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Calling All Application Developers – Is This Possible?

by Ronen Halevy on Apr 17th, 2008 at 4:27 pm EST
4 Comments »
 

GPSsatteliteI tend to do my best thinking on the porcelain throne and came up with a great brainstorm idea (in my opinion) for an application. I know Geotagging and friend finding applications have been all the craze recently but I have a simpler and more effective use of GPS or cellphone tower triangulation. Let me know what you think about my proposed application.

The application would allow you to geotag your emails or PIN messages. This would allow fellow BlackBerry users to click on a link in the email and open up a BBmaps or Google maps view of where you are.

This could be even cooler if your friends could send you a PIN or email requesting your location. That way I don’t have to have an application constantly reporting my location. Rather the application would ask me before telling my friends where I am. Even better would be a way to tie this into BlackBerry Messenger where you could allow certain contacts to request your location.

So what do you think? Stupid and useless? Or brilliantly simple and useful?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 and is filed under News.
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4 Comments to “Calling All Application Developers – Is This Possible?”

  1. Posted by: Neil
    April 17, 2008 at 10:14 pm EST

    So basically all you are really after would be a menu item when composing an email or PIN message which says “Insert current location” and this would insert a link which when clicked by the recipient launches the BBMaps app pointing to that loc:

    (ie: http://maps.blackberry.com?lat=xx.xxxx&lon=xx.xxxx&z=?”

    That would take all of one minute :) It’s not automatic mind you but it would do the job!

  2. Posted by: Richard Puckett II
    April 17, 2008 at 10:25 pm EST

    Like many other BB devs, I wrote my own GPS-based tracking app. Simply captured my coordinates every X minutes, transferred them to my web service, and made them available on a Google maps page. Want to know where I live? :)

    http://www.falseflag.com/maps/finder/find.cgi

    So, would there be much more involved than adding something like the above link to all outgoing emails?

    I just read

    http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/archives/136740.asp?source=rss

    The paragraph starting with “For example, she said the company is working on a technology that would…” sounds like a more-general case of what you’re describing. Not just geotagging email, but all content originating on the mobile device. A couple good BB devs could probably whip up something like that relatively quickly, I’d think.

  3. Posted by: Ronen Halevy
    April 17, 2008 at 10:40 pm EST

    Interesting so I guess Neil you’re confirming that it is not that hard and Richard creating his own application proves that somebody other than me thinks this is a good idea :)

  4. Posted by: DavidB
    April 18, 2008 at 9:52 am EST

    Sounds like a capability that RIM should have built into the OS of every GPS capable Blackberry. That said, since so many carriers block access to the GPS location from anything but their own “pay extra per month” apps, this capability isn’t going to gain widespread traction without RIM putting their foot down and telling carriers to stop blocking access to hardware features. But RIM has shown no balls when it comes to doing for the end user (vice their REAL customer, the carriers). :(