LBS Use Cases - Hotel Finder and Cabbie Helper

So what I didn't say about the trip to Colorado was the nightmare return home. We arrived back at the Gunnison airport on Sunday afternoon several hours before our flight. This wasn't a big hit with Jess but I miscalculated the time of the drive for some reason. We checked in and hung out with the airport wifi and our computers while Tate watched some DVDs. About an hour before take off time we had some bad news that the flight was going to be delayed. We had a tight connection in Denver so this was some big time bad news.

The delay stuff was hanging over the whole time and it quickly became apparent that we weren't getting out of Denver once we arrived. At the airport it was a complete mess. Apparently Denver shut down for two hours or so for lightning storms and this killed the feeder flights coming in from the little towns nearby. The lines were out the door. If you have ever been stranded in Denver, then you know that the only decent hotels are about 45 minutes away in downtown Denver.

I had two bad nights in Crested Butte with a not so great bed and an upcoming cross country trip to NYC so I had to get a good nights sleep. I whipped out my Helio Ocean and pulled up the Google Maps application. I searched for Starwood, Hyatt and other chains that do a good job with the beds. I found a Hyatt Place hotel very close to the airport and called them. They had availability so I booked a room. This experience was so good I will follow up with another post just about this new approach to hotels later.

I hopped in a cab and said I wanted to go to the Hyatt Place at the airport. He was dumbfounded. Never heard of it. I whip out the phone and said here on the map, go here.

While in NYC this week I was playing with the Google Maps application again as I was plotting out my 5 meetings per day itinerary. I can't recall how many times in NYC I am asked about the cross street and I don't have it. 550 Madison? Madison and what? I don't know, I am from LA. Our numbers make sense there. Not this trip. Madison and 55th. So there. My favorite was a meeting in the East Village where I pulled the phone out and said look, this is where it is.

These examples are the kinds that make LBS compelling to me.

Dow Jones Wireless Innovations

Thanks for having us out to present at Wireless Innovations. The parts of the conference I saw and participated in were excellent and I thought they brought together a great crowd. My personal highlights were getting to hang a bit with Sam Altman from Loopt, watching the captivating CEO of Spark Parking Cooper Marcus (we shared a room - use his service!) and especially getting to meet and spend a chunk of time with Andrew Graham CEO of Bones In Motion, my favorite LBS application.

Bones in Motion Part 2

Enrique Ortiz saw my previous posts about Bones In Motion and pinged the founder of Bones In Motion Jon Werner to check it out. He sent me a nice email last night and pointed out one technical issue that was present in the post that contained the map. When I was running in downtown Los Angeles there was an apparent wavy motion on my running path, and no I wasn't stumbling through the streets. He explained that dense buildings distort some of the signal and that was what you can see. I frankly thought nothing of it at the time but did notice that while running at the beach, the lines were completely smooth.

Below is an example of that. Unfortunately you can't see with really great detail but when I zoomed in you can even see the ever so small loop that I intentionally did at the turnaround point to see how precise it was and I was very impressed by the accuracy.

I am clearly a new found convert to some of the specific vertical application of LBS technology and Bones can count me as a long time future customer.

Bones In Motion

Last year almost to the day, I was at SXSW and spoke at the Austin Mobile Monday event. I was presenting Rabble and there were a number of LBS providers doing demo's as well. One of the coolest sounding applications, although for what I would consider a specialty market, was Bones In Motion. In a nutshell the idea is to use the GPS in your phone to track your fitness performance. In general I have been skeptical of GPS performance in phones until last weeks Telenav experience. I decided to check out some other LBS applications to see what else might be cool. While going through the Sprint catalog I found the Bones In Motion application.

Last night I stayed in Los Angeles at The Standard Hotel before I head up to Hollywood for the iHollywood forum. The ambient noise from downtown woke me up around 4 AM so sometime after 5 PM I grabbed the sneakers and my phone and headed out for a short run. Downtown LA is a great place for a jog as the topography is generally flat with the exception of Bunker Hill which is where the Disney Concert Hall and MOCA are located. I figured out a short loop that would include that as it is fairly close to my hotel and off I went.

The Bones In Motion application kept track of my time and speed and told me when I had hit the mile mark. At the end of the run I saved the relevant data and returned to my room. I went online to check all the details (which were also available on my phone and thought it would be nifty to have it automatically publish to my blog. Note the integration with maps and the mapping of the elevation gain around Bunker Hill. I can't wait to try this out some more.

Rental Cars, LBS and Cellphones

Sometime last week I received an email from the Sprint Ambassador program soliciting feedback for the Phase 2 timeframe. I have to say that I have really dug the program and it has forced me to evaluate things I wouldn't normally look at in the course of my information ferreting process. After giving my feedback I fired up my phone and did some deck cruising to see some of the things they have that I may not normally look at. Combing through the record crates as it were.

For some reason, that is mostly historical, I usually rent cars from Budget. The primary reason I think is that I really like the guy who runs the Budget franchise at Union Station in Los Angeles and he always takes care of me when I am in LA. Beyond that I really am on the fence about Budget, especially the outfit at the airport in Seattle. those people are a case study in miserable customer service.

So yesterday I headed up to San Francisco and Silicon Valley for a busy day of meetings. While booking a car late at night on Monday, budget was sold out at SJC, which happens more than occasionally. Big sigh. I went over to Hertz and found a bunch of cars and went ahead and booked.

The next morning while picking up the car, I was asked if I need satellite radio or GPS or anything special which I declined but I realized that I had a little bit of all those things in my Sprint phone, which is an LG Fusic.

I have to admit that the thought of GPS navigation on my cell phone for the car seemed really ridiculous. I recalled from my previous digging around that there was an application I had subscribed to called TeleNav Navigator. I fired up the application and set it up for directions to San Francisco. I know how to get to San Francisco but I wanted to see how well it works.

As I exited the Hertz parking lot the phone started barking out directions to the city. Very cool. The speaker could be a bit louder but the experience was as good as what I have seen pre-installed in cars with the exception of the sound volume. While flying up the 280 I pulled out the phone and was blown away by the really cool 3D representation of my car cruising up the coast route.

I spent the better part of the day making the application map my directions and all in all it was really good and surprisingly kind to the battery. At $10 a month for an application like this I have to wonder what sort of threat this poses to the guys charging $2000 to load this stuff directly into cars. If I can do a bluetooth connection to a car speaker system I can get the sound piece worked out and I am good to go. Just a thought. I will come back to some other implications of this shortly as it relates to the mobile relevance of applications or not in a post I am working on assuming I actually finish it.