List of Location-Based Services

Update: This list was updated in a new post in April 2013, check out my new list.

Every couple weeks there are major changes to location-based service. Big players are out, new exciting apps come in, such as YWCA's Safety Siren and Swim Guide.

This month, it's the launch of Google+ Local (replacing Google Places). Lately, Banjo is also getting a heap of buzz. And it wasn't that long ago that Facebook bought Glancee.

Trying to keep track of these apps is rather futile under such conditions. But this list demonstrates the interesting ways location-based services (LBS) can be used and highlights their cool features, so I find it useful to keep updating it.

LBS are mobile device apps are able to able to determine users' physical location and then deliver content or experiences relevant to that location. The list below is categorized based on the application's leading purpose. However, many applications offer overlapping functionality.

The descriptions in quotation marks are taken from that application's website.

Coordination, Communication, and Safety

• Crowdmap - open-source hosted solution to present location-specific crowdsourced info whether for activism, crises, or community projects
• Glympse - share your location with your contacts and specify the duration of visit
• Groundcrew - "coordinates on-the-ground action with your people. Use location, availability, and skills to mobilize in realtime."
• Guardly - "When an emergency occurs, your personal safety network will always know where you're located....we can pin-point your exact GPS location and provide you with valuable information about what's located around you, and how it can aid your situation."
• Moby - family member tracking and coordination
• Swim Guide - find nearby beaches, their safety status, and historical info
• YWCA Safety Siren - sends geolocation to emergency contacts, maps and directions to women's health clinics & resources, etc.

Commerce and Marketing

• MapDing- hyperlocal classifieds
• Placecast - service provider for brands to create geolocative mobile apps
• Priority Moments - proximity-based promotions & deals (only in London, UK)
• Realtor.ca - allows a user to search and receive info and pix on properties for sale in their vicinity or across Canada. Also offers proximity-based new listings and open houses (Rightmove has this for London, UK)
• Shopkick - "gives you rewards and offers simply for walking into stores, for scanning products, and for signing up friends"
• Shopcatch - location-based deals (Canadian company)
• Sociallight - service provider of geolocative apps
• Where - proximity-based promotions and deals
• YellowPages - detects your location or enter one to retrieve nearby businesses or people

Geoannotation

• Flickr - upload & search for georeferenced photos (also the ZoneTag tool from Yahoo appears to facilitate this)
• Geoloqi - "securely shar[e] location data, with features such as Geonotes, proximal notification, and sharing real-time GPS maps with friends."
• Historypin - enables users to add old photographs and text narratives to locations
• Instagram - popular photo-sharing app that allows georeferencing & sharing with foursquare
• Murmur - recorded oral histories of place, uses old cellphone tech as users see plaque and call specific number to hear targetted message
• Tagwhat - a "mobile encyclopedia of where you are... learn all about the world around you through interactive stories, videos, and photos"
• urbantag - tag and share lists of places with friends

Geosocial Networking

• Banjo - geosocial discovery - helps you find friends and people with similar interests near you
• BuzzE - proxmity friend finding and networking
• CheckIn+ - "all-in-one check-in app with augmented reality"
• Citysense - "real-time nightlife discovery and social navigation"
• Find My Friends - Apple-based friend finder
• Glassmap - friend tracking
• Google Latitude - "see where your friends are right now"
• Grindr and Blendr gay and straight friend and dating finder
• GyPsii - claims to be the world's largest geosocial network
• Highlight - "if your friends are nearby, it will notify you. If someone interesting crosses your path, it will tell you more about them"
• Hurricane Party - "helps friends find, share, and create spontaneous parties"
• Locle - geo-based friend finder
• Plazes - proxmity friend finding
• Skout -"find interesting singles close-by, strike up a conversation, maybe grab a drink or share a cup of coffee"

