for his insights on mobile development and advertising. Here’s what he had to say.
Searchviews: On your blog Unixica, you recently referenced an article about the decline of mobile development. As CTO of Frucall, a mobile shopping search engine, what do you think about this report that discourages developing products just for mobile, and how has it changed the way you approach your business?
Nasser Manesh: Mobile applications have caused a lot of hype over the past decade and a lot of companies were built around making mobile applications mainstream. Unfortunately most of these companies are not around any more, and the others, for the most part, have shifted their focus in order to be able to survive. For a number of years now industry analysts have been predicting the mobile application space to be the next revolution, similar to what happened when the PC was introduced to the market and when the Web was put to mainstream, commercial use.
But this revolution has not happened in the US market, and that’s what this report is talking about. Personally I agree with most of the writer, Michael Mace, has written. He has had very high positions within Palm and PalmSource, front runners of the mobile application space, and what he says comes from first-hand experience. There are a number of reasons for where we are today, mostly inter-related, and I think US mobile carriers are at the heart of these issues.
Carriers have tried to prevent what made the Web successful from happening in the mobile space: An open and free paradigm of delivering content and applications. Access to the handset is highly guarded and the carrier wants to have a share – usually the lion’s share – of whatever a content or application owner wants to deliver to a handset.
Mobile data plans have been a source of revenue to carriers rather than a means to an end, i.e., monetizing content and applications. As a result, consumers have been reluctant to adopt and use data plans. Those who have been more curious to pay have not found enough useful applications that would justify the cost, because mobile carriers have failed to create the right ecosystem to attract third-party application developers.
All of this has resulted in a psychology of “it’s just a phone” in the US consumer market. There is a reason for hearing the term “cell phone” from the average US consumer while average European or Asian users carry “mobile devices.” What we did at Frucall was to leverage this psychology. Instead of building a fancy mobile application, we built a voice application, which users can call to get information. In the back-end, Frucall is all web API calls and integration with Internet retail services, but to the caller it’s just a phone call. People in the US are used to touch-tone applications, as pretty much all banks and large organizations operate with touch-tone services. So why not use the same for a mobile application to make it familiar? Later, we added text (SMS) services and finally mobile web. We avoided downloadable mobile applications. You can see the reasons clearly verbalized by Elia in Mace’s article. The economics of supporting a vast number of devices for such a small percentage of users simply does not make sense for a startup.
SV: You’ve also noted on your blog that monetization is very difficult in mobile. How do you think the mobile space needs to change to spur more advertising dollars and opportunities for monetization?
NM: I have to admit I’m not a big fan of advertising on mobile phones. The mobile user experience is very different from the PC – there’s less screen space and the device is constantly with the user, making the nature of mobile advertising more intrusive. Add to that the fact that the mobile device “knows” more about the user – the incoming and outgoing calls, the location of the user, and other things we usually consider private. Just how companies like Yahoo! and Google analyze the content of your hosted email to show you relevant ads on the side bar, a mobile application can analyze these more private pieces of information to serve a more targeted ad. Location-aware advertising is on the radar of many companies. Think of Tom Cruise walking in the mall in “Minority Report” and how the voices were trying to sell him things. It will become real much sooner than we think, thanks to the mobile phones we carry with us.
There are a few companies though, such as AdMob, that have adopted the same ad-brokerage model used on the Web and are serving ads for mobile web pages. Unfortunately, iPhone aside, the user experience for mobile web browsing is unpleasant and usually slow, so users keep it to the absolute minimum.
I think one aspect that is less explored is tying mobile into the web. A lot of applications have natural mobile extensions and components. We do not have to port the whole application to the mobile device just because we can; we should study the usage and see which parts of the application can be “mobilized” to add value to the end user. Obviously one monetization strategy is to charge more for those mobile components, the other is to collect data from such components that would help serving more targeted ads later on when the user is browsing the web on a PC.
