There is a campaign that Mastercard runs in the UK and maybe elsewhere comparing the value of goods and services with the value of Mastercard, of course the value of Mastercard is always priceless ! Well is appears over the past couple of months and with the latest announcement from Motorola picked up by All Points Blog, The price of maps on a phone is zero.
I have two mobile devices I carry around with me, my N95 and a Blackberry both of which have manufacturer installed mapping applications which offer extensive street level mapping data free of charge.. in the case of the N95 I can even download offline a global mapping dataset to store on my 2GB storage card so that I won’t incur the stupid data rates imposed by the network operators in the UK
Of course if you don’t have a new Nokia, Motorola or Blackberry you can download Google Maps for Mobile which delivers the same Google maps experience of the desktop on any mobile device which can run Java.
I remember as a data supplier we had such high hopes of the mobile market and LBS taking off as a major revenue stream, it still is a potentially a major stream, but it is certainly not going to be the gold mine it was hoped to be with individual transaction based billing of consumers. That was always going to be too costly and complex to build a business model around, at best a subscription model as used for some of the navigation applications might be sustainable.. but time will tell.
Written and submitted from Hyatt Hotel, Calgary, using its in-room wired network.
No comments:
Post a Comment