LBS no longer just a delicious pie in the sky

Today, when I hear about people talk about how location is the hot new mobile/social marketing/PR 'thing', I can't help but wonder what things would be like if I was doing my thesis now, as opposed to six years ago when I struggled to explain my research topic - Location-Based Services or LBS in the context of tourism - to most people.

Back then, I spoke to a few groups of 'advanced' or independent travellers (i.e. your typical backpacker) and asked what they thought about the idea of using location-based mobile services as part of their travel experience. It seemed they were quite keen as long as the services were reliable, easy to use, had trustworthy content, didn't invade their privacy, spam them with too much info, or were too costly. Funnily enough, they are probably still the pertinent issues of today.

Of course, LBS seemed especially like a 'pie in the sky' six years ago when there were no smartphones with large touchscreen interfaces and built-in GPS. In comparison, the clunky mobile phones of old were simply incapable of delivering an intuitive and satisfying user experience when it came to location. Now, the main problem is connectivity, particularly for travellers. Mention 'data roaming' to most smartphone users and they probably have a horror story of discovering bills running into the hundreds or thousands upon their return. And if you're only going somewhere for a week or two, you're hardly going to bother buying a local SIM. Even then, will local telcos have reasonable prepay data offerings?

An alternative connectivity option is WiFi, which is going great in cities like Hong Kong, but NZ has yet to offer much on this front. There are some promising signs this may change soon, particularly in time for the Rugby World Cup, but that's hardly a solution for the non-urban or even suburban areas that visitors will ultimately end up in. Ubiquitous WiFi or even mobile network coverage is simply unfeasible for cities or countries as sprawled out as Auckland or NZ.

When travelling, the one thing that will keep working on your smartphone regardless of mobile data or WiFi coverage is the built-in GPS. Any apps reliant on this to the exclusion of network connectivity would mean having to have pre-downloaded, fully self-contained content within the device. Google already have a few of these on offer, which is a pretty good start. Of course, having your phone basically ping satellites chews through the battery rather quickly, and you wouldn't want to be stranded somewhere with no knowledge of how to get out!

All potential pitfalls and negativity aside, things are certainly looking a lot brighter for LBS than they were six years ago, and there are already some amazing applications out there. People are always talking about foursquare, but until more firms in NZ take ownership of their foursquare place, it's not going to penetrate the mass market or be able to offer real value to users. Facebook places has a huge leg up already in that regard, and it'll be interesting to see if companies are more likely to want to 'own' this. This is all very well and good for businesses like Burgerfuel, but for tourism LBS apps someone else may have to take responsibility for public or natural attractions with no business driver.

Given many small (tourism) businesses may not necessarily even be online yet, asking them to have a LBS app may be a bit of a stretch. But definitely not as much of a stretch as it would have been six years ago! Bring on better, cheaper connectivity along with longer battery lives for smartphones, and we might just get there within the next six years...

A trip down memory lane

After such a long absence from the regular blogging, I thought it was about time to pick this up again. Twitter may be a great way to force yourself down to the bare essentials, but sometimes you really do want to say more than can be contained within 140 characters. As you can see below, this used to be just a dumping ground for my travel posts, but that's all going to change...

I can't say for sure what the new posts will be comprised of, but knowing me they will probably mostly revolve around food. You might be wondering why I so titled this post, and it's because deciding to try and regularly blog again is like putting on a really old, well-worn but comfortable pair of shoes. It seems like - and was in fact - years ago when I started blogging at the tender age of 15 (!). Now 27, I feel like a bit of a grizzled veteran. Like:

Back in the day, before all these newfangled things like Twitter or FourSquare or Tumblr, we had to write our own HTML if we wanted to make a website... Most people started out on Geocities. Back in 1998 when I was 14, I had a website with a background I had made up myself using Corel Draw... I was so proud to be one of the first to use a layout with TABLES! And of course I NEVER embedded background midis without letting people turn them off! I was all about the emoticons like ^_^ O.o and >_< Then the blogging craze started and everyone was using this service called pitas.com... Of course that went under, so after that I was tossing up between xanga and LiveJournal, but LJ was so much more social, with the emoticons and Friends Only posts... And of course we were IMing each other on ICQ as well... Ah, those were the days!

Reminiscing aside, blogging hasn't really changed that much in this past decade. Basically, you write a whole bunch of text and upload it to some webpage, that people can read. You may have social media gadgets and promote your posts via Twitter and Facebook, but it's still all about the copy. The only thing that's different is probably the ability to blog on the go via smartphones, but a touchscreen or even slide-out keyboard isn't exactly conducive to typing many paragraphs of text. That's where tablets can't really trump a traditional keyboard - there's nothing more satisfying than the tactile feedback of the keys bouncing back when you type for hours on end. That's why we always take our netbook when we travel, I would hate to have to type out whole blog posts on my tiny phone keyboard!

Even though I won't be travelling around somewhere exciting like I usually would when I've been blogging these past few years, I'll still try my best to keep this interesting! Let's see how that pans out.