For example, in the case of Frucall as a mobile comparison shopping, if the user calls Frucall to search for a Nike shoe, next time they visit the Frucall web site we can show them a sports-related ad, or an ad from Nike or a competing brand. Companies are doing a lot for behavioral targeting these days. I would like to think of the mobile components of applications as extensions that can collect more behavioral data related to a certain application. All of that, of course, is still limited by the way carriers are controlling the applications.
SV: With the overwhelming popularity of the iPhone and increasing ubiquity of more sophisticated handheld devices for US consumers, how should companies be approaching the mobile market in the United States now?
This is a tough question and what I say here is my personal view, but I think the iPhone is going to have a big impact and at this point it might make sense for some companies to only focus on the iPhone and forget about the other platforms. This is not because of Apple being behind iPhone, but because of the user experience which has made it easy – for the first time – for users to use applications on a phone. Statistics, for example, show that Google searches are 50 times more prevalent on iPhones than other phones. That’s because there is less friction in using search on an iPhone. I am not particularly a fan of Apple’s model of controlling application distribution, bit still it’s much better than the traditional carrier model, and the fact that AT&T has agreed to Apple’s way of application distribution is a huge leap forward. There are some limitations within the iPhone SDK but I’m sure they will be resolved over time. It’s Unix underneath, after all, so capabilities such as multiprocessing are built in. It’ll just take some time.
There are two other platforms currently showing traction or at least hype – Google Android and LiMo. Personally, I expected more from Android. Creating the Open Handset Alliance was a very good move by Google and the promise of an open source mobile operating system is a good - and only a company with high levels of influence such as Google can pull it off. But in retrospect it looks like they were not ready for the prime time. Things are moving very slowly.
LiMo, on the other hand, is backed by a number of phone manufacturers and has actual handsets. The problem there is that LiMo supporters don’t come from an application software background – they are phone manufacturers. So LiMo seems to lack the developer ecosystem to add value to it. Look at how many people are trying to do things around Android, even though there is no phone out there. That’s what Google can do. Limo is ahead of Android in terms of availability, but the development support is practically non-existent, which in the long run can kill it.
Note that most of the things I’m covering is consumer-oriented. There’s a whole different mobile market out there for enterprise users, and Blackberry has done a great job there. Apple is aggressively targeting that market through their integration projects with Microsoft and Cisco and there will be application opportunities there, but as usual, enterprise sales in general is much tougher so I think small companies and startups have a smaller chance of making money in that market.
SV: Your company, Frucall, has a social network element, with users able to create profiles and connect to friends, as well as presence on Facebook via an application that allows users to share product lists with their friends. What were your considerations in creating your Facebook app? Do you think it’s more valuable for new companies to build in social network capabilities or for them to leverage existing user bases on highly-trafficked sites?
NM: I certainly think social networks are a viable marketing strategy. Obviously one has to find the right angle and come up with something that fits naturally within both their application and a social network’s expected behavior, otherwise it will fail. But if there are aspects in an application where sharing make sense, leveraging the social networks will reduce both the user acquisition cost and time. In older days the ACPU (Average Cost Per User) which is an indication of how much money one should set aside to get users, was in $10-$20 range. A good, useful web application with clear messaging and meaningful value can expect less than that, maybe in $3-$7 range. But that’s still too high – getting a million users will cost you a few million dollars. So what do you do? You make your application viral, to let users bring in new users without you spending. Now, you can either build the viral elements inside your application, or you can leverage the tools and the platform that inherently exists within a social network and just create the right hooks between your application and that platform. It’s still easier said than done though. It’s been very hard to predict how users react to these viral mini applications added to their social network such as the ones on Facebook. Most of the ones that are very viral are not adding value (depending on how you define value); they are just for fun. The problem with the “fun” applications is that they become viral quickly, but they also die down and disappear quickly. So there is no recipe out there for tapping into a social network to do the marketing, but it’s definitely one of those things that should be on the task list of a good marketing manager to look into how they can design their marketing strategy to take advantage of social media.