Local Discovery and Hyperlocal Information

• Around Me - find business near your location by biz type (similar for gas is GasBuddy)
• EveryTrail - "find and follow trips from other travelers"
• Geopedia - geotargetted Wikipedia entries - as also offered by WikiMe
• Google+ Local - combines Google's old Places listings with Zagat content and their Google+ social network features
• Junaio - AR-based vicinity info search, including business and attractions
• Layar - augmented reality browser
• Local Books by Library Thing "It shows you local bookstores, libraries and bookish events wherever you are or plan to be."
• Nearest Wiki - "AR view, with a synopsis against points of interest near you. Tapping on the place you wish to learn more about will give you more in-depth information on the location with images" content from Wikipedia
• Poynt - local search with proximity based reviews and mapping
• Star Chart- not exactly local, but uses your position and AR view to offer info on the heavens (Google offers similar functionality with their Google Sky Map service)
• Trover - "log remarkable places and things by snapping a photo and adding a quick note. When your friends and others pass by in the future they, too, can experience your discovery. Track the paths of friends and other interesting folks using our "follow" mode"
• Twitter Places - search for tweets within a specified area or tag places in your tweets
• Zeitag - historical photographs

Location-based Games

• Booyah - variety of games, including MyTown and Nightclub City
• My Town - "built around your local shops, restaurants, and hangouts. Level-up, unlock items, and earn cash to buy your favorite real-life locations."
• SCVNGR - "share where you are & what you're up to with your friends. Do challenges to earn points and unlock badges & real-world rewards."
• TapCity - "play with friends as you build and defend your very own city made up of your favorite places in the real world."

Navigation and Transportation

• BlackBerry Traffic by RIM uses GPS and customized maps to "establish your estimated time of arrival, find out if a road is closed, or decide to take a faster, alternate route"
• MyCar Park - "capture your parking location on a map, add a photo, and comments... Then built in maps direct you to your car from your current location."
• Nearest Subway - locates nearest subway station for New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Paris, Madrid, etc.
• Red Rocket - Toronto transit maps, routes, schedules, and nearest stop
• SitOrSquat - find nearby bathrooms with user reviews of their cleanliness by Charmin (genius marketing effort and I must say the most useful LBS to come along in ages!)
• Waze - "free, community-based traffic & navigation app"

Personal Efficiency and Organization

• Siri's Location Services - directions, recommendations, and personal efficiency services based on your location
• Task Ave - "location-aware reminders. Magically get alerts when you're nearby a task."
• Voxora - "voicemail for places", integrates with foursquare
Social Recommendation and Navigation


• DeHood - tap into neighbourhood buzz to find local businesses
• DontEat.at - foursquare-based and only in NYC it sends "a text message when you check into a NYC restaurant that is at risk of being closed for health code violations"
• Goby - suggests "fun things to do" based on your location or category (US only)
• Localmind - get answers about a specific place & real-time events by people who are there
• Urbanspoon - location and shaking based restaurant recommendations
• Urbantag - customize a list of favourite places and share with friends
• Wikitude - offers A.R., map, or list view of various types of proximal content (reviews, deals, and Wikipedia entries)
• Yelp and Citysearch - user-generated local reviews combined with local search engine

Travel and Place Guides

• Ask a Nomad - answered on your travel questions from fellow travellers
• Compass by Lonely Planet - "plot itineraries on dynamic, GPS-enabled map. Grab practical information and useful tips using our augmented reality camera view"
• Gogobot - travel tips from friends & other users
• MobilyTrip - social networking travel diary app
• mTrip - "automatically customizes your trip itinerary...guides you to each tourist attraction with directions, uses augmented reality to display tourist attractions in your area, and allows you to share your trip with personalized e-postcards"
• Ski & Snow Report - detailed ski info snow amounts, traffic volume, weather, lift times, etc)
• Ski Tracks - a GPS-enabled ski log of your routes, velocity, etc. with ability to geotag your pix
• TimeOut - travel guide apps for various tourist hot-spots
• TripAdvisor - get TripAdvisor's content on your mobile with proximity search option
• Tripbirds - travel tips from friends
• Trippy - get trip advice from your social network

