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One Small Step for Verizon, One Big Step for Mankind

Mark your calendars! March 19-20 is Verizon’s Open Development conference.

But what does this mean exactly? If you are an application developer, don’t book your flight to NYC just yet. For starters, the conference is not for all developers.

The first step towards enabling an open platform environment is getting device manufacturers on board and in sync with each other. This explains why the first conference targets device developers. During the conference Verizon will review its technical device standards. The question is are these “standards” standard with respect to the rest of the devices in the world?

On a side note: another, perhaps even bigger announcement is the “company’s desire to encourage innovation, give customers wireless choices, and quickly address opportunities to expand the wireless market”. I just love the sound of that!

Related posts: GigaOm, mobilebuzz

Simple Wins, Especially in Mobile

In past posts I have ranted about the challenges of developing applications in the mobile space: the closeness of various platorms, the fragmentation of devices (ranging from hardware to operating systems to development platforms, and even to applications, such as browsers).

Today, even as I anticipate the blossoming of open platforms, I still strongly recommend SMS as the simplest and fastest way to reach mobile users. This is why I was ever so delighted to see that TechCrunch's first "Best Mobile Start Up" Crunchies award went to Twitter. I am a huge proponent of Web meets Mobile services; in a not so far future all applications will fall under this category.

It is true that Twitter is more than a mobile application; it integrates many communication mediums. But when it comes to taking the best it has to offer, its simplicity, and taking it to the next level by integrating mobility, Twitter is still one of the best examples I can think of.

Guitar Hero Any Time, Any Where!

Since this has become my latest addiction I thought I would post a quick review:

It is a really good app based on an outstanding video game. Hands On Mobile has done a superb job transposing the guitar-based UI to a handset.

• It works just like Guitar Hero, except there are only three keys (instead of five)
• The graphics are also pretty good and true to the game
• The AV synchronization is almost perfect (every once in a while a note will be slightly off, but this is barely noticeable to someone who has worked on mobile video applications before)
• The sound on the Verizon Chocolate is pretty good, especially with stereo head phones

What I didn't find optimal:

• No free-demo available?! That’s kind of sketchy! So in order to try the game I had to pay for the 1st month’s subscription. Talk about a deterrent for some folks out there
• Interesting pricing strategy going on here: only four songs available with the 1st month’s subscription. One can work his way up to fifteen songs total (three at a time). But given how addictive the game is, unless more songs are available soon, there will be little incentive for folks to renew their subscription beyond five months. This makes it better to simply pay the indefinite package upfront
• The biggest drawback is that one can only have two songs residing in the phone at the same time. To switch from resident songs to the other two songs, the full songs must be downloaded. Translation: almost a minute to download each song (too bad one can’t take a Guitar Hero break during)
• And the ever present problem with mobile anything: when I play to “Suck my Kiss” (by the Red Hot Chili Peppers) it feels more like “Suck My Battery” just after a few plays
  

The game is currently sold exclusively on Verizon phones. One can download it through Fun & Games on GetItNow (or the Brew deck for mobile geeks out there familiar with the term). One can pay $4.49 for a month to month subscription, or $11.99 to have indefinitely.

The WAP Fenced Garden

In the U.S. the concept of off-portal premium content and applications provided over WAP is almost nonexistent as most carriers maintain a fairly closed WAP walled garden.

But do off-portal content and application providers sit idle while waiting for the walled garden to come down? No.

When there is a will, and a loophole, there is a way.

Most carriers do allow end users to navigate to sites outside of the carrier-branded portal. The problem is that as end users navigate outside of the walled garden, off- portal sites will not benefit from automatically knowing their identities (i.e. the phone number). In a way this is similar to a Web experience – the only difference is the limited UI of the device. Many content providers thus take advantage of this by continuing to sell their content in a variety of different and creative ways.

One way is through the use of a third party payment method, such as Paypal or credit cards. On Verizon Wireless I can easily navigate to a content provider’s WAP page (the name of the content provider will go unmentioned), select a ring-tone, enter my credit card number, confirm my purchase. The two problems with this are 1) the cumbersome user-experience, and 2) most phones do not allow content downloading over HTTP (in my case, I got charged for the purchase but never received my content).

There are also other ways to marginally improve the end user experience:

Enter Off-Portal SMS. Through Premium Short Messaging Services (PSMS), off-portal content providers have been able to circumvent the WAP walled gardens. PSMS provides a way for content providers to bill consumers via the operator’s phone bill, either directly or through an operator-trusted aggregator.