Yahoo Mobile’s oneSearch Goes 2.0, Now with Voice
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | April 2, 2008 | Share This
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Yahoo is beefing up its mobile capabilities, today announcing key improvements in mobile search. According to the company’s press release, it will blow out its user-facing products, create standards for mobile widgets, and continue to develop monetization in the mobile space.
More specifically, Search Engine Land notes Yahoo is opening up its oneSearch platform, and also cut a deal with voice-search technology company Vlingo. Yahoo led a $20 million round of financing for Vlingo, which makes speech recognition software that will better position Yahoo against Google and other competitors. Mashable notes that speech recognition will likely become more integral to mobile search:
It’s evident that speech recognition is going to be pushed as a driving force for a good portion of development regarding mobile search over the next few months, to say the least. Perhaps Yahoo will even apply Vlingo more directly to some of its other mobile applications as well.
Google Gears for Mobile Apps Launches
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | March 4, 2008 | Share This
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Google has just released Google Gears for mobile, which allows users to access online data when offline. From the Google Mobile blog:
Ever use a mobile web application and suddenly lose your cell connection? That’s happened to me many times. If you’ve shared my pain, you’ll be excited to know that we’ve launched Google Gears for mobile, which lets users access Gears-enabled mobile web apps offline. Initially available for Internet Explorer Mobile on Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices, mobile web app developers have already started integrating Gears for mobile into their online services.
This functionality will also be built into Android. Here’s a video of Google engineers talking about how Gears for mobile works.
Mobile Browser Wars: Google Yanks Opera from Yahoo
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | February 28, 2008 | Share This
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Opera yesterday picked Google as its new search partner for its mobile browsers, giving the search engine a boost of about 130 million Opera users who browse 1.7 billion pages a month on their phones. The partnership will be effective on March 1 and applies to users outside the former USSR.
Google has been the default engine on Opera’s desktop browser for the last seven years. Yahoo, Opera’s old mobile partner, claims it is walking away willingly from its position as Opera’s default search engine, but it doesn’t make sense for Yahoo to give up 130 million users. Though Yahoo says that it and Opera continue to remain partners, with Opera users still able to access Yahoo’s mobile oneSearch from the browser, clearly being the default browser is the best position in a partnership like this.
Both Google have been working to close search deals with phone makers and mobile providers: Yahoo is the default engine for AT&T and recently bested Google in a fight for European T-Mobile, and Google will be in certain Nokia phones.
Searchviews: Week in Review
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 18, 2008 | Share This
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In this edition of the Week in Review, the Facebook news keeps coming, MySpace tries to wrap its arms around the whole child online safety thing, and it might start costing more to watch video online than just to buy it in a store.
- Hasbro, the company that makes Scrabble, demanded removal of the very popular Scrabulous Facebook application this week, and is going after a Boggle-style game on the social network, too. More on Facebook: CEO Zuckerberg appeared on 60 Minutes, the site got some German funding, MySpace is still leading in traffic, and the British government wants to know what happens with deactivated accounts (and so do we, actually…).
- Contextual search startup Proximic adds a huge inventory of auction listings.
- Widget developer Slide was valued at $500M just today. Bubble?
- Compete revealed winning 2007 sites and their loser counterparts.
- MySpace teamed up with state attorneys to put in place some new security features protecting minors.
- We explored ISP censoring earlier this week, then Time Warner announced they’ll test a “metered” model that charges broadband users by how much bandwidth they use instead of a monthly “buffet” fee, potentially making music and movies extremely cost-prohibitive to download or stream.
- Some in-house news: we’re on Facebook, and we’ll be in San Diego for the Online Marketing Summit next month (Also - last call for discount tickets).
- OpenID, the organization/consortium/movement to eliminate username overload, got a boost from Yahoo’s support this week. Another exec left Yahoo this week. And is there more to come from Yahoo in mobile this year? Their ad deal with T-Mobile suggests so.
- Popular microblogging format Twitter is going to Japan. They still have some kinks to work out here in America, as this week all the tweeting over Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote crashed the site (and Jobs’ talk tanked Apple stock). Other international bloggy news: Blogger’s now available in Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew.