Early and/or Deceased LBS:

• Brightkite, Centrl, Loopt, Rally Up, and Gowalla - pioneers in place check-ins(Facebook Places also tried this market and then soon closed)
• Dodgeball - SMS, pre-cursor to foursquare bought by Google and eventually shut down (see CNET eulogy)
• Dopplr - social travel planning (bought by Nokia and withered)
• Flook - offered user-generated geolocated information
• Glancee - friend finder based on proximity and social and personal commonalities (started in 2010, bought by Facebookand shut down)
• GeoSpot - started in 2005 and offered location-based information and search products
• Hidden Park - "iPhone adventure game created especially for young families...lead(s) children into a fantasy world of trolls, fairies and tree genies - right in their local park"
• Fire Eagle and Friends on Fire - location sharing platform and API, by Yahoo
• Magitti - local recommendation, from PARC (see ReadWriteWeb article)
• Mscape - location-based gaming platform by HP
• Whrrl - users joined interest and brand based groups to get recommendations, tips, and deals

Please let me know of any corrections or ones you recommend be added to this list.

Media & Place - Notes from a McLuhan Event

One of the things that drew me to iSchool at the University of Toronto was the McLuhan Program in Culture & Technology. For reasons that have taken me years to partially glean, the program has existed more in name than anything else in recent years.

Over the years, the program has hosted a series of Monday night seminars, as Marshall McLuhan was famous for. At last night's seminar, the program heads announced a stream in culture and technology starting next year as part of the iSchool master's degree and McLuhan's lacklustre building, the Coach House will get a substantial reno. These are all part of the plans to make the Coach House and UofT a centre (again) for thought and discussion on new media and society.
Despite this promising news, last night's discussion on "Making Sense of Place" was disappointing. An unfortunate habit of academics, particularly those tenured, is to abandon the seminar topic and talk about whatever they want. Only one of speakers, Shawn Micallef, addressed the topic. The questions by the audience were also generally off-topic, basic (e.g. "What is Twitter?), or curmudgeonly ("These young people today, there's no hope..." ) so I was only able to gather a few useful morsels from the seminar.

The first speaker Joshua Meyrowitz was a major influential figure in examining the role of media in relation (projecting or negating) to place. Although his talk was mostly about the campaigns of indigenous people to protect their land, he briefly touched upon how current digital media is being used by groups to both chart their own spaces and to use media to bring attention to their cause - to bring outsiders into their place. As one commenter noted, these types of media efforts enable "the co-occupation of imaginary space, leading to empathy, and then hopefully leading to community".

In response, Meyrowitz offered an analogy comparing our relationship to place as a marriage. Where in earlier times, our marriage to place was an arranged marriage in which one didn't have a lot of choice about what places they were attached to. Now we have more choice in our place engagements and more overt expressions of place love, similar to declarations of romantic love. But we also have more divorces, as people are now not as bonded to place and will move or make new engagements as they see fit.

Micallef has an impressive history of place-related media work, including launching one of the first locative media projects [murmur], launching a magazine on Canadian urban landscapes, and his current Twitter and TTC electronic sign project, Stroll City. Micallef discussed his use of digital media both as a creator and audience. He hates Foursquare ("it's geo-spam, as it just says where [people] are") but loves Twitter for the layers of information not otherwise possible. He describes his morning ritual of reading his Twitter feed (1200, including about 800 Torontonians) as gets to "hear the pulse of the city" and get a glimpse into a diverse range of people lives from various parts of the city.

He also found that Twitter has helped him appreciate the places he encounters either through checking out tweets refined by a geographic area or from feedback he gets from others on the places he mentions.

Micallef's work attempts to counter the notion that Toronto is ahistoric, boring, or placeless. His Stroll City efforts have attempted to address this by encouraging people to think and talk about place - to "merge the corporeal and the digital".

