Location Based Services Getting Closer

[Robert Levy]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://blogs.msdn.com/cthota/archive/2004/02/22/78004.aspx' target='_blank'>http://blogs.msdn.com/cthota/archive/2004/02/22/78004.aspx</a><br /><br /></div>Chandu Thota works for the MapPoint group at Microsoft and posted an interesting photo to his blog today. This shows an app built using a pre-release version of the MapPoint Location Server. Man... that's one product with a lot of potential to stir up the industry. There's going to a few talks about this at MDC for developers who want to get the scoop on what it will do and how to use it.<br /><br /> <img src="http://www.smartphonethoughts.com/images/SmartLocator[1].jpg" alt="User submitted image" title="User submitted image"/>

[Santa Fe]

From the great American West I wonder if this is going to be a service or an annoyance? I don't want to be spammed by local pizza places as I walk by but it would be nice to have certain kinds of local information available. Thankfully the i600 lets you choose to turn them off.

[Robert Levy]

This is technology is more for "pull" than the more typical "push" LBS technology. It's basically let's software on your device determine where you are and act accordingly. If that get's annoying you can just uninstall the program ;)

[Santa Fe]

I like "pull". Give me control and I'm a happy cowboy. When will we see a little application?

[Kris Kumar]

I was pretty impressed with the demo that Microsoft gave at Last year's PDC. I believe it was called Enterprise Location Server. I guess they just changed name a bit but the feature set is the same as last year.

Overall a very powerful solution enabler for CRM, technical/sales field agents etc.

Kris

[Jason Dunn]

I've been waiting for technologies like this to evolve, and it seems like we've waiting an eternity for them...this looks like a step in the right direction, and I like the idea of "pull" rather than "push". I'm happy enough to take out my phone and do a search for interesting things around me, although if I was in a new area I might put the phone in "accept pushes" mode and let local vendors contact me. Ideally, having the freedom to do both would be appealing...

[possmann]

I'm withya on the pull paradigm - the last thing I want is spam on my mobile phone :pukeface:

[Mike Temporale]

Push? Pull?? I think there are arguments for both. At times it would be nice to have things pushed to your phone. Imagine your on vacation and driving through a city/state/province that you aren't familiary with. Telling you phone to allow vacancies, and rates from any hotel with-in 3 kilometres (or miles) of your current location. Then as you can easily evaluate the information as you drive. Without having to repeatedly tell your phone to pull information.


However it should be user configurable. I need to turn this on and off as I see fit.