- In non-profit news, Wikipedia turned 7 this week; what did we ever do without it? For history buffs, the Library of Congress put two of its collections on Flickr. And take note, Google.org applicants: the search giant’s philanthropic arm has a roadmap now.
Google: Soon to be Big in Japan?
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | December 26, 2007 | Share This
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An agreement between Google and Japan’s largest mobile provider, NTT DoCoMo, will reportedly make Google the search engine and email service on NTT DoCoMo phones. According to Reuters, DoCoMo accounts for fifty percent of Japan’s mobile market and, as of last week, the company is also in talks with Apple to sell the iPhone.
The DoCoMo-Google agreement will go into effect in the spring, giving access to Google search, email, calendar, and photo sharing (Picasa). It is also said to include development of a handset using Google’s open-source, mobile operating system, Android, which will help Google increase its visibility and influence in Japan; Google is currently the second-place engine in the country, while Yahoo is first. Mobile internet use in Japan exceeds wired PC internet use, making mobile a crucial area for search engines to dominate in their bid for market share.
Though the deal between Google and DoCoMo is as yet unconfirmed by either company, it would be consistent with Google’s strategy in Asia: execs confirmed several months ago that Google’s China strategy emphasized mobile and included a total overhaul of its mobile offerings.
2008 Searchviews Predictions
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | December 21, 2007 | Share This
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In yesterday’s post, we outlined what happened in search and social media in 2007, and why it mattered. Today we’re looking to the year ahead, and making some industry predictions for 2008.
Topline? Searchviews predicts that 2008 will be the year that:
- The concept of paying for online content ceases to exist
- “Open” platforms and a free social graph become more meaningful concepts - with implications for mobile and government
- Mobile Internet will have a big impact on content and its distribution
- Search gets truly social and smaller engines get a chance to shine
- Privacy becomes a much bigger concern
Here’s the breakdown:
The concept of paying for online content ceases to exist
- The success of the NYTimes’ dismantling of TimesSelect means Rupert Murdoch & Co. get smart and go free with the WSJ this year - and everyone else will have to follow suit.
- YouTube will stop getting sued and start signing huge video advertising deals.
- But: The music industry will continue to be heavy-handed and litigious rather than figure out how to effectively monetize music online – Notably, we predict that the music industry will go after the excellent Hype Machine, instead of recognizing how valuable it is as a promotional aggregator.
“Open” networks and a free social graph become actionable and meaningful concepts - with implications for mobile and government
- All new web services will be expected to have an open API.
- Remaining US wireless networks will open up, too. By the end of the year, we’ll hear some announcements of the industry shifting considerably to allow users to use any phone on any network.
- U.S. citizens will get better access to government records online.
- Government officials will start to adopt social networking/blogging as new point of communication with constituents. In other words, social networking and blogging won’t just be an election gimmick anymore, but a real point of communication between politicians and people (but, watch out - we also predict that at least one politician will suffer serious online backlash by ignoring search & social media best practices).
Mobile Internet will have a big impact on content and its distribution
- As mobile browsing/Internet access becomes more prevalent, microblog formats (Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) in aggregate will exceed Blogger in users.
- Content will get shorter.
- RSS adoption will start to hit the mainstream
- GPS capabilities (a la Google Mobile Maps) will be critical to mobile’s impact - especially for locally-focused social media sites.
Search gets truly social and smaller engines get a chance to shine
- Ask.com will pick up steam, and IAC will buy vertical engines to blow it out – watch out, Live.com!
- Yahoo’s Kickstart will fold and they will quit trying to build social networks from the ground up – they will finally figure out personalized Yahoo start pages have the beginnings of social network profiles and just let people link to each other that way.
- Similarly, Google will get its social network act together, leveraging iGoogle and Google Profiles to do it. Dare we hope for the end of Orkut?
- Myspace will lose ground to Facebook, becoming lost in the wind like Friendster. Or…
- Facebook will acquired outright by Google or Yahoo. Or…
- Facebook will make a really big mistake (compromising user privacy in an unforgivable way) and see a mass user-exodus.
