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benny1967 is offline benny1967
2008-10-08 , 06:08
Posts: 3,790 | Thanked: 5,718 times | Joined on Mar 2006 @ Vienna, Austria
#11
Originally Posted by Jerome View Post
And this is the problem: there is no such thing as a free lunch. And this has been my experience with location-based services (they are available today on cell phones): they are just advertisements in disguise. They tell you things that are near, as long as they are expensive shops who have paid to be in the database. It is not a technical problem, it is a problem with the business model. Maintaining a database is expensive. Very expensive.
No. It isn't.

Take the examples above: Almost all of them can be used for free with the current infrastructure. It's a matter of software, not databases. Wikipedia is a high quality source of location based information and is free. XMPP-based chat services can exchange the locations of users for free, all we need is a client that goes 'beep' when someone's near you. (I live in Europe, too, and I know quite a lot of people who'd get excited about this.)
So what we don't yet have (or do we? I don't know) is the free database for shops and cash machines. Such a database would be much easier to create than a complex project like, say, openstreetmap, so I'm very confident it will be available once people see the need for it.. (I mean, geourl even sorts websites by location, why wouldn't someone come up with "yellow pages" in wiki-style with latitude/longitude?)
 
lardman is offline lardman
2008-10-08 , 09:53
Posts: 2,102 | Thanked: 1,309 times | Joined on Sep 2006
#12
Well you can always search then parse yell.com and then do a lookup of the postcode lat/long, so the data is actually already available.
 
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Jaffa is offline Jaffa
2008-10-08 , 12:44
Posts: 2,535 | Thanked: 6,681 times | Joined on Mar 2008 @ UK
#13
Originally Posted by Jerome View Post
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see why people are excited about location-based services.
Things I'm interested in in location-based services:
  • Rough "where am I?" type stuff when in a city, on a train etc. when a GPS fix may take too long and something rough is enough. Also feeds into better A-GPS.
  • Location-aware alerts: "it'll take 15 mins to get there from here", already mentioned; but also "I'm not in London, don't remind me about anything work related unless some other flag has been set"
  • Proximity-based alerts: the "remind me to .... when near ...." already mentioned
  • Location-based profiles: when at home, don't flash an LED at night when I get an email; but do everywhere else.
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SD69 is offline SD69
2008-10-08 , 13:23
Posts: 1,513 | Thanked: 2,248 times | Joined on Mar 2006 @ US
#14
Originally Posted by benny1967 View Post
I like the concept of "remind me to ... when I'm near...".
I would love to share my location with certain contacts - all that's needed is a way to make sure I can control who gets the information and who doesn't. Would be nice to have my cellphone beep when a friend's two blocks away.
To answer your previous post, getting a location fix involves different technology than LBS.

btw, Nokia has ALREADY patented the location/contact synergy idea.
 
Jerome is offline Jerome
2008-10-08 , 18:29
Posts: 477 | Thanked: 118 times | Joined on Dec 2005 @ Munich, Germany
#15
Originally Posted by Benson View Post
Not everything's business-model driven, especially things not relying on a central server, or not on frequent communication to that server (like the calendar service noted above).

It's not a free lunch; some of us pay for it by coding, and others by putting up with RTFM!, etc. Think of it as a community-funded lunch.
Fair enough. I have great respect for the people who gave us projects like Linux, Wikipedia, etc... I even try to contribute when I can. Even more: I think it is the only model that will protect us from corporate greed (anyone remembers trusted computing?). But there are limits to the free (as in GPL) model, and I really think that location-based services are beyond that limit.

Originally Posted by benny1967 View Post
No. It isn't.

Take the examples above: Almost all of them can be used for free with the current infrastructure. It's a matter of software, not databases. Wikipedia is a high quality source of location based information and is free. XMPP-based chat services can exchange the locations of users for free, all we need is a client that goes 'beep' when someone's near you. (I live in Europe, too, and I know quite a lot of people who'd get excited about this.)
So what we don't yet have (or do we? I don't know) is the free database for shops and cash machines. Such a database would be much easier to create than a complex project like, say, openstreetmap, so I'm very confident it will be available once people see the need for it.. (I mean, geourl even sorts websites by location, why wouldn't someone come up with "yellow pages" in wiki-style with latitude/longitude?)
Wikipedia cannot search things near your location, I think (I have not found how). You have to use google for that. Google is... well google. Not really evil (we all hope), but certainly not free as in "freedom".

About a free database for shops, only one word comes to mind: spam.

If you know quite a lot of people who would get excited about a location-based XMMP client, then why don't you start a project? At least, it could be made really private, with strong encryption ensuring that only the people you want have access to your location.


