I see that the iPhone 3G has created yet another round of LBS speculation from various commentators, including Ajit Jaokar, Tomi Ahonen and Om Malik. Interestingly, this is how Ajit and I first met when he came to me with an LBS idea and I did some feasibility consulting (remember that one Ajit?)

Like all good ideas back then, the technology wasn’t up to the job. But, finally, things are changing.

I spent a good deal of time and effort designing various LBS applications and even entire platforms over the years. For a while I was CTO of MetroWalker, an LBS service in Hong Kong, killed off by the lack of support from the operators (no surprise there) and for being too far ahead of its time. I seem to spend my whole technical life in that zone! Someone should have stopped me playing with mobile virtual reality back in the early 90s. I think it permanently skewed my expectations of technology. (Although I have to say that I’ve seen a really impressive avatar chat app running in Moto labs and I’m still a big believer in avatars. Someone slap me around the face please!)

I’ve always maintained that without GPS accuracy, LBS is a load of pants! I remember sitting through an incredulous Orange Forum presentation on the topic (back before they became vaguely interesting, as operator forums go, and we only turned up for networking and free food). The presenter insisted that OTD and all these other within-a-mile-if-you’re-lucky services were good enough (because that’s all they had in their network). Thank God that we’re finally moving on from that particular myopia.

I also remember doing a thorough usability analysis of Vodafone’s Find Me service (more like F* You). My God, what a bad service that was in every way. I should have learned my lesson. Looking back, I think this is when I should have left the industry to pursue something that had a chance of being useful within the next few years instead of the next ten!

Finally, we get the iPhone with proper GPS accuracy. Now all we need is the right ecosystem and a few killer apps to herald the new new era of LBS. LBS is dead, long live LBS!

I say ecosystem, because in my view we need something like the equivalent of RSS to glue LBS together and make it a universally useful service. This will make a big difference to the piecemeal rubbish we’ve had for so long. Users need to be able to sign-up for geo-tagged services and information. I think that geo-tagged RSS is probably a solution. I could even sign up for cheap milk from my local store.

The architectural challenge for LBS to make it really useful is how to support an event-driven ecosystem. We need to be able to bump into things in space. As we move around, we’re interested in things that are within a certain distance (radius of interest) that must present us with worthwhile opportunities if we go investigate (radius of opportunity). Handling real-time events isn’t that easy on mobiles.

I agree with Tomi that LBS is a great enabler for other services. From the mobile perspective (versus standalone GPS devices), it’s clearly one of the key enablers for real Mobile 2.0 services where the mobile actually adds something to the Web 2.0 smorgasbord of digital goodies.

However, unlike Tomi, I do believe that there are going to be some real killer apps that hinge completely on LBS, which is a whole new category of applications waiting to happen. My favourite contender, which I’ve been talking about for years now, is Spatial Messaging - leaving content in space for others to pick up, add to, change, edit, and do whatever the imagination and technology allows. I’ll refer you to a paper I wrote in 2003 about this topic, as it’s still largely relevant.

Whilst involved with the ‘Mashing Room’ lab at Moto, my favourite app that I architected was a variant on the spatial messaging theme (we called it Mobigraffiti, because of my fascination with graffiti over the years - real and virtual). However, it was deemed mostly a ’science project’ due to the lack of devices that could actually run it. Mobigraffiti relied heavily on 3G videophony and GPS to create a kind of geo-aware YouTube for mobiles. There simply weren’t many 3G devices with GPS and a suitable API to access the location info (which we really needed in the network, not on the device).

I still see the real LBS problem as how to drive and handle events. I’m not sure how the iPhone SDK will handle this, or Android, but I suspect that some really interesting ecosystem ideas could come from both Apple and Google, or possibly Nokia of course - and perhaps this is Nokia’s chance to make their first real impact as an ‘Internet company.’

Looking forward to trying some really cool GPS apps on the iPhone soon. Now, maybe I’ll go back to avatars, GPS and all that stuff combined! Augmented reality - here we come! (p.s. - low cost VR headsets really do work, but don’t tell anyone I said so!)