The user experience might look something like this:

• User navigates to the content provider’s WAP site and selects the service

• User needs to provide the content provider with his/her phone number (manual input)

• To ensure the end user is truly the owner of the phone number an SMS containing an SMS message is sent to the phone number. Since the end user may have to exit the WAP session to receive the text message, the content provider sends a URL in the device (WAP Push). By selecting the URL the end user is taken back to the WAP page where he/she can continue with the transaction (and which serves as a means to authenticate the user)

• The content provider may deliver the content through a WAP download or through SMS, depending on the operator/device limitations

A less desirable user experience is one which is the last alternative for operators/devices that do not support WAP Push:

• User navigates to the content provider’s WAP site and selects the service

• User needs to provide the content provider with his/her phone number

• To ensure the end user is truly the owner of the phone number an SMS containing a PIN is sent to the device

• After the end user receives the PIN he/she may return to the WAP page, assuming the device’s browser is able to cache the page

• The end user enters the PIN

• The purchase is completed

• The content provider may deliver the content through a WAP download or through SMS, depending on the operator/device limitations

The big disadvantage is that the end user experience still leaves much to be desired.

The other disadvantage of PSMS is that the operators takes a cut of each purchase. The cut can range anywhere between 25% to 40%. The irony is that by trying to protect their walled gardens carriers are also keeping dollars outside of their precious garden, and out of content providers’ wallets.

In the Spirit of the New Year: Mobile Awareness

My first post of 2008 goes out to RareEarthTones. Unlike the vast majority of mobile content providers, RareEarthTones is leveraging the most ubiquitous access technology to promote awareness about endangered species. It does so by offering FREE ringtones featuring the sounds of animals at the brink of extintion.

I tried it on my Verizon phone and it worked like a charm.

This is truly liberating. The economics of SMS are very unlike the Internet. There is a considerable cost that the Center for Biological Diversity (or some very generous donor) must be incurring. I cannot think of a better purpose!

My Location: Google is Not Always Watching Me over the Airwaves

Google surprised us again this week with yet another bold announcement. With My Location Mobile Maps will be able to tell you where you are. But fear not, big-brother or stalker phoebes. In contrast to Google’s free WiFi service, Mobile Maps has made the very intelligent decision to not bother to know where you are. All My Location knows is an arbitrary identification number (not your MDN, which is your seven digit phone number) that is associated with your mobile device.

The challenge for operators is that whether their LBS platforms provide anonymity or not, it will be difficult for them to shake off the perception that they do not. The network knows the MDN associated with the device; the MDN is associated with the account. The account not only holds information about the identity of the subscriber, but even other facts such as mailing address and credit card number.

Google’s announcement also sparked new discussions about how the carriers ought to release LBS APIs that application developers can take advantage of. This only speaks for the U.S. operators’ inability to effectively educate the media. After all, as I have posted before, some operators do have open (or semi-open, depending on whether economics are part of the definition) APIs. So here is a quick snapshot of carrier supported LBS APIs for developers:

Verizon Wireless
Sprint
ATT

Right now Mobile Maps is limited to smart devices such as Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian. However, in America it is feature phones that occupy the largest footprint today. So why doesn’t Google take advantage of the semi-open API’s provided by operators? Hmm… perhaps they will soon… Or perhaps the economics get a little murky since operators impose revenue share models on subscriptions to on-deck applications. To make things even more complicated, with Brew operators a third party is also involved: Qualcomm. In contrast, Google’s model is based on advertising, which means giving the service away for free. So perhaps with a little creativity, and suppression of egos, all players could come to friendly terms that would ultimately benefit us, the end users.

Regardless of how this will pan out, the truth is Google’s is definitely a good long term strategy; eventually most, if not all, devices will be open smart devices.

I end this post with the real question that I have: will Google make Mobile Maps open like its online counterpart some day?

(Here is a good interview with the Google Maps product manager, Steve Lee).

Oh, It’s a Wonderful and Predictable World

Why is Om wasting his analytical mind and his words on his post today? The reasons behind the news from Verizon Wireless today can be simply narrowed to the first once he mentions: It’s all about the upcoming spectrum auction. And it is also about Android… Oh, which by the way is also all about the upcoming spectrum auction…

So it is only a matter of time before the rest of the herd follows. The big question for me is which carrier will embrace Android? Just for fun, my money goes to T-Mobile.

