David Pitkin

Thanks to the host (Orange Labs) and organizers of Mobile Monday Boston for the chance to attend a mobile social networking panel last night. I wanted to just write a few of my notes.

• Mobile Phones are great social networking tools for a variety of reasons such as they are always with you, are key content creators (camera, microphone, keypad), have access to your location and make it easy to get your attention
• Nobody mentioned 3G at all, everyone mentioned facebook ( I just created a momo boston facebook group )
• Paying for your shortcode is expensive
• The four wireless carriers in the US continue to control distribution

Event details here

I attended my first MoMo Boston event this week, the topic was location based services and maybe because it was in a classroom I had the natural urge to take notes so here they are.

My takeaway was that location based services on your mobile phone have been stuck in the same place for 3 years. When I had my Nokia 6820 from AT&T there was an awkward wap site where you could put in a friends mobile number and through an opt-in process subscribe to their cell tower based location. You could then pick a friend from your list and search for a restaurant in-between both of your current locations. This application would have been a great demo even today at such an event. We have not progressed very far.

The presenters were all good. uLocate presented their where.com GPS widgets. They were pitching their platform for Location Based Services so shared their pain in dealing with the individual carriers, phone operating system diversity and testing of location based services.

Skyhook shared some numbers about their coverage, they have mapped 18 million wifi access points and have about 70% of the US population mapped. Ryan said they had some N800 code working, I hope that they enable Maemo Mapper for Skyhook with a Loki app.

The event itself was great, the classroom was filled. There were more Mac’s than PC’s so I fit right in with mine. 7 minutes for a presentation was a good amount of time and Jeff Glass did great as the moderator.