2001: The Original Use Case for LBS from NTT Docomo
Location Based Services were launched a little under a decade ago, since then we have seen the rise of the web, social networking, and mobile. Yet, we are still struggling to turn some of the earliest applications thought up for location enabled devices, into consumer friendly reality. It turns out that moulding technology into a product that is usable for the majority is harder than it looks.
The technology is there, and has been for a long time, this is an issue of design and scale. The smartphone had existed in some form for a decade before Apple successfully merged the touch screen and an elegant interface to pull their greatest ever trick – fooling people that the iPhone was just a phone and not a computer. To achieve their dominance in online retail, Amazon had to build a physical infrastructure of warehouses, staff, supply chains and wait for enough people to change their shopping habits to digital. LBS is no different.
So nearly a decade later, I’m cheering on the EchoEcho team from the sidelines. They have succeeded in taking what was the favourite use case of LBS; the friend finder/tell me where X is/share my location with Y…. and turned into something that is designed for real people.
I don’t need to sign up for another social network, I don’t need to worry about the privacy implications of broadcasting my location, and praise be…I don’t need to check-in.
EchoEcho leverages the social network of people I actually meet in real life, my phone address book. Telling friends and family where I am, or asking where they are is as easy as a few taps on my smartphone. It is the essence of designing a solution for one use case, and making it as simple as possible for the majority of users.
On the scale side of the problem, thanks to Android the market is now full of cheap smartphones rather than feature phones. The other smart thing about EchoEcho is that when I ping (or Echo) someone who doesn’t have the app installed, they get an SMS telling them I would like to share my location with them and a link to download the app. Instant viral marketing, and I’m betting that conversions from SMSs are much higher than email.