I'm looking forward to hearing more from Micallef and the new culture and technology iSchool program.

Putting Facebook and Flickr on the Map

Online user-generated maps aren't new - they exploded years ago when Google Maps released their API in 2005. I've used web-based mapping services to build my own maps for everything from the places I've visited via TripAdvisor to a list of my favourite bakeries via foursquare. 

Of the various user-generated maps, the type I most frequently use is maps of my photgraphs. For a long time, I've been adding the location of the photos I upload to Flickr and Facebook, but only recently started exploring the functionality.

Both Facebook and Flickr have really useful and fun photo map features, but neither meets all my needs completely. 

Facebook Maps
What I like about Facebook maps is that is easy to use. You don't need to know the address of a photo's location to map it. One can add the location by either dropping the photo on a map (a common enough feature) or enter its name and Facebook automatically will find matches (with good accuracy). One can also batch identify the location of photos based, which speeds up the process.  I also like how Facebook doesn't have a cap on how many photos one can upload without having to pay, unlike Flickr.

One of the most useful elements that Facebook's maps offer is that every location automatically links to a Facebook page with info about the location and if friends have been there. The content is mostly populated with Wikipedia entries, but I can see this growing into an interesting hub of place-info.

There are downsides to using Facebook maps. I don't like how when you click on a map to see a geolocated photo, it opens a small window that does not proportionality resize or centre the image, so inevitably the picture is displayed poorly. Facebook only has a map view, instead of also having an Earth view as most online maps now have.

The biggest problem with Facebook is critical mass. If my friends represent a snapshot of Facebook users, almost no one is mapping their photos (or other life-events as Facebook enables). I checked out my friends' maps and they are virtual deserts. It could be a great way to learn more about one's friends or gain some collective insight on places, but that value is only realized if enough people use it.

Also, although it is fairly easy to add location details to Facebook, it isn't easy to access this information. There needs to be a way to explore friends maps without having to go to each friend's page and click on their maps. It's social media, so the maps should enable collective display. Finally, the nature of Facebook - sharing info amongst friends vs. the world-at-large - means that it isn't feasible to share or export one's map or even photos.

Flickr Maps
I haven't used Flickr for years as I reached their 200 free images cap and don't want to pay.  But I wanted to experiment with their mapping feature so I deleted a bunch of old pictures and gave it a try - here's my Flickr map.

As far as I have found, Flickr has the best, publicly-viewable user photos mapping service (let me know if there are better ones out there). But I have had trouble with Flickr map being buggy and not displaying some geotagged photos and with it locking up frequently.

It is also way more difficult than other online map services to geotag a specific location. It doesn't accept the names of places (e.g. organization name or point of interest) or longitude and latitude coordinates, so one needs to know the specific street address to get the map to recognize the location.

Once mapped though, it is easy to view photos on a map. But Flickr doesn't allow one to customize their map beyond sorting by most recent or "interesting"  or searching. One can't have more than one map or customize their map by a specific set or some category.

I really like Flickr's Places feature.  Unlike Facebook Maps, the "Places" feature represents a vibrant social media effort. It displays the collective photos of a place either by recent or "interesting" (Flickr's secret sauce sorting algorithm). It also displays a map of the place that if clicked on opens up to display the geotagged photos charted on a map. Places also offers relevant groups and keywords.  Flickr Places' page for Fergus, Ontario is a good example.

Flickr doesn't enable their map to be embedded in another site, for that they do enable third-party apps.

iMapFlickr & MyPics Map
What Flickr lacks in extensive functionality, it makes up for fostering a wealth of third-party apps (via their "App Garden"). I found a couple, MyPicsMap and iMapFlickr that offer the map functionality that can be embedded in another site.

