Andrew Lim
It's thought that Andrew was born with built-in Bluetooth. When he talks, radios make that strange buzzing sound usually associated with network interference and there are rumours that he has an alphanumeric keypad implanted in his back.
Thursday 5 February 2009, 12:57pm
Google Latitude is just the beginning
Yesterday Google announced Google Latitude, a location-based social app that lets you see where your friends are and vice versa. It's available to download on a variety of mobiles, including BlackBerrys, S60 handsets and Windows Mobile phones. As a concept, it's very simple -- but this is the beginning of something huge.
The immediate application of Latitude is to help you keep track of your friends and loved ones, but the potential is vast. By combining Google Maps with a people-finder, Google is opening up its ecosystem to a whole range of real-world situations and solutions. Imagine searching for pizza and your phone vibrating when you're near a takeaway, to take a particularly profound example.
By uploading your exact geographic location into Google's servers, Google can overlay all of its search info, ads and other online properties on top of you. It might sound scary -- and to some extent, it is -- but the practical applications are endless. Large-scale emergencies in particular will benefit greatly from this kind of technology.
What I'm really looking forward to though is seeing this merged with something like Twitter, so that not only do you see where someone is but you also see what they're thinking. Of course it's creepy if you don't want to be tracked, but if people are happy for others to track their tweets, why not their location on Latitude?
Comments on this post
PLEASE, MY LG KU900 VIEWTY TOUCH PAD IS NOT FUNCTIONING. I SENT IT TO LG OFFICE IN GHANA BUT THEY SAY THEY DONT HAVE THE SOFWARE TO WORK ON IT FOR ME. WHAT CAN I DO?
Posted by fiifi takyi on Thu 12 February, 2009 1:46 PM
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