(I am painting everything in black here, but I think I am raising valid arguments. And when everyone gets excited about a project, someone has to play the devil's advocate. )
 

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benny1967 is offline benny1967
2008-10-08 , 20:46
Posts: 3,790 | Thanked: 5,718 times | Joined on Mar 2006 @ Vienna, Austria
#16
Originally Posted by Jerome View Post
Fair enough. I have great respect for the people who gave us projects like Linux, Wikipedia, etc... I even try to contribute when I can. Even more: I think it is the only model that will protect us from corporate greed (anyone remembers trusted computing?). But there are limits to the free (as in GPL) model, and I really think that location-based services are beyond that limit.
So you say people can work on a complete operating system, build an encyclopedia and create a free streetmap, but can't feed the location of the Italian restaurant around the corner into a database?

Originally Posted by Jerome View Post
Wikipedia cannot search things near your location, I think (I have not found how). You have to use google for that. Google is... well google.
Google queries Wikipedia, as can anyone else. Look at this Project page, especially chapters 10.5 and the following.

Originally Posted by Jerome View Post
About a free database for shops, only one word comes to mind: spam.
Sure. As there's attempts to spam each and every Wiki-style projekt, forum, blog etc. ... and all of them found ways to reduce spam to an acceptable minimum.

Originally Posted by Jerome View Post
If you know quite a lot of people who would get excited about a location-based XMMP client, then why don't you start a project?
Because I don't code and because there already is a project of this kind around.
 
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eiffel is offline eiffel
2008-10-08 , 21:59
Posts: 600 | Thanked: 742 times | Joined on Sep 2008 @ England
#17
Originally Posted by Jerome View Post
Wikipedia cannot search things near your location, I think (I have not found how). You have to use google for that.
Just in case anyone doesn't already know: in Google Maps you can click on "More" then select the Wikipedia overlay. It works well.

Roger.
 
Jerome is offline Jerome
2008-10-09 , 05:40
Posts: 477 | Thanked: 118 times | Joined on Dec 2005 @ Munich, Germany
#18
Originally Posted by benny1967 View Post
So you say people can work on a complete operating system, build an encyclopedia and create a free streetmap, but can't feed the location of the Italian restaurant around the corner into a database?

Yes, I am saying just that. You severely underestimate the difficulty in maintaining a database like this one. For Wikipedia, the articles do not need to be revised every second week. Restaurants, shops, internet cafes with wifi access etc... come and go all the time. Commercial offers like the ones from teleatlas and navteq have the same problem and their databases (e.g. the one for wifi you have on Nokia maps) are severely outdated. What is the use of location based services if the database is full of obsolete links?


Openstreetmap has this problem as well, and the quality of their user drawn maps is also poor. The good quality maps which are sometimes available almost always come from other sources (like publicly available survey data) and even then when you actually go on the spot, you often find out that things have changed. Navteq and teleatlas redo their maps 4 times a year and they have links to the road planning authorities in most countries who inform them of planned changes, aerial photography and have a fleet of gps equipped cars to roam the streets.
 
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benny1967 is offline benny1967
2008-10-09 , 07:51
Posts: 3,790 | Thanked: 5,718 times | Joined on Mar 2006 @ Vienna, Austria
#19
Originally Posted by Jerome View Post
Yes, I am saying just that. You severely underestimate the difficulty in maintaining a database like this one. For Wikipedia, the articles do not need to be revised every second week. Restaurants, shops, internet cafes with wifi access etc... come and go all the time. Commercial offers like the ones from teleatlas and navteq have the same problem and their databases (e.g. the one for wifi you have on Nokia maps) are severely outdated. What is the use of location based services if the database is full of obsolete links?
Maybe you're overestimating the effort because you think of something more complete than I do.

When I think of such a database, I think of the quality standards set by commercial sources now, like for example the POIs I bought with my navigation software. And they are low. Really low. When there's 50 restaurants and cafés near you, they'll show 10. They don't show shops at all, there's no category for them. They don't provide any means to update even the sparse data they have in real time, you get new POIs when new map data is available, usually every 3 months or so. In fact, the whole thing is a mess. Still it's useful for me. It's not complete, it's out of date, but it's good enough for every day use. (FCS, we used to have printed city guides, how up to date and complete were they?)

Community-driven projects on a wiki-style basis cannot get any worse. The aim is not to have an entry in the database for each and every shop in the world. The aim is to have at least some useful data mainly for the more populated areas, and this should be fairly simple.

The only challenge is to overcome the chicken-egg problem: People first need to use a service, and then some of them might want to improve it by contributing themselves. We're not even at a stage right now where people have the hardware to consume the data (=hardware that knows where you are and is always connected to the internet). Some cell phones, yes, but they're new and not wide-spread. The N810 is such a device, too. But it will take more time until there's the critical mass.
 

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TA-t3 is offline TA-t3
2008-10-09 , 10:13
Posts: 3,841 | Thanked: 1,079 times | Joined on Nov 2006
#20
Whenever I try to think of the usefulness of location based services I start thinking of Minority Report, and the urge goes away quickly..
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