Getting Warmer

Location-based services — the perennial underachiever — seems to be gaining traction once more thanks to high profile ad campaigns, the rise of affordable in-car navigation and the burgeoning mobile internet. In all but a few territories though, the technology that's driving LBS is still very much turn of the century. So why does it look like location is about to turn a corner?
Mobile Signal MCI
June 1st, 2006
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It once looked like LBS would be the next great mobile superhero. But competition among superheroes is tough, and these days, it seems all eyes are fixed on mobile TV. Indeed it was on television that this writer's attention was recently drawn to location-based services. An advert promoting LBS on last year's must-have handset was shown before a film that made a certain Nokia device the must-have handset of 1999-the year that, arguably, LBS was first touted as 'the one'.

The film in question was The Matrix and the handset was a Motorola RAZR V3x. But more intriguingly an operator-3UK-also-enjoyed prominence in the advert. An email was fired off to the operator to find out more.