- Veoh.com will gain heavy exposure for video sharing and become a competitor to YouTube.
- Facebook Beacon will get more sophisticated and start to monetize.
- Niche social networks will emerge as big players, and engines (specifically Yahoo) go on a spending spree. Niches to look out for: moms, pets, shopping, and healthcare.
Privacy becomes a much bigger concern
- Consolidation will occur in the people search space (e.g., ZoomInfo, LinkedIn, Spock, etc.).
- Pipl.com will freak people out.
- Companies will be expected to prioritize user fears/the illusion of privacy above the value of data they’re collecting.
More predictions for 2008? Add them to our comments below, or give us a shoutout on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/searchviews.
Search and Social Media: 2007 in Review
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | December 20, 2007 | Share This
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The year’s almost over, which means it’s time to look back on search and social media in 2007 and take stock of what happened and what it all means. It was a big year in search and a pretty big year for us at Reprise Media, too: OMMA deemed us Best Search Agency for 2006, we turned four years old, we joined IPG, and we started giving back.
Way back in January 2007, Searchviews predicted quite a few things that came to fruition, among them that Google would keep growing (okay, that was an easy one) and that Panama would be good for Yahoo. The key theme this year was media convergence, with an emphasis on acquisitions and blurring the lines between search and social media. You’ll have to come back tomorrow for our 2008 predictions, but to refresh your memory, here are the big developments of 2007 that we’ll keep close to our hearts… until next year’s big stories overshadow them.
Yahoo
It was a tough year to be #2, especially for the ever-beleaguered Yahoo, which kicked off 2007 with some bad press courtesy of Wired. The magazine skewered the company’s spotty strategy and its then-CEO Terry Semel. No big surprise, first quarter earnings were disappointing, and Semel was replaced with Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang over the summer. Yahoo released some interesting 2.0 tools and bought some others, but this year it mostly floundered when it came time to pull together a cohesive social network strategy that would truly leverage its existing gajillion or so users.
On the search front, Yahoo had a slightly better year: its introduction of Panama was a great move (here’s our full report), America said it loved Yahoo the most, and improvements to its search engine were a step in the right direction. Now Yahoo’s signing up publishers to serve contextual ads in PDFs, and the company also bought Right Media and BlueLithium to expand its ad network. Here’s to putting the ! back into Yahoo! in 2008 - in a good way.
Google
Every year we ask Google, is it possible to be so successful? Really? If it wasn’t for everyone’s favorite upstart-in-shower-slides, Mark Zuckerberg, and all the press and industry upheaval Facebook inspired, I’d say this was Google’s year.
Unlike in 2006, though, Google’s growth didn’t come without costs — 2007 saw the rise of Google as a true world power, wherein Google became everyone’s best Frenemy - i.e., the company we all hate to love (though Zuckerberg seems to be gunning for top spot in the frenemy category for next year). Google managed to get sued for $1 billion over YouTube, had some antitrust trouble over its acquisition of DoubleClick (apparently now resolved), inspired the ire of both librarians and newspapers, served us some questionable ads, introduced shady “preferred cost bidding,”and without really launching it in a meaningful way, introduced OpenSocial, a consortium that looks like its sole aim is to take down Facebook.
On the other hand, Google also created a super-cool mobile platform/operating system (maybe cooler than the iPhone, maybe not), kept monetizing everything (this could maybe also go in the list of bad things, but we’re all marketers here), and got its hands dirty with TV (not yet a smashing success). Not to mention, Google also continually improved its already supremely useful services (Gmail, Analytics, Reader, etc.), bought and integrated Feedburner, launched iGoogle, and kept us sated with free versions of expensive stuff. Probably in his 20% time, Google co-founder Larry Page even came up with a plan to save the planet and Google funded it. All in all, not bad for a year’s work. Plus, of the top 3 engines, Google’s social network efforts seem most promising and logical. We’ll be watching you, Google, and we know you’ll probably be watching us.