Finally, as soon as I figure out how exactly Verizon’s open platform will work and how it will benefit (or hurt – always a possibility) the industry, I will post some more….

Android… New Player, Same Old Song

Attention mobile application developers: the news is that you will now have yet another development platform to deal with. But why should this be a real issue to you anyway? Your present strategy is, and will probably continue to be to maximize your porting investments by focusing on the largest footprint available anyway. If you're looking for VC investment, however, it might wow some of your prospective investors to showcase your app on a a) an iphone and b) android.

It is not like I want to discount the effort undertaken by Google. It will certainly shake things up. And I still believe that few players have the vision and ability to transform the mobile industry, and Google is certainly at the top of my list. I have no doubt about the superiority of the technology either – I’d be scared if I were Windows Mobile, for example. Most importantly, I don’t think there is any other brand in the industry that could have the power to make their platform the de facto standard someday in the future as much as Google. Five years out, I expect Android to comprise a large share of handsets. But until then it is business as usual for application developers.

Seriously, can anybody out there seriously and sincerely focus on application developers’ needs today for once?

Why is it that everyone promising an open mobile platform these days seems to have a hidden – or not so hidden, such as the intent to bid for some coveted spectrum – agenda?

>play's "Beyond Mobile 2.0"

I attended the UC Berkeley Digital Media and Entertainment >play Conference this past Saturday. The mobile panel focused around a somewhat vague, yet interesting topic: “Beyond Mobile 2.0”. The panel consisted of Steve Lee, Product Manager at Google Mobile, Tico Ballagas from Nokia, Jeff Sellinger, VP of Mobile at CBS, Rick Robinson, VP Products and Services at XOHM/Sprint, Evan Tana, Director of Product Marketing at Loopt, and moderated by Mike Rowehl of Sillicon Valley’s Mobile Monday, and AdMob’s tech dude. Some of the predominant themes were:

Location:

The most heard theme was: LBS is the key to providing targeted content.

According to Rick Robinson, the biggest problem with adoption today is the lack of privacy. However, I would agree with Evan’s response that the privacy control tools are in place today, so the biggest challenge is education (of consumers about these controls).

On Future of paid on deck applications:

According to Steve and Evan, both Google and Loopt get the whole ‘playing with carriers’ deal today, but believe the market is slowly moving to a more open environment. Nokia truly believes this, which was clear by Tico’s constant reminder that Nokia is evolving into a services company. Proof of this is the company’s launch of Ovi and late acquisitions (Navteq, Enpocket, Twango, and Loudeye). Rick Robinson from Xohm went as far as saying that "Xohm will tear down this wall..." (BIG statement!), but will still provide an on-deck expericence that is customized for the device.

Interoperability of different technologies:

The best description of what a rich end user experience might be was Jeff Sellinger’s. This would call for an interactive behavior between the different applications that exist on the mobile device. Jeff said it would be great to be able to tie SMS/MMS with WAP and Location. I would add streaming video and interactive gaming to this fabulous equation.

Limitations in the U.S.:

* Limited MMS support by U.S. carriers was the top item

* Absence of unlimited data plans, as in Europe, was mentioned repeatedly as a roadblock for user adoption

* Pervasive broadband (both availability and adoption) was mentioned a few times as an issue
Device fragmentation, specifically with browsers, was also mentioned as "old" but never ending "news"

Consumers should not have to pay

As a follow up to my previous post, here is a good example of how working with U.S. carriers to develop new economic models can create opportunities for growth in the mobile econsystem.

mBlox, Inc. is making inroads with U.S. carriers to make SMS free for end consumers. Why would carriers care to lend an ear to this seemingly ludicrous proposal? And who will pay for these messages?

Today when you receive an alert from your favorite Web application, such as Twitter, your carrier collects money from you for the delivery of the message. On the other hand, your carrier does NOT charge a fee to the aggregator who delivered the message to it, nor to Twitter for delivering you your message.

mBlox’ proposition is that by removing the charge to the end user will drive more user adoption of messaging applications. In other parts of the world the model has been proven to work better for the players in the ecosystem, beginning with end consumers. In Europe the amount of traffic for simple mobile terminated messages by far exceeds that of premium content (e.g., ringtones, wall papers).

