Back in the 1990s I used to wonder, often in public forums, why the phone companies didn’t offer location-based services such as were available in Japan. For example, I thought that it would be nice for a phone to show a traveler nearby available hotel rooms and allow the handset user to book one. It seemed that all of the pieces were there. The phone company, through tower triangulation, knew where you were to within a few miles. Services such as Expedia maintained a list of available hotel rooms in the U.S., sorted by location. The business infrastructure was there to make it pay for the phone company, with hotels accustomed to paying commissions to booking services. Why wouldn’t the phone companies hire a couple of programmers to connect up the last few feet of wire and deliver a service that would save consumers time and hassle?
The other thing that I wanted was a service to notify me that a friend was hanging out in a nearby coffee shop and/or that a stranger with similar interests had some free time.
Has Apple delivered these basic services with the new iPhone? Have the other American phone companies truly done nothing in these areas for all of these years?
[In http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/money, most of which was written in 1998, I wrote
It may take the full 50-year horizon of this chapter to come to pass but eventually there will be a usable wireless Internet. When that day comes imagine Joe Traveler, getting tired after a long day of sightseeing, pulling out his cell phone and saying “show me the nearby available hotel rooms for tonight”. The phone company knows approximately where you are, based on which tower your handset has connected, and they ought to have enough marketing clout to establish links with hotel chains’ room reservations systems.
We still don’t have a usable wireless Internet, so maybe we need another 40 years…]
For that matter, you could have predicted back in the 1970’s, during the big energy crisis, that within 30 years rooftop solar-panel home energy generating kits would be inexpensive and commonplace. You CERTAINLY would have made that prediction if you had known that by 2008 a device no bigger than a Star Trek Communicator that contained a computer far more powerful than an IBM 370/168, with 1,000 times the online storage of a very large IBM installation back then, containing not only the computer but a wireless telephone AND a camera AND a music player AND a video player, would cost the same as 100 gallons of gasoline or 5,000 KWH of electricity.
Oh well. Computers and telephones are so much more fun to develop and mass-produce and market than solar panels, and the power company doesn’t mind if you sell lots more computers and telephones.
First of all the situation regarding the commissions for booking services has somehow changed (or so everybody says). More and more sites like Expedia and random “brick and mortar” agencies are charging for booking (they say the hotels/airlines don’t usually pay anymore). I know a big company that pays ~40 $ for each reservation and they are one of the largest customers you can get.
You say you would find nice to find services available near you and even up-to-date info regarding availability but I would settle for just having them in my Point of Interest database in my GPS. Speaking of Western Europe you do have plenty of hotels and restaurants usually but the shopping centers (I’m talking about large chains equivalent to Wallmart in the US) are more often than not missing. Depending on the country and the GPS program you’re using fast-food chains like Pizza Hut and Burger King are missing completely. And to close the circle completely of course you can’t download some POI files directly from let’s say Burger King with all their restaurants from one country.
This is a software problem.
There’s no reason why someone couldn’t write an app that uses the location API go get lat. & long., go to a web site to search for local hotels, and display the results. TomTom is rumoured to have navigation software for the iPhone. Heck, if you get a GPS unit, many have “points of interest” pre-load, of which some would be hotels.
As William Gibson said, the future is here now, it’s just not evenly distributed.
I think David uncovers the tip of the notion: Cell phone companies nowadays are like AOL and CompuServe and Prodigy in the 1980s. They think their value comes from walling you off from information, from preventing interoperability, and from nickel and diming you.
The innovation isn’t going to happen until somebody breaks the monopoly. In the case of the net it was the simultaneous critical mass of the bulletin board community deciding that it needed to build a real-time version, coupled with the Internet growing large enough on college campuses that when kids got out of school they missed it.
I don’t know what it’s going to be for wireless, but I hope it comes soon, ’cause the cell phone model sucks.
Google Maps performs some of those functions on my old ATT 8525 phone. There’s no GPS, but it triangulates your approximate location; then you can ask for hotels, pizza, or whatever and they pop up on the map, with links to phones or web sites.
…if you had known that by 2008 a device no bigger than a Star Trek Communicator that contained a computer…
Mark,
What you’re describing is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Moore’s law, which describes the changes necessary to make that huge leap in computing power you describe, has to do with feature size on a chip. Solar panels, as they are today, use more or less the same materials as computer chips and involve many of the same manufacturing processes and therefore resources. The amount of energy produced by a solar cell is related to its efficiency (which has only increased incrementally since the 60’s) and the light flux (essentially the area) A 1-cm square of processed silicon used for solar power has the potential to produce more or less the same amount of energy as a 1-cm square did 30 years ago, while a 1-cm square of processed silicon used to make an integrated circuit has exponentially more utility than the same amount of processed silicon made 30-years ago. (and, unless we put the solar cells in space or something, we’re near an asymptote with regards to output) Silicon solar cells are kind of a waste of potential computing power, when you stop to think about it. It’s not because it’s fun, it’s because the chip-makers have physics on their side. I figure we’ll see the same thing in reverse with oil. As oil gets more expensive, making useful things out of it will begin to make more sense than burning it, because the gains will become relatively greater. (There will most likely never be a full-size car that gets 150miles/gallon, but those same hydrocarbons could be useful indefinitely as recycled plastic)
My understanding is that people are making good progress on panels that don’t need a clean-room and don’t rely on ultra-pure silicon. That’s when you’ll see them on every roof.
“the future is here now, it’s just not evenly distributed.”
Heh, that’s funny. I hadn’t heard that before. There’s some truth to it, although as Mr. Greenspun has pointed out, a lot of what we enjoy today was really thought up by those “mother of all demos” guys in the 60’s. (The iphone is still quite a future artifact, for those that haven’t played with one)
Also, one place the future definitely isn’t here is aerospace:
The coolest single engine light plane is probably either a mooney (50’s) or a v-tail bonanza (40’s)
Modern light jets aren’t really any better than 80’s learjets.
The hottest ride a civilan can buy is an Aero L-39 Albatros (70’s … from behind the iron curtain)
The premium corporate jet is a 737(’68)
The best way to get into Low Earth Orbit is a Soyuz Capsule (’66)
Worst of all: Those jokers at Moller are still dragging their feet on my flying car(??)
Hey Phil,
Late to the conversation, but…
I have a so-called “jailbroken” iPhone and am running a Twitter client called Twinkle. This is a location-aware 3rd party add-on/client to Twitter. I won’t stray into a discussion of my disdain for (the apparent) Twitter architecture, but I will say that Twinkle is really interesting. I generally have it set to display both my “friends” and those within 5 miles. How cool was it to read “off to practice the drums” and then hear a neighbor on my block start playing? I’ve also posted “At Daedalus for drinks” and had a random woman from Twitter write back “hey, I just passed there, can I join?”
When traveling, it’s particularly interesting. Shortly after posting to Twitter “just landed at Honolulu Airport,” I received a few “alohas” back from people in the area. When I needed advice for a date restaurant, I received a few responses back from locals.
The notion of instant, amorphous communities is pretty interesting, but the question is once something like Twinkle becomes more widely deployed, how do you narrow the community down again. If 30 people had said “hey, I’m near Daedalus, can I join,” that would have been less cool. In the case of the restaurant advice, it came mostly from (extremely good natured) surfer kids in Hawaii and therefore wasn’t quite what I needed.
Lots of phones have the hardware right now and the software’s not a challenge. The real issue is the rules behind how it will all work in a usable way.