Microsoft
Microsoft was on the defensive (or is that the offensive?) much of this year, especially because Google beat them out for DoubleClick and surpassed it in site traffic. MSFT paid a whopping $6 billion for online ad company aQuantive to help nurse its wounds and then drove Facebook’s valuation to $15 billion by paying $240 million for a small stake - exemplifying its strategy this year, which was to buy or partner up wherever it made sense. Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista, launched with much fanfare but also to mixed reviews. We’ll have to wait and see with this one.
Ask.com
Ask.com is tiny but worked hard this year, introducing contextual ads and getting props for its proactive privacy policy. Its parent company, IAC, decided to be less confusing by breaking up its holdings into a few smaller companies, which should benefit the search engine, and Ask also secured $3.5 billion deal with Google.
Facebook, Social Media
Arguably the leader of the social media pack, Facebook’s high value as a communication vehicle became clear when, after shootings at Virginia Tech, students used the site to share information faster than the news networks could. That paradigm shift continued when the site opened up its API to allow outside development of applications - a move that made VCs sit up and that forced direct competitors and even other industries, like notoriously draconian mobile providers, to follow (in rhetoric, at least).
Thanks to Facebook, it’s not enough to have a site, you’ve got to have a platform. Applications became microcosmic indicators of Facebook’s massive success, and the site made its first acquisition in July. But the social network was also plagued by a some missteps this year. Users of the site are resistant to overt advertising and Facebook bungled the launch of its newest ad program, Beacon, shaking the faith of its advertisers and causing some (minimal) unrest among users, though it continues to secure funding.
Media Convergence, Money, and Ad-Model Growing Pains
ComScore introduced new engagement metrics this year, and social networks added search-like, CPC ad structures. A rash of acquisitions made it clear that everyone was eager to get into the social media game, even if they didn’t know quite how: Ebay bought StumbleUpon, and CBS snagged online video show Wallstrip and music service Last.fm.
This year’s housing market crisis had many worried that the economy’s headed for downturn, but we didn’t think online advertising would be drastically affected, and so far, we’re right. Traditional offline industries (music, TV, and newspapers) continued struggling with web monetization. Steve Jobs railed against DRM, and Radiohead practically gave away their new album as an experiment. The New York Times got rid of paid content online, successfully, but the rest of the newspaper industry seems not to have figured out how to make enough money. In TV, the writers’ strike is still underway because networks aren’t giving writers a cut of online profits, while networks experiment with ways to distribute content online.
And Other Top Stories Worth Remembering…
- For the third year in a row, we evaluated big advertisers for their search-savvy in our Super Bowl Search Marketing Scorecard. The winners made search an integral part of their campaigns, ensuring that millions of dollars spent on TV campaigns didn’t get lost when it came to the search box. Here are parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of that feature.
- Taco Bell, dirty as their restaurants may have been, proved they know how to leverage search to make the best of a horrible health and PR nightmare.
In sum, a lot of growth for the search industry, the emergence of social media as a real force, and still some hobbling by traditional media companies to catch up or keep up - 2008 will definitely be interesting. What stories do you think will still matter next year? What would you add to this list?
Google Maps Mobile Adds “You Are Here” Function
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | November 28, 2007 | Share This
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Google Maps has been busy this week. First, they added a new terrain view option that shows users topography, and today Google Maps for mobile added a beta “My Location” feature, which is basically “You are here” functionality that shows you where you are on the map. The best part is that it doesn’t require a GPS-enabled phone, because it uses cell phone towers to figure it out. From Google Maps, here’s how to use it:
Press “0″ and look for the blue dot… If you have a GPS-enabled device, this blue dot corresponds to your GPS location. At times, or if you do not have a GPS-enabled phone, you might see the blue dot surrounded by a light blue circle (as shown on the right) to indicate uncertainty about your location…
The My Location feature takes information broadcast from mobile towers near you to approximate your current location on the map - it’s not GPS, but it comes pretty close (approximately 1000m close, on average).
And here is a short video that explains it.