I tried out these apps on a new page of this blog, My Photos.  Both apps are free, offer some cool features, and are easy to use. They both allow one to display a Flickr collection or set overlaid on a map. Both use Google Maps and therefore offer zooming, scrolling, and map, satellite and terrain views.

On the top of the page, my travel photo highlights are displayed via MyPicsMap.  I like how it uses a thumbnail version of my photo overlaid on a map, so that one can quickly scan the world to see the global highlights.

MyPicsMap doesn't allow one to customize the default view and for some reason it chooses the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It also seems to have faulty display as my images of India and most of Europe do not show up unless one zooms in.

iMapFlickr does allow one to customize the view of the map that is embedded and some other display options (such as height, colours, default map view, etc.).

Instead of offering a thumbnail of a photo overlaid on a map, iMapFlickr displays a flag and then has a scrolling photo viewer below the map (similar to Flickr's map). This isn't as much fun for worldwide photos, but works great when trying to display photos mapped in close proximity. I used iMapFlickr for my local photos (it's the map of Toronto, below my travel photos on My Photos page).


Facebook, Flickr, iMapFlickr, and MyPics Map offer some impressive functionality.  Facebook has the existing social network that has tremendous sharing potential and Facebook also integrates well with specific place pages.  Flickr's has great photos of most places and some cool third-party functionality such as the latter two mentioned. But none of these services offer the degree of customization and social integration I'd like.

Also, I'd love to see functionality that enables these to be converted into an individual location-based service. Still looking for someone to offer that service.

Digital Media Business Models

MIT's Technology Review published a really good article this week in response to Facebook's IPO (who hasn't commented on this?). But the article, The Facebook Fallacy by Michael Wolff, offers a perspective I hadn't seen addressed. Wolff uncovers the inherent problem of Facebook's reliance on ad-revenue as their business model. Believing such a model is doomed, he predicts,

"the fallacy of the Web as a profitable ad medium can no longer be overlooked. The crash will come. And Facebook—that putative transformer of worlds, which is, in reality, only an ad-driven site—will fall with everybody else."

I worked for a website that relied on ad-revenue and witnessed the resulting cyclical ups and downs. I'm not convinced it is doomed, but the long-term viability is definitely unclear.

When I present or talk to people about location-based services or geosocial networking apps, I often get asked about their business models and their likelihood of financial success. People like the apps or websites, but aren't clear how they make money, why the ads are so prevalent (or annoying as I frequently hear), and whether or not they'll be able to stick around.

I'm not an MBA-type, but here are the ways, I've encountered for digital media to make money:

1. Advertising & marketing - sell ads or run campaigns on your digital service (although noting how flawed Wolff believes this to be and I'll add that in months my Google ads on this blog have made me under $2)
2. Sell user data - this is going hand-in-hand with advertising, but how companies will pay to learn more about your customers and their habits (e.g. foursquare, I believe)
3. User fees - charge for use either upfront (per apps), per use, or by subscription
4. Bundled package - offer digital services for free to sweeten the pot of items that you can charge for (e.g. WebKinz)
5. e-commerce - sell things or charge a commission for selling, or helping to sell, (such as referrals) other people's things
6. Ancillary sales - offer free services and hope users will buy your related products or services (e.g. photo hosting sites and Amazon with user reviews & lists)
7. Teaser - similar to above, offer a free version and try to up-sell to a paid version (e.g. SurveyMonkey)
8. Brand awareness & loyalty - don't make money directly on digital efforts, but hope by creating a positive, branded experience it'll inspire people to purchase your other products (e.g. Disney or blogs promoting one's expertise to draw consulting gigs)
9. Donations - ask users/members for financial support or rely on endowments (e.g. per Wikipedia or the Cancer Society)
10. Subsidies - consumers get the service, or a portion thereof, for free, while someone else pays for it and subsidizes it, (e.g. Craigslist & LinkedIn)
11. Taxation & grants - rely on the government for funding, either directly or through granting agencies (e.g. arts-based, special projects) (e.g. CBC)
12. Start-up funding - don't make money, receive funding through venture capital, rich parents, student loans, second mortgages, etc.
13. Altruism - don't worry about money as a side gig pays the bills (e.g. blogs, open access journals) or just keep on doing it for some sense of a larger purpose/compulsion

I'm sure I'm missing several ways, so let me know.