The most interesting part of the proposition is that the carriers would receive a bigger payout for each individual message. This is due to the higher willingness to pay that exists in specialized services and applications, where the ability to send a message to an end user signifies a cost saving. Examples are financial institutions and brands, which otherwise have to invest significantly to reach consumers through other means; and which, presumably, should be willing to pay for the ability to make messages received by end users feel less intrusive.

Quit Complaining

I get sick and tired of Web developers complaining about how closed they are finding the mobile space. I find the complaints ignorant and whiny. The arguments for the need for an open mobile ecosystem are not only shallow, but also obviously selfish and poorly disguised as idealism and altruism.

It is not that I do not believe in openness and opportunity for all. It is not like I do not realize that the consumer is who will benefit the most from access to a broader, more compelling, more discoverable, and price competitive range of services and applications. It is not like I do not perceive the potential that mobile has of surpassing the Internet in terms of availability and profitability of services and applications (in terms of reach, mobile has long gone surpassed the Web).

My dilemma is that as a capitalist I strongly believe that the parties who have invested heftily in laying down and maintaining infrastructure to connect the world are entitled to protect their investment to capture as much of the returns as possible. Carriers are also entitled to protect their physical assets from abuse, malice, and tear and wear. It is, however, also investors’ entitlement, if not their duty, to also maximize their ROI.

The problem I see in the carrier ecosystem is that by being so over protective and paranoid of opening the flood gates carriers may be selling themselves short. One major downfall of the walled garden is the stifled user adoption.

My call to action then to the Web developer community is to stop complaining. Instead, get your creativity juices flowing and think of ways to turn the situation around. It is time to develop innovative ways to show carriers ways to maximize their returns by opening up their platforms, and forcing OEM’s towards a less fragmented device platform environment. Successful models will be those in which all carriers, OEMs, developers, and end-consumers alike will reap benefits.

Google is Watching Me Over the Airwaves

I am logged onto Google WiFi in Mountain View right now. First time I have ever used Google's free WiFi. I did not realize that I would have to log in with my Google username. It is pretty scary to realize that Google knows where I happen to be at this very moment... Or is it?

Google Navigator

I pay $4.99 per month for Verizon Wireless's VZNavigator. VZNavigator is a Brew based LBS applications that gives turn by turn directions, local directories, maps. VZNavigator has gotten me out of many a hairy situation. The past few times I have used the application, however, I get a sporadic error telling me it is unnable to retrieve the directions I have requested.

When this happened to me today, I decided to try Google's SMS directions. I sent "directions from (my work address) to (graphing social paterns conference address)" to the short code 46645 (GOOGL). Within 30 seconds I received three messages including the turn by turn directions. So while I didn't have a friendly voice dictating to me where to turn, nor access to a map, I was able to get to my destination just fine. I must admit it is pretty tempting to want to save myself $5/month going forward... Especially when it takes almost the same amount of time and effort to type the directions request onto the SMS message, than to navigate through the device's convoluted menus to get to VZNavigator.

One More Sequel to My Mobile Widget Ranting

As a follow up to my previous post about taking Web applications Mobile...

Yes, there's a lot of appeal to the word 'widgets' these days. And widgets are fantastic for the Web. But when it comes to mobile, whether the widgets are client-based or Web-based, they can become rather difficult to implement, and impossible to port or support across many types of devices.

Few words to the wise: stay away from mobile widgets!

From Web to Mobile, One Step at a Time

My advice to Web developers wanting to penetrate the world of Mobility is to take it in strides. Forget about dealing with the plethora of on-device platforms (from 5+ different Operating Systems, to the 3 or so middleware platforms, to the 1000's of resolution and other iterations). WAP and Mobile Web have their problems. The learning curve is steep and quite costly.

The simplest and quickest way to get your feet wet in mobile is through SMS. Through services like TextMarks or Mozes you will be up and running in no time without the need to integrate with any carrier or aggregator. But SMS will not allow you to automatically port your application to a mobile dimension. Although SMS will only allow your application to extend some functionality to the mobile device it will achieve two things:

1) It will help you learn more about your users' interactions with their mobile devices with respect to your app. This is valuable information to have before taking the full plunge and investing significantly in other mobile platforms.

2) In many cases and depending on your application it will help drive stickiness by allowing you to ping users when they are away from their PC

The best example I can think of is Facebook. They started off by supporting a few alerts to users' mobile phones. Today they host a plethora of alerts and functionality around these alerts. Facebook even allows (much like blogger) to post pictures from a mobile device. Other excellent examples are Twitter and Truemors.

