location based services
Finally, after wondering how long I would have to wait for a truly useful service on my cell phone (watching sports highlights on a 2-inch screen is lovely, but it's not too helpful when I'm lost) Starbucks has answered the call with a text messaging service that tells you where the closest Starbucks are located. You text your ZIP code and Starbucks texts you back the three closest locations.
That's all well and good, but it does leave me wondering where the heck location-based services are. Location-based services use your cell phone's built in GPS capabilities (they all need to have them for 911 compliances), and were supposed to be everywhere by now. And sure, it's cute to be able to locate other hot singles in your network by using some of these LBS services, but I'm much more interested in locating my closest caffeine fix without having to figure out my ZIP code. Why can't Starbucks help me out by having me text them my request (giving them permission to see where I am) and then get the closest location sent back to me?
That's a trick question, because I'm pretty sure the answer has to do with the carriers, who are so intent on maintaining their revenue streams, they want to charge for Starbucks to get at this information if they want to give it to a third party at all. However, if the carriers would open up a bit, they'd get more revenue from users texting their requests for this kind of information. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty clueless about what ZIP code I'm in at any given time, so wouldn't be able to use the feature.
Business tells us you can't make money off of services people can't use, so carriers are shooting themselves in the foot with their closed networks. But bravo to Starbucks for seeing the possibility to offer useful information over a mobile phone. Let's hope the carriers can see the benefit of cracking open their networks a little bit to let the data flow. Otherwise, the millions of investor dollars backing LBS is going to waste.—Stacey Higginbotham
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