Google Drive is a Wreck

This post has been archived.

Diagram & Use Case of Location-Based Service System

I'm not a systems' theorist, but I do think to understand technology it helps to place it in relation to the larger technical picture. As such to help understand the various facets of how location-based services function, I developed a system-type diagram and a couple use cases.

Although they both simplify the actual technical and individual processes, I think they help explain how the various functions work together to deliver locative content.

Diagram: System perspective of location-based services (a digital library can be any database of digital content)

Use Case A

In the first case, a user opens an application on a mobile device and submits a query. Queries may be general, such as “What happened here?” or “What’s here” or specific, such as “trees” or “architecture style”.

This query, along with the geographic coordinates of the user, which has been automatically or manually identified, is sent over the Internet to a digital library or information repository system.

The system then queries its database to determine which entries match the search criteria and the geographic location of the user. Automated indexing, manual classification, or author-supplied metadata can be used to determine the geographic footprint of an information object.

A method then determines the match between georeferenced information objects and the user’s query. Algorithms determine matches and sort the results, using geographic relevance and keyword analysis, information retrieval relevance factors, or a combination.

So a search for trees would return information about the specific trees found at the user’s location.

Use Case B
In a second case, the technical infrastructure is the same, but instead of a user querying the system directly, a user arrives at a location, accesses a location-based service to see a list of proximal points of interest (POI). These POIs could be businesses, attractions, landmarks, public spaces, etc.

To see these POIs a user may directly enter their location into the system (known as a check-in) or may have the location automatically determined.  The user then sees information concerning the POI, either facts (e.g., contact information, photographs) or user-generated content (e.g., reviews, ratings).

The user may elect to share their location with their contacts or add their own content about the POI.


As mentioned, this diagram and use cases offer a brief overview of the underlying and interconnecting topics. Although my future research looks at the individual meaning-making process upon receiving geotargetted information via a location-based service, there is certainly a need for research that examines the system as a whole.

Types of Mobile Media

I've blogged previously about my defintion of mobile devices. Suprisingly, there is little consensus in industry and academia on exactly what is a mobile device, so I hope my definition will be of some use in this regard.

While research the usage and potential of mobile devices, I have found a tendency to view mobile devices as the first form of mobile media. And thus, many writers further the sense that what we are experiencing with mobile device usage is an entirely new phenomenon. Humans have a long history of mobile media, pretty much as soon as written language was invented, texts were carried around whether in clay, vellum, or papyrus.

So since I love lists and typologies, I thought I'd offer a list of other forms of mobile media.

I think it is important to distinguish between portable and mobile. Portable means that a medium is capable of being moved, while mobile means easily moved (see Dictionary. com).

So although a television set can be moved around (hence portable) it isn't easily mobile.

Ghetto blasters, for example, blur this distinction - as this picture from Wikimedia, circa 1987 demonstrates.  Carrier pigeons while helping extend communication over large distances at least since 2000 years ago are not that easy to carry with one so were probably one of the first portable communication mediums were not quite mobile.






Mobile mass media:

• books (paperback more so than hardcover)
• newspapers
• maps
• magazines
• transistor radios (e.g. to beach)
• print-outs & photocopies
• wristwatch televisions (launched in 1982) and possibly smartwatches soon
• Walkmans & MP3 players
• game consoles
• GPS devices
• e-readers
• tablets
• netbooks

Mobile communication media:

• personal digital assistants
• walkie-talkies
• CB radios
• pagers
• car phones (they had them on Charlie's Angels, remember?)
• cell phones

Let me know if I missed any...