Redefining the “Cloud” (i.e., add wireless)? Too early to tell

So what of the news that the FCC will auction new spectrum under the condition that those who venture into the challenging space of building, maintaining and operating a network keep the last mile open to any device?

Well, for starters, if it comes to fruition this ruling could have a major impact on the wireless industry: more consumer power, less restrictions on proliferation of applications, less device fragmentation with better devices… and on and on. At last, a stride towards an open environment has been taken. Great.

However, while this ruling could result in something bigger than the Telecom Act of ’96, today it is still too early to tell what the real outcome will be. Fully aware of the threat that this poses to the them, the incumbent operators have already been busy at work in Washington for some time, and will continue to be until the fat lady sings. The lobbying (they have been at it since before Sergei and Larry were born) and staying power of the operators is not something to be underestimated.

Finally, even if this ruling were to be successfully implemented by the FCC, the incumbents not only have the deep pockets to compete in the bidding war with Google and co., or whomever. They will fight to the nail and teeth for they have much more to lose. They might even give Google a little bit of its own medicine: pay ludicrous amounts of money for the spectrum and do nothing with it simply to keep the competion out.

Access is the problem, but Yahoo Go may be on to something

The most important determinant of user adoption of applications is access. It is a noble (and potentially very profitable) effort for companies to add more applications platforms to increase the number of applications to the mobile device. Yet, the pending need is not the number of applications. There are thousands of BREW and J2MEE aggregate applications. Handango currently sells over 7000 applications for the Symbian platform alone.

Yet the issue of access to those applications that remains unsolved for the most part. Access today remains a major roadblock for consumer adoption and stickiness. I synthesize access into three areas:

Discovery. Given the abundance of mobile applications out there users find themselves overwhelmed. Even when a user has an idea of an application he/she is interested in using, finding it in the operators’ or storefront catalogs can be quite the ordeal. Not to mention when it is done from the device itself.

Adoption. Most existing platforms have actually made the process of trying out and signing up for applications significantly simple. An application download will typically involve a series of authentication and provisioning processes. Most of these processes combined take place in a matter of seconds and are usually invisible to users.

Stickiness is another problem area. Mobile phones have a very limited user interface that has resulted in cumbersome navigation and layers and sub-layers of menus. Frankly, it is easy for consumers to forget about an application they downloaded in the past along with many others. It is easier to stick to the basic applications, like WAP or SMS, which are closely integrated with the physical user interface.

On this front, Yahoo is on to something with Yahoo! Go. It brings potentially thousands of applications to the consumer in a self-contained, seamless and user-friendly experience. The Yahoo Go experience is client based, so reaching a wide device footprint will be a never-ending challenge for Yahoo. However, since the downloading can be initiated from the Web, and through a SMS containing a URL, getting the client to supported devices will be easy for the consumer. The discovery of new applications that are part of the Yahoo! Go experience has been made so simple, thanks to the Yahoo Go user interface that allows for extremely simple navigation. As the number of applications, or widgets as Yahoo calls them increases, however, discovery will become increasingly more challenging. Hopefully Yahoo will add an effective Search and/or Recommendations engine to future versions of Yahoo Go. Yahoo will still have to address the problem of stickiness. Depending on the device, the Yahoo! Go client may be added to the device’s layers and layers of applications. Alerts (opted-in by the user, of course) may be a simple way, for example, for Yahoo to remind users to shift the Mobile Web paradigm to Yahoo Go on an on going fashion. The other, even better and very possible alternative, is the Yahoo Phone through direct relationships with OEM's for device-embedded Yahoo Go.

Who cares as long as it's sexy

I have been interviewing as many fortunate owners of the iPhone as I could come in contact with. What I have observed is either a severe case of herd-mentality denial or simply a slap in the face for the wireless industry that has been decades in the making.

Among many surprises about the iPhone, one that stood out to me the most is that the iPhone does not support picture messaging. The alternative functionality of sending pictures, or anything else for that matter, as email attachments is not supported either. The average iPhone user's response to this was that he/she had no need for pictures on a phone.

A certain iPhone user also described the Internet browsing experience over the EDGE network as “painful”. Another user commented that he would not even attempt to watch a streaming video outside of WiFi, but then added that he “hates YouTube anyway” (he and the rest of the world, right?). An eager user insisted, instead, that streaming video over EDGE was even faster than doing it from his computer over high speed Internet – obviously in denial!!

Furthermore, while the phone allows music side-loading only (no different than the iPod and not to mention a waste of the benefits of wireless connectivity and money left on the table from consumers' higher willingness to pay to purchase songs while on the go), the iPhone has been praised in the bloggsphere for having the potential to revolutionize the music industry. More denial.

Openness? Don’t even get me started. Besides Safari, nothing else in the device is open to developers: no keypad, no LBS, no codecs, no SMS, no J2MEE/BREW equivalent...

While the phone’s revolutionary touch-screen keypad provides for more and much needed screen real estate, it made it very difficult for me to enter text (my fingers are pretty small, mind you). That was acceptable to the owner of this particular iPhone because I am a newbie, after all, and I need to practice. This same user had been practicing for one week and yet kept fat fingering every other letter.

In terms of memory space, no one has denied that it is definitely a downgrade from the Video iPod. iPhone owners’ response?... They do not need the memory space for video because they can stream video (when sitting in front of their computer at an Internet café, of course).

One area where eager iPhone adopters and I can certainly meet is the device’s extremely slick design. It is thin, light, has a relatively large screen, and aesthetically pleasing rounded corners. The UI is a beauty with its large bright colored icons on a dark background. Unlike the iPod, the phone will actually resist the physical abuse of the average mobile user.

So what could this mean to the rest of the mobile industry? For years thousands of competent minds have been trying to second guess what customers really wanted out of their phones. After voice and SMS, we brought users access to information over data networks. It turned out that what we provided (WAP 1.X) was not the Web, so we gave them WAP 2.0 with images, colors, fonts, tables. It was still not enough. With more powerful devices, we were able to provide Internet browsers, but since the limited machines cannot bear to process much of the content that is out there today, this is still not good enough. So we added more bells and whistles (cameras, MMS, LBS. Video, Music)… Not enough because the networks were too slow? Answer: 3G networks. But no. Not enough.

So, could it be that over the course of 20+ years working to improve the mobile device the so-called experts were simply heading in the absolute wrong direction? Could it be that at the end of the day, despite of anything they said, consumers did not really want feature-rich empowering mobility tools after all? Could it be that after all, all the consumer really wants is an overpriced sexy-looking gadget that shouts social status to the world? Hopefully not (and I doubt it), but only time will tell…

For the time being I am holding on to my $600… and holding out for the iPhone 2.0... perhaps.

Off-Carrier LBS platform

Hats off to the folks over at Yahoo! Research Berkeley for developing something truly disruptive!

The Yahoo! Research Berkeley team has come up with an open LBS platform that allows the community to generate and openly obtain the location information. This is in contrast to other LBS platforms, most of which are owned by carriers.

“Fire Eagle”, code name for YRB’s open LBS platform, allows location-based applications to connect to it and 1) post end-users’ location information, and/or 2) get end-users’ location information. Here is an example of how it works: Suppose you, as a developer, come up with the “Totally Rad” Social Networking location-based application and connect to “Fire Eagle” using its soon to be made public API. Now, let’s say one of your users also uses Zone Tag. While out and about, this user takes a picture, tags it, and uploads it to Zone Tag. Zone Tag will determine the user’s location by means of its Cell Site ID database. Zone Tag will then post the user’s location information to the “Fire Eagle” platform. Next, the end-user will log in to the Totally Rad Social Networking application. The Totally Rad application will get the user’s location information from Fire Eagle. With this information Totally Rad will be able to serve your end-users with location information about their friends or love interests, or even highly targeted ads.

So what about the security of users’ privacy?

Privacy has always been the number one concern with location-based services and continues to be. YRB promises the platform will be armed with privacy features. First, the location history of users will not be maintained. Fire Eagle will only cache each user’s latest posted location information. Second, users will be able to manage through a Web UI which applications should or should not have access to their location information. I would add to that the ability to specify windows of time, ability to turn off the disclosure on information from the device, etc.

How good will the information be?

Unlike a carrier supported LBS application, a user’s Latitude and Longitude may not always be available.

What might the carriers say/do?

They may not do anything until a user’s location information is compromised and used in a bad way… or until they see that this significantly eats into their revenues. For now, though, this is probably will be just noise to them.

What’s Fire Eagle’s status?

Currently “Fire Eagle” is about to go through alpha testing. Enter your email address on the Fire Eagle Website to be notified when